The end of the year is always a time of reflection and consideration; the end of a decade even more so. As I’ve been working on a “Best Experimental Films of 2000-2009” list, mulling over the thousands of films and videos and live moving image works that I’ve seen during that time, it’s hard not [...]
Festival Reports
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“Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.”
– Florence King
1. Anorexics, bulimics and the smorgasbord
For every metaphor for the cinema – Godard’s goodwill for a meeting, Bazin’s window on the world, the cinema as a machine célibataire – one can usually think of at least a couple of metaphors [...]
Firmly established as the pre-eminent film event in North America, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) seems less compromised than comfortable. Rumours of a few years ago that TIFF was cutting back on adventurous programming may or may not have been accurate, but quite a few strange little items are still finding their way into [...]
In many respects the Sarajevo Film Festival is the antithesis of “glamorous” film festivals such as Cannes or Toronto. In a story that was widely circulated, Associated Press highlighted it as a festival that was “born in a sandbag-protected basement during the Bosnian war.” To the general international population, Sarajevo may be better known for [...]
On the edges of Sydney’s inner city, as the terrace housing thins, depots and warehouses begin to mingle with a vast suburban prairie. Here, in the aptly named Factory Theatre, the still youthful, one might say swaddling-clad, Sydney Underground Film Festival holds an annual, short-lived, series of screenings. Since 2007, festival founder-director Stephan Popescu and [...]
As always, but this year perhaps more than usual, the unveiling of a new New York Film Festival slate was greeted with accusations that the festival was doing… well, exactly what it’s supposed to be doing: presenting a highly selective summing-up of What’s Happening In World Cinema, Arthouse Division. For some of the NYFF’s critics, [...]
When is a film festival not a film festival? In China the answer is, when it’s an exhibition. The Chinese title of the China Independent Film Festival (CIFF) is “Zhongguo Duli Yingxiang Niandu Zhan”. That translates more literally as “Annual Exhibition of Chinese Independent Film and Video.” This is important because the Film Bureau of [...]
More so than any other year that I can attest to, the 53rd London Film Festival was characterised by a series of conflicts, contrasts, frustrations and absences. During those two long, thin weeks, a few masterpieces were discovered (Jacques Rivette’s 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup, say, or Frederick Wiseman’s La danse – Le ballet [...]
Before American and European motion pictures took over Brazilian movie screens in 1911, domestic cinema was enjoying a bela época. Dominated by actualités and newsreels as most early cinemas were, Brazilian cinema also produced the popular genre of filmes cantantes, which un-spooled to the sounds of singers, musicians, and actors stashed behind the screen. Their [...]
In the vast world of international film festivals, the Canberra International Film Festival is still in its infancy. It began in 1996, running for three days at the Electric Shadows cinema. The opening night film was Jean-Paul Rappeneau’s Le hussard sur le toit (The Horsemen on the Roof, 1995), followed by a cocktail party at [...]
Late 1960, Northern Greece: the Thessaloniki Film Festival is launched, and my father, aged 27, emigrates to Australia. Late 2009: the Thessaloniki festival celebrates its 50th edition, and I re-locate from Australia to Greece.
As a cinephile living in Melbourne, for years I was enamoured with European film culture and festivals such as Cannes and Rotterdam, [...]
A Quick Backgrounder, For Those Who Came in Late
With its advent smack-bang on the first year of a new millennium, Mezipatra, the Czech Republic’s queer film festival and, by a considerable margin, its largest GLBTIQ community event, continues to demonstrate a timeliness in its sense of occasion. In 2009 it marked, and heartily celebrated, its [...]
Who’d a thunk it? All of a sudden the Persian Gulf is host to a slew of film festivals brimming with internationalist, top-tier ambition and seemingly mad keen to hothouse a vibrant homegrown film culture.
The granddaddy of them all, the Dubai International Film Festival, debuted only as far back as 2004. This year has just [...]
So there I was, my dear reader, about to come back to Paris after several peripatetic weeks, ready to settle into my new flat and wondering what I was going to do with myself upon my rentrée. Clearly the thought of actually doing some work on my thesis, its due date rapidly approaching, filled me [...]
18-29 March 2009 (1)
In 2009, the Melbourne Queer Film Festival (MQFF) can – and does – still boast of being the second biggest film festival in Melbourne, quite an accomplishment in a city where, barring a summery spell hanging over from Xmas/New Year, there is scarcely a day when there isn’t at least one film [...]
7–12 February 2009
On a wintery Sunday morning, in the hundred-year old HAU1 theatre in Berlin, British screenwriter Sir David Hare is in conversation with Brazilian writer/director Daniela Thomas (Foreign Land), US producer Anne Carey (The Savages, Thumbsucker) and British film critic Peter Cowie. He’s talking about working with director Stephen Daldry and editor Claire Simpson [...]
28 April – 5 May 2009
Now in its 23rd year, the Image Forum Festival has long since established itself as one of the foremost venues for contemporary avant-garde Japanese film and video. Held every (northern hemisphere) spring, the festival is the hallmark annual event for Image Forum, an organisation which also operates an art cinema [...]
17-22 March 2009
While film festivals get questioned more and more about their purpose on the contemporary film market, the Diagonale seems quiet sure about their benefit: to get an idea of the Austrian filmmaking and the essential establishment of the Austrian film production in an European context. Showcasing all genres, running times, narrative styles and [...]
17-22 March 2009
In the years since the Emergency Diagonale and the festival’s defence at the hands of Austria’s filmmaking community against a coup attempt by the government, the country’s second-most important annual event in cinema had been unable to find its way back into track. Truth be told, the Diagonale had been in a state [...]
4-19 April, 2009
The 28th International Istanbul Film Festival closed by hosting its Closing Gala on 19 April 2009. At the gala, where Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski received The Lifetime Achievement Award, the Golden Tulip was awarded to director Pablo Larrain’s Tony Manero (2008), by the jury presided over by director Goran Paskaljevic and composed of [...]
30 April – 5 May 2009
If you should ever come to know a film critic who is crazy not only about the A-programme screened at the International Shortfilm Festival in Oberhausen but the location itself, be sure: he or she has never been there! By this time, I guess it is absolutely pointless to question [...]
