Skies Over and Caves Under Kutaisi: Kutaisi International Short Film Festival Levan Tskhovrebadze October 2022 Festival Reports Kutaisi International Short Film Festival (KISFF) is a pure manifestation of how film festivals can enrich and enhance a city’s cultural landscape. Ku...
NYFF 60: Hide and Seek Nolan Kelly October 2022 Festival Reports Something interesting happened in the opening minutes of Jafar Panahi’s No Bears when it was shown at the press preview for the New York Film Festival...
Budapest Classics Film Marathon Andrew Northrop October 2022 Festival Reports The Budapest Classics Film Marathon is a growing festival run by Hungary’s National Film Institute (NFI), drawing upon the film archive’s restoration ...
Setting the World Ablaze: Notes from the 30th Curtas Vila do Conde International Film Festival Susana Bessa October 2022 Festival Reports Skimming through my many scribbles in a desired attempt to describe what Curtas Vila do Conde means 30 years into its instalment in Portugal’s now eve...
The 75th Locarno Film Festival: Happy Birthday and Many Happy Returns Jaimey Fisher October 2022 Festival Reports This year marked the 75th edition of the Locarno (Film) Festival, which started in 1946 and technically before the more famous Cannes festival – Canne...
(Fist) Bump in the Night at Fantasia 2022 Jake Pitre October 2022 Festival Reports As with many film festivals around the world, the 2022 Fantasia International Film Festival, its 26th edition, was a grand return to in-person moviego...
Living Ghosts at the Melbourne International Film Festival Eloise Ross October 2022 Festival Reports It was rather poetic that my first IRL interaction with the festival, on the Sunday of the first weekend, was a much-anticipated, rarest-of-rare scree...
Nothing will be left but memories Sofie Cato Maas October 2022 Festival Reports French writer Roger Martin du Gard believed that there was more truth to be found in a memory itself than in a written down version in a diary. Despit...
Sundance Film Festival 2022 Bérénice Reynaud August 2022 Festival Reports Sundance 2022 espoused the to and fro of the volatile situation of the pandemic. The Festival was supposed to be hybrid: each film afforded several in...
Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? The 56th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Cerise Howard August 2022 Festival Reports While there was a KVIFF last year (held uncharacteristically in August, from the 20th to the 28th) and a 16-film-strong roaming festival-in-miniature ...
Normality: The 2022 Cannes Film Festival Daniel Fairfax August 2022 Festival Reports “Back to normal” was undoubtedly the prevailing ethos of this year’s Cannes film festival. This was to be expected after the cancellation of the festi...
36th Cinema Ritrovato Gets Covid in the Tail Roger Macy July 2022 Festival Reports Cinema Ritrovato had never gone away in 2020 and 2021 but now there was no online alternative and most festival-goers were back at the usual venues to...
Keeping the Fires Burning: A Week at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival Jonathan Mackris July 2022 Festival Reports Two topics have come up every time I’ve discussed the 2022 San Francisco Silent Film Festival: One: This is the first edition of the festival after...
New Territories and Old Dreams of Independence – Chinese and Hong Kong documentaries at the Taiwan International Documentary Festival Judith Pernin July 2022 Festival Reports Almost three years into the pandemic, online festival screenings have become a new norm, and while they meet our needs to catch up with new production...
The 22nd Nippon Connection Refuses to Age Roger Macy July 2022 Festival Reports The Japanese film festival in Frankfurt, Nippon Connection, kept going in ’20 and ’21 as a digital-only festival, so kept its easy number co-ordinatio...
Whither German Cinema? Observations from the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival Marco Abel July 2022 Festival Reports And there he is: perhaps not entirely unlike those famous bespectacled eyes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz-age novel The Great Gatsby (1925) that stare...
Day by Day: IFFR 2022 Madeleine Collier May 2022 Festival Reports The 51st edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam was among the first of many this year to be pushed online by the materialisation of the ...
Stuck in traffic: IFFR 2022 Tara Judah May 2022 Festival Reports On his early evening drive home from work (he leaves just after 5pm every day), Andrew Rakowski, the Melbourne lawyer who serves as protagonist in Dav...
