In a state in which politics are generally considered synonymous with proportional representation (and that is a nice and rather euphemistic way of describing the Austrian “proporz”), it should be taken as a good habit that its main film festival shows great affection towards topics such as “democracy in process” – like the meticulous depiction [...]
Festival Reports
Subscribe to Festival Reports RSS Feed 
By the time this report is out, many changes have occurred within Italian and international festival politics. What is left to say now is only this much: it is indeed hard to think of a festival director with more insight and delicacy (from programming to representation) than Marco Mueller. Venice is a total cinematic pleasure, [...]
“You bump into experiences, films, each other, opinions…on the internet you’re always searching for something, but during a festival you’re not looking – you’re finding.” – Martijn te Pas, IDFA Program Coordinator Despite recent government spending cutbacks in the Dutch cultural sector that will massively reduce the amount of support available for film productions and [...]
Festival Business The opening weekend of the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival also signalled the beginning of TIFF’s second year in the $200 million dollar TIFF Bell Lightbox. The public side of the facility features five theatres, a ticket office, two galleries, a store and two cafés; the upper floors hold office space, private screening [...]
The 26th Entrevues festival in the charming town of Belfort in eastern France was a bustle of activity on many levels. As usual, it paid court to new movies, long and short, and offered themed series, including overviews of the Western and the Bad Boys (not the same category!), a tribute to Howard Hawks, two [...]
Over the course of nine years, DocLisboa has grown in stature into one of the key European shop windows of modern non-fiction film. Lisbon’s documentary film festival has become a yearly rendezvous, an opportunity to take a clear-eyed look at the state of the art in the documentary world, with the cream of the year’s [...]
“Representation is a denial of participation” – Muammar Gaddafi in The Green Book Used to the soothing distraction film festivals offer in the form of anal-retentive social events and cultural bulimia, to encounter I Mille Occhi (Italian for “The Thousand Eyes”) is a pleasantly disorienting experience. A recipient for socio-aesthetic potentialities rather than a trend [...]
The Dragons and Tigers Award for Young Cinema went to the first digital film of a young Tibetan director, Sonthar Gyal’s Dbus Lam Gyi Nyi Ma (The Sun-Beaten Path), that had already received a Special Mention in the Asian Digital Competition in Hong Kong in March; the winner of the Golden Digital Prize had been [...]
A lot of people seem to think that art or photography is about the way things look, or the surface of things. That’s not what it’s about for me. It’s really about relationships and feelings. . . . It’s not about a style or a look or a setup. It’s about emotional obsession and empathy. [...]
Recine, the International Festival of Archival Cinema, is the stuff a cinephile’s dreams are made of. Its slate bulges with beloved classics, premiering restorations, and a host of new films competing for prizes, including one for best research. Each day from 10am to 5pm, films were scheduled back-to-back in the vaulted-roof “cellars” of the National [...]
If this were the 50th edition of the New York Film Festival – and the year in which programming director Richard Peña hands over the reins of the Film Society of Lincoln Center after 25 years in command – then the shape of the changes to come might have appeared more distinctly. As it is, [...]
The Film Festival Cottbus: 21 this year! One might then pause to consider, with the festival attaining maturity (if we were to arbitrarily decide that 21 is, as we do with humans, a marker of such): does its mission still hold up to scratch? Much as queer film festivals are given every few years to [...]
The inaugural Iranian Film Festival Australia kicked off in Brisbane on 4 August 2011 in spectacular fashion with a sell-out screening of Asghar Farhadi’s acclaimed new film Jodaeiye Nader az Simin (A Separation, 2011). With true Iranian hospitality, the event culminated in a party featuring Persian music and delectable servings of Iranian wedding rice. In [...]
Like the gorgeous city that hosts it, the Festival de Donostia-San Sebastián Zinemaldia continues to display a healthy respect for the past, an open-minded appreciation of the present and a nurturing concern for the future. A major highlight of this year’s festival, the 59th, and our primary rationale for attending it, was a complete retrospective [...]
