Generational Feminisms: the 45th Festival International de Films de Femmes Sian Mitchell May 2023 Festival Reports As a director of a women’s film festival here in Melbourne, the opportunity to attend the world’s oldest, still running women’s film festival – the Fe...
GoEast: the 23rd Festival of Central and Eastern European Film Carmen Gray May 2023 Festival Reports Andrii Donchyk’s debut fiction feature Oxygen Starvation (1991), a devastating vision of military service in the Soviet army, was one of the first non...
CPH:DOX 2023: At World’s End Will DiGravio May 2023 Festival Reports Among the great cognitive dissonances of our time is the fact that those of us who fear the end of the world by way of natural forces like climate cha...
Punto de Vista 2023: Dust No Longer Clouds Our Eyes Jay Kuehner May 2023 Festival Reports I approached the 17th edition of Punto de Vista (International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra) with necessary ambivalence, owing on the one hand...
All the world’s a stage IFFR Critics’ Choice 9: PLAY Tara Judah May 2023 Festival Reports In Inge Coolsaet’s video essay (putting) On Aftersun, she divulges that her brother missed the early scene in the film where the tour guide mentions T...
Sundance 2023 – Hybridity and Transgressive Heroes Bérénice Reynaud May 2023 Festival Reports Sundance 2023 (hybrid again this year) expanded its multicultural reach, spreading over several sections. It offered films by and about Black protagon...
Sweet Madness: the 2023 Berlinale Daniel Fairfax May 2023 Festival Reports Reader, sometimes it feels like I have been penning film festival reports for an eternity – and not just because of the distension of durée that we ha...
All that is Solid Melts into Air: IFFR 2023 Madeleine Collier May 2023 Festival Reports In early December, I received an unexpected email. After participating virtually in the IFFR Young Critics Program in 2019, I was invited to take part...
Fire Within: The 60th Viennale Leonardo Goi January 2023 Festival Reports The single strangest effect the pandemic’s had on me is that I seem to have changed the way I walk. I don’t mean how I walk indoors, or at home, but h...
Politics, Isolation, Pandemic: The 35th Tokyo International Film Festival Kohei Usuda January 2023 Festival Reports If an argument can be made that film festivals reflect some of the unique traits of their host cities, the sprawling format of the Tokyo International...
The Kids Aren’t Alright: The 27th Busan International Film Festival Marc Raymond January 2023 Festival Reports The latest edition of the Busan International Film festival was, for the first time since 2019, more fully “international” in terms of the festival au...
A Report on the Exhibition Threshold (works by Dirk de Bruyn, Guy Grabowsky & Mat Hughes) Glenn D'Cruz January 2023 Festival Reports Dirk de Bruyn’s extensive body of work is marked by an experimental ethos that consistently challenges formal cinematic conventions. Steven McIntyre h...
All the Pain and Exploitation: 66th London Film Festival Tara Judah January 2023 Festival Reports After two years of hybrid versions, London Film Festival was back in full force. But I still felt uncertain about attending in person; fighting my way...
BABY, THE RAIN MUST FALL … on the Claude Sautet retrospective at the 70th San Sebastian International Film Festival Neil Young January 2023 Festival Reports Only a tiny handful of film festivals have ever made it to their 70th edition, but celebrations when Spain's leading such event — at San Sebastian, th...
Small but Mighty, the Power of the Donkey: Adelaide International Film Festival Saige Walton January 2023 Festival Reports Dubbed a “celebration of the imagination”, AFF expanded its scope in 2022 to include new venues across the city (Her Majesty’s Theatre, the Capri Thea...
Restarting Indian Documentary Film Festival Bhubaneswar (IDFFB) 2022 With a Bang! Dr. Sneha Krishnan January 2023 Festival Reports Worldwide, film festivals are slowly emerging in their physical avatars after the pandemic-induced break since 2020. Screening of independent document...
The 59th Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival: Cold War Revisited Maja Korbecka January 2023 Festival Reports Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival survived the pandemic unscathed. None of its editions took an online or hybrid form. However, another issue thorough...
DOC NYC 2022: Fringe No More Will DiGravio January 2023 Festival Reports Since 2010, DOC NYC, the largest documentary festival in the United States, has put forth programs that showcase a wide range of works that rally unde...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
