Finding the Forest Through the Trees: The 64th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen Tara Judah June 2018 Festival Reports Few films captured my imagination this year in Oberhausen. Fewer still rocked my world. There were four new strands added to the program and finding m...
New Achievements, New Challenges: The 20th Far East Film Festival Chris Berry June 2018 Festival Reports Chalking up 20 editions is a big achievement for any film festival. After surviving the 2008 financial crisis and growing to include a significant ran...
The Case for Documentary: Full Frame 2018 Annie Berke June 2018 Festival Reports At the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival this year, the thematic program was “Crime + Punishment.” Curated by guest programmer and documentarian Jo...
Reflections Upon Transitions: The 18th Las Palmas International Film Festival Andreea Patru June 2018 Festival Reports The Canary Islander has the mind in Europe, the feet on Africa and the heart in America. – anonymous popular saying Spread upon five centuries of hi...
Inside the Outsides: The Half-Year in Documentary Festivals Carmen Gray June 2018 Festival Reports “Is Finland a fucking awful place?” Jörn Donner asks his fellow citizens for answers in Fuck Off! – Images from Finland. He travels around his then-mo...
Dismantling Divisions: NEW:VISION(s) at CPH:DOX 2018 Matt Turner June 2018 Festival Reports Having peppered their program with fiction films since their first edition in 2003 – a time when doing such a thing was far less commonplace than it i...
Conjuring Ghosts: The 15th IndieLisboa Leonardo Goi June 2018 Festival Reports I am interviewing Donal Foreman at the headquarters of IndieLisboa about his entry in the Portuguese extravaganza’s international competition, The Ima...
South Korea’s Shadow Land: The 19th Jeonju International Film Festival Marc Raymond June 2018 Festival Reports Over the course of five days at this year’s Jeonju film festival, I watched 21 films, the vast majority of which were Korean, with 15 of these being w...
Confronting Austrian history at the Diagonale: Making Up for Lost Time Randy Malamud June 2018 Festival Reports If Austrian film is less renowned than some other European cinema, still, it is a valuable and eclectic duchy of its own, and the Diagonale Festival o...
Rotterdam – Delete/Ignore: locating gremlins and glitches in the machine. Or, how I met the humans and parasites of Planet IFFR Tara Judah March 2018 Festival Reports When I scroll through Instagram, I am fascinated by the ability of the interface. I am at a film festival, having what I presume to be a good time, un...
AFM/AFI FEST 2017: Magic Women, Haptic Men Bérénice Reynaud March 2018 Festival Reports – Are you going to sleep with the Chinese? – Yes, I think so. – When? – Maybe later on today. Barbara Two events made the trip worthy to the Amer...
Ânûû-rû Âboro: The Festival of Peoples’ Cinema Charles Fairbanks March 2018 Festival Reports New Caledonia may be far from the glitz and glamour of Cannes, Sundance, Venice and the rest, but that is exactly what makes the festival Ânûû-rû Âbor...
A Tale of Two Festivals: International Film Festival of India and Experimenta Parichay Patra March 2018 Festival Reports International Film Festival of India, popularly known by its acronym IFFI, rests, like many other events in South Asia, on its past glory and nostalgi...
Clouds over Berlin: A Few Remarks about German Cinema at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival Marco Abel March 2018 Festival Reports The 68th Berlin International Film Festival took place underneath two significant clouds that did not have anything to do with the films as such. Firs...
New Eastern Promises: The 21st Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival Leonardo Goi February 2018 Festival Reports “It’s called Black Nights for a reason,” previous attendees of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival had warned me on my way to Estonia. Named after ...
Korean Cinema in Winter: The 22nd Busan International Film Festival Marc Raymond December 2017 Festival Reports Because of an extended national vacation of ten days in early October due to the unusual convergence of various holidays (most notably Chuseok, the Ko...
In a Year of European Documentary Film Festivals Carmen Gray December 2017 Festival Reports Hearing critics talk about European documentary festivals you could often be fooled for thinking they start and end with Amsterdam’s IDFA and its sexi...
New York Film Festival 2017: Robert Mitchum Retrospective + Main Slate Jackson Arn December 2017 Festival Reports To watch the films of Robert Mitchum – the Golden Age Hollywood star whose 54-year career was the subject of a major retrospective at the New York Fil...
