Transcendental Style in 2007: The 31st Hong Kong International Film Festival Virginia Wright Wexman August 2007 Festival Reports 20 March - 4 April 2007 Much of what I saw at this year’s Hong Kong International Film Festival gave new relevance to Paul Schrader’s 1972 book...
Iranian Cinema Looks Inward: The 25th Fajr International Film Festival Michelle Langford August 2007 Festival Reports 1-11 February 2007 In the year 2000, Hamid Dabashi provided an overview of the state of Iranian cinema. That year, according to Dabashi, herald...
Explaining Mabelescence: The 3rd Amsterdam Filmmuseum Biennale Jay Weissberg August 2007 Festival Reports 11-15 April 2007 In whatever epoch of the picture business Mabel Normand had entered, she would have been the biggest star in it. – Adela Rogers...
Reality-Based Filmmaking: The 4th Annual True/False Festival of Documentary Film Brad Prager August 2007 Festival Reports 1-4 March 2007 Is there a new wave in documentary filmmaking? Taken as a whole, the level of public engagement with films such as An Inconvenie...
Can Independent Film Sell?: The 4th Mexico City International Contemporary Film Festival David M. J. Wood August 2007 Festival Reports 21 February - 4 March 2007 While the holy trinity of contemporary Mexican cinema, Alejandro González Inárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del...
Moroccan Cinema at Las Palmas: Immigration from the Other Shore: 8th Las Palmas de Gran Canaria International Film Festival Lidia Merás August 2007 Festival Reports 16-24 March 2007 Translated by Anita Haas Because of its varied landscape, the Spanish island of Gran Canaria (The Canary Islands) often goe...
Fragments of Forgotten Shame: Films about Imperial Japan at Hot Docs 2007 Brandon Wee August 2007 Festival Reports 19-29 April 2007 At Hot Docs this year, two titles about Japanese involvement in World War II made it as official selections. Nanking (2007), c...
Unexpected Filiations: The 26th Sundance Film Festival Bérénice Reynaud May 2007 Festival Reports January 18-28, 2007 In spite of a creeping feeling that Sundance 2007 was not a great vintage, there were some really good films – albeit sprin...
A Cinema In-Flux: German Films at the 57th Berlin International Film Festival Mattias Frey May 2007 Festival Reports February 8-18, 2007 When the German dailies gave this year's Berlinale an unfortunate post mortem, they merely subscribed to an annual traditio...
Inside and Outside: The 2006 AFI Fest/American Film Market Bérénice Reynaud May 2007 Festival Reports November 1-12, 2006 The American Film Institute Festival (AFI), now with its twin shadow, the American Film Market (AFM), is a double-entry aff...
More Please: Report on the 3rd Biennial Adelaide Film Festival Geoff Gardner May 2007 Festival Reports 22 February – 4 March 2007 Adelaide has a long tradition of putting money into its Arts events. It was the first Australian city to present a m...
Short: As Long As It Takes as part of The 36th Rotterdam International Film Festival Genevieve Yue May 2007 Festival Reports January 24 – February 4, 2007 In a festival as large and as diverse as Rotterdam, it's often hard to choose what to see – aside from word-of-mo...
The End of Innocence: Scandinavian Films at the 30th Göteborg International Film Festival Mattias Frey May 2007 Festival Reports 26 January – 5 February 2007 The 30th Göteborg International Film Festival proved why it is Scandinavia's superior film festival. Featuring 450...
Elusive Reality: The 25th Vancouver International Film Festival Bérénice Reynaud February 2007 Festival Reports 28 September–13 October 2006 The jury is still out whether cinema is a “window to the world” – yet “masking” it rather than “framing” it (André...
Film Culture… and How to Make a Festival of It!: The 24th Torino Film Festival Olaf Möller February 2007 Festival Reports 10–18 November 2006 The Torino Film Festival is quite comfortable with being the No. 2 among Italy’s main events in cinema: it has just about a...
The State of the World According to the 2006 Thessaloniki Film Festival Richard Porton February 2007 Festival Reports 17–26 November 2006 Many international film festivals feel understandably compelled to both fulfil their missions as showcases for world cinema...
New Asian Ventures: The Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival John Orr February 2007 Festival Reports 10–24 November 2006 A year after showing at the Warner Village multiplex in the plush new Xinyi district of East Taipei, the Golden Horse Festi...
Where Life is a Film: The 12th Sarajevo Film Festival Tamara Plakalo February 2007 Festival Reports 18–26 August 2006 It is a given that a novice reviewer of the Sarajevo Film Festival (SFF) would saturate their audience with the facts that ha...