Absence and Presence at Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen. 68. Tara Judah May 2022 Festival Reports I was searching for a word to describe my specific feelings of loneliness when I came across mauerbauertraurigkeit, which the internet tells me is Ger...
From Within the Umbra of History: A Few Things about the Films of Rainer Komers, Sohrab Hura and Sylvia Schedelbauer Anuj Malhotra May 2022 Festival Reports A study of three profiled filmmakers at the recently concluded, 68th edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and the distinct str...
Film Goes On (?): The 23rd Jeonju International Film Festival Marc Raymond May 2022 Festival Reports This year’s 23rd edition of the Jeonju International Film Festival returned to full capacity for the first time since 2019, following a 2020 cancellat...
Play-Doc 2022: António Campos, a secret filmmaker Ricardo Vieira Lisboa May 2022 Festival Reports Translated by Cristina Río López Between 4 and 8 May, in Tui (a Galician town near the Portuguese border) the most recent edition of the documentar...
70 Years of Mountain Cinema: The 2022 Trento Film Festival Maria San Filippo May 2022 Festival Reports If unaware, as I was, that there’s a film festival devoted exclusively to mountain cinema, much less that it’s in its venerable 70th year, this and ot...
Rings of Saturn, Gardens of Empire: The 2022 Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra Jay Kuehner May 2022 Festival Reports At Punto de Vista (The International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra) it seems there are no margins, no outliers; that the notion of the marginal...
Thessaloniki International Film Festival: Rewriting the Rules of the Game Maria Giovanna Vagenas February 2022 Festival Reports Inventive and sassy – one of the best in a long time – 2021's TIFF poster featuring Mrs. Tependris in her pink overall, kicking off the event with a c...
The Pivot to Asia: The 34th Tokyo International Film Festival Kohei Usuda February 2022 Festival Reports Preamble Following the previous year’s abbreviated edition – when the global pandemic forced organisers to scale back the event and forgo its main co...
Come Together: The 59th Viennale Leonardo Goi January 2022 Festival Reports Anytime I’ve wondered about the pandemic’s impact on my relationship with cinema – a depressing exercise I’ve indulged in far too often over these god...
From White Clouds, Wild Delights: The 18th Golden Apricot Yerevan International Film Festival Carmen Gray January 2022 Festival Reports “I see Mount Ararat — it stands high in the blue sky. With its gentle, tender contours, it seems to grow not out of the earth but out of the sky, as i...
AFI FEST-AFM: The Perils of Online Bérénice Reynaud January 2022 Festival Reports The Perils November 2021: as I prepare, confident in my virtual screening accreditation, to make my film selection for the AFI Fest, a bad surprise i...
Looking for Love at HitchCon 2021 Amelia Leonard and Jacob Agius January 2022 Festival Reports Hitchcon 2021 brought together twenty professors, scholars, authors and filmmakers from the United States, Canada and Britain for a celebratory weeken...
Sharing Sensations with a Community of Strangers: The 68th Sydney Film Festival Joshua J. Taylor January 2022 Festival Reports Mask wearing, social distancing and QR code check-ins may have become normalised practices in our everyday lives, but in the context of an internation...
Expanding on the Familiar: The 26th Busan International Film Festival Marc Raymond January 2022 Festival Reports 2021 marked a return of the Busan film festival to close to normality following a 2020 which had very limited theatrical presence, consisting mostly o...
Towards New Horizons: The 74th Locarno Film Festival Maria Giovanna Vagenas October 2021 Festival Reports This summer the Locarno Film Festival and its Piazza Grande finally got their colours back. The giant screen in the piazza lit up again and the public...
“I Wish I Were Here”: Women at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival Alexandra Heller-Nicholas October 2021 Festival Reports Locked down as I have been in Melbourne, Australia, and unable to attend the Toronto International Film Festival in person for a second year running, ...
Time Capsules: Manfred Kirchheimer at Play-Doc 2021 Iván Villarmea Álvarez October 2021 Festival Reports How many times can we return to a place, to a time, to a mood? Each time is different, since we ourselves are different, although we usually look for ...
35th Cinema Ritrovato Inhabits Bologna with Joy and Pride Roger Macy October 2021 Festival Reports When I wrote last year on Cinema Ritrovato that “it is by no means certain that we will have reached ‘post-COVID’ any time soon”, did I really have an...