A City of Cinema Perseveres: The 15th Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival Joel Neville Anderson December 2017 Festival Reports Shortly after the conclusion of the 15th edition of the biennial Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, the UNESCO Creative Cities Network ...
Wavelengths at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival Darren Hughes December 2017 Festival Reports My conversations during the first two days of the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival were dominated by two subjects: Twin Peaks: The Return, whi...
Reimagining Reality: 61st BFI London Film Festival Tara Judah December 2017 Festival Reports I was born in London, but I grew up in Australia. To my eyes, the people of London move with direction and urgency, as if the city somehow has the stu...
Between the Breaths: The 2017 Adelaide Film Festival Saige Walton December 2017 Festival Reports Paying homage to the birth year of punk rock as well as the persistence of a rebellious sensibility in the contemporary, the Adelaide Film Festival st...
Dissent and Its Discontents: Five Decades of RAF in German Film and Television at the moving history Film Festival Marco Abel December 2017 Festival Reports 6 September 1977. I was not yet eight years old. Helicopters in the air; police cars everywhere. On the way to school, the display of the box with the...
Finding the National Within the International: TIFF Revives a National Film Festival Petro Alexiou December 2017 Festival Reports The Thessaloniki International Film Festival (TIFF) is a vibrant festival that attracts new and emerging directors from all over the world. With close...
A Queer Tale of Two Sister Cities, 100 Years and the First FIPRESCI Colloquium Dedicated to Russian Cinema Cerise Howard December 2017 Festival Reports The First FIPRESCI Colloquium Dedicated to Russian Cinema 13-15 November 2017 Lenfilm Studio, St. Petersburg Colloquium website: https://new.cultur...
Vancouver International Film Festival Josh Cabrita December 2017 Festival Reports It is always in the process of being made. It is never finished; never closed. Perhaps we can imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so far. – ...
Faces, Places: The 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival Joanna Di Mattia September 2017 Festival Reports “We didn’t need dialogue. We had faces.” This statement, from Billy Wilder’s Hollywood noir, Sunset Boulevard (1950), returned to me time and time aga...
Cinema Ritrovato 2017 Peter Hourigan September 2017 Festival Reports It’s an old postcard view of Bologna, the colonnaded street unchanged since this image was made over a hundred years ago, women in long skirts and par...
Eastern Blooms in Karlovy Vary Carmen Gray September 2017 Festival Reports Ask any tourist what sights struck them in Prague and they’ll more often than not regale you with their bemusement over the Žižkov Television Tower, a...
Fantasia International Film Festival Justine Smith September 2017 Festival Reports As a festival grows in size and prominence, can it continue to maintain its identity? Slowly but surely, the Fantasia International Film Festival in M...
Midnight Sun 2017: The Sodankylä Syndrome Maxim Seleznyov September 2017 Festival Reports What is the Midnight Sun Film Festival, held every year in the northern Lapland town of Sodankylä about? It is when you exit the Lapinsuu cinema in th...
The Locarno Film Festival is dead, Long Live the Locarno Festival: The 70th Locarno (Film) Festival Jaimey Fisher September 2017 Festival Reports On the seventieth anniversary of the Locarno Film Festival, the festival reinvented, or, rather, reintroduced itself in several intriguing ways. Much ...
The Political Prism: the 20th Shanghai International Film Festival Zhaoyu Zhu September 2017 Festival Reports The Shanghai International Film Festival’s gigantic size and its globalised focus are not only revealed in the fact that more than 1500 sessions of 50...
What is the Cinema?: The 2017 Cannes Film Festival Daniel Fairfax June 2017 Festival Reports Cannes, as we all know, is essentially a scandal-making machine. More than any other film festival, Cannes has had controversy baked into its DNA from...
No Service, Keep Moving: The 63rd International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Tara Judah June 2017 Festival Reports The programme at the Short Film Festival is difficult, to be sure, but it always has been. Even the Short Film Festival’s first programme in 1954 alre...
Pan African Film Festival 2017 Bérénice Reynaud June 2017 Festival Reports Pan African Dreams: the Dreams that Dance Attending PAFF is to open oneself to a world of images, colours, sounds – even the suggestion of smells – f...