“Queers Being” and “Being Queer”: The 9th Annual queerDOC Documentary Festival Maija Howe February 2007 Festival Reports 7–17 September 2006 QueerDOC, the world’s only film festival dedicated to documentary films by, for and about queers, celebrated its ninth year...
The Pick of Pusan: The 11th Pusan International Film Festival Alan Stanbrook February 2007 Festival Reports 12–20 October 2006 South Korea’s Pusan International Film Festival, now 11 years old and the most dynamic in Asia, almost had a problem – but o...
Syndromes of an Inland Film Snob Empire: The 44th New York Film Festival Kevin Lee February 2007 Festival Reports 29 September–15 October 2006 For 44 years we’ve been accused of being demanding, inflexible and insanely selective.... Remarkably like our audien...
The Last Picture Shows: Midnight Madness Films at the 31st Toronto International Film Festival Brandon Wee February 2007 Festival Reports 7-16 September 2006 “The Midnight Madness category was originally devised as a spot for films that didn’t really ‘fit in’ with a traditional fe...
Void in the Voices: The 44th Vienna International Film Festival (Viennale) Martina Lunzer and Barbara Wurm February 2007 Festival Reports 13–25 October 2006 If an annual festival like the Viennale were to be encapsulated by a general motto, this year’s edition might be called If t...
Why are We in Vancouver? Geoff Gardner February 2007 Festival Reports 28 September–13 October 2006 So the big man in the pink shirt has stubbed out his last cigarette and marched down the aisle of the Pacific Ciné...
Desire, Passion and Power: Women in the Festival of German Films Leonie Naughton November 2006 Festival Reports Goethe Institut Festival of German Films Australia April, 2006 Women were more powerfully represented in front of the camera than behind it at...
On the Occasion of Remembering the Golden Gate: The 49th San Francisco International Film Festival Jay Kuehner November 2006 Festival Reports 20 April – 4 May 2006 “San Francisco’s in a tough position” tells me the editor of a major American film magazine, at a festival reception in h...
A Taxidermia Indeed: Stuffed to the Gills at MIFF Although Still a Little Miffed at Some Stuff: The 55th Melbourne International Film Festival Cerise Howard November 2006 Festival Reports 26 July – 13 August, 2006 Excepting an Opening Night publicity coup, of which, more below, the Melbourne International Film Festival’s last yea...
Womanising: The 20th Cinema Ritrovato Virginia Wright Wexman November 2006 Festival Reports 1-9 July, 2006 Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato stands alone among the world’s film festivals for the quality and breadth of classic and little-known...
Relative, But Also Absolute: The 53rd Sydney Film Festival Bill Mousoulis November 2006 Festival Reports 9–25 June, 2006 Whether the glass is half-empty or half-full, let us be thankful that we can still drink. But let us also prod the barkeep to s...
A Report on Cinema at the Periphery: An International Film Studies Conference, Centre for Film Studies, University of St Andrews Jenny Chamarette November 2006 Festival Reports 15–17 June, 2006 Inaugurating the first year’s work of the new Centre for Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, the prestige of this co...
“Dhow Aesthetics”: Negotiating the Global and the Local: The 9th Zanzibar International Film Festival Sharae Deckard November 2006 Festival Reports 14–25 July, 2006 At the first roundtable of the 9th Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF) of the Dhow Countries, held from the 4th to the...
A View from the 41st Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Renata Murawska November 2006 Festival Reports 30 June – 8 July, 2006 Karlovy Vary consists of three worlds that coexist hand in hand, blissfully unaware of one another. One is that of luxur...
Ihr kleines Österreich: Wurscht, the World: Diagonale Festival of Austrian Film, Graz Olaf Möller July 2006 Festival Reports March 21–26, 2006 After the screening of Florian Flicker’s No Name City (2006), basically everybody at the Diagonale’s opening agreed that this...
The 23rd St Kilda Film Festival Fiona Trigg July 2006 Festival Reports May 30–June 4, 2006 Rejected from cinema exhibition and all but the most barren stretches of television airtime, short Australian films wander ...
The Nature of Animation: Anifest: International Festival of Animated Films David Sorfa July 2006 Festival Reports May 4–10, 2006 It seems ironic that contemporary animation’s greatest thematic enemy is the city with its associated horrors of regimented, rep...
The South American Way: The 24th International Film Festival of Uruguay Mariana Amieva July 2006 Festival Reports April 1–16, 2006 Uruguay is a very small country. It is quiet and peaceful, and its capital city, Montevideo, is a large and beautiful city tha...