Despite a diverse line-up, the 14th Revelation International Film Festival will doubtlessly be remembered as the year of David (Stratton) and Margaret (Pomeranz). The presence of such iconic Oz film royalty in the Astor lobby confirmed Rev’s incredible growth from the Greenwich basement to a truly distinctive national film event. As with the previous opening [...]
The key aim of the Jeonju International Film Festival (hereafter JIFF) is to showcase independent films from around the world and from South Korea. In its twelfth year, JIFF is not only a young international festival, it is also very youth-oriented. The audience at virtually every screening is comprised of twenty-somethings; most of the Korean [...]
With support from the city of Paris and presided over by actress Charlotte Rampling, the Paris Cinema Festival is touted as a democratic and offbeat annual event that combines the retrospective and the prospective. With more than 100 films screening over the festival’s twelve days, there really is something for everyone, and at 5 euros [...]
In the crowded calendar of film festivals Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato stands out for being one of the very few which persistently investigates cinema’s lesser-known history. Strategically set between the end of June and the beginning of July, Cinema Ritrovato has the double ambition of promoting the rediscovery of cinema through archive research and restoration and [...]
Frameline is a film festival that is flourishing alongside the dramatic changes in queer and LGBT identity politics. The larger, more prominent screenings occur in the Castro neighbourhood, which is famed for being the centre for San Franciscan LGBT politics and activism. Alas the Castro district is also notorious for being conservative and male dominated. [...]
Having flown the coop of the Flaherty family farm in Dummerston, VT, back in 1958, the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar has been migrating ceaselessly through a succession of deserted college campuses, mostly in the far reaches of New York State. This year, at Colgate University in Hamilton, approximately 150 people are in attendance. Two other [...]
In any good film festival, one’s life flashes before one’s eyes. And the history of cinema. Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) is a good film festival. It is big enough to encompass a variety of things, both good and bad: some glitz, numerous middling new films, latest works from recognised auteurs, and a number [...]
There are certain film festivals whose films and business politics always inspire great discussion. There are others where the warmth of community beats all else. For some hospitality and competency are their hallmarks. And for a few the most memorable things about them are the ugly totes given to guests, but best admired at other [...]
Renewal, when generational change finally occurs, may well unleash an explosion of energy that will burst the log jam and permit the nation to resume its interrupted progress toward the vision of a tolerant, fair-minded and decent society for all its citizens. – Francis Gordon Clarke (1) It’s quixotic, but naive, to expect a film [...]
I have a confession to make. I have known about Udine’s Far East Film Festival (FEFF) since its inception in 1999. But somehow I had never made it until this year. After a shamefully short flying visit, I know I am going to be back for more. Yes, FEFF emphasises popular cinema. But, no, FEFF [...]
Despite the attention given to the Toronto International Film Festival, the Images Festival may be the city’s most ambitious, if not in scale, then in programming, which ranges across film, video, expanded projections, performances and installations. Its young, energetic audiences seemed well-accustomed to hopping between the cinema and the gallery, or those hybrid spaces in [...]
Following the terrible events that rocked Japan on March 11th and onwards, the organisers of Nippon Connection were faced with a difficult decision: whether to hold the Frankfurt-based Japanese film festival this year or not. It would fall on the final week of April, only about a month and a half after the magnitude 9.0 [...]
It’s hard to be objective about Boston as a movie town. I’ve lived in (relative) close proximity to the small city for most of my life, and when I found myself completely enamoured with cinema in all of its forms in the 2000s, embarking on a career to study both cinema and cinephilia, I couldn’t [...]
After 57 years of running a short film festival you’d think that the organisers of the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival would know exactly what short film is. However, the festival’s website has small text scrolling across the bottom of its pages with the provocative line “We do not know what short film is.” It [...]
Part One: Ebru April means rain in Istanbul and biting winds sweeping down from Russia – at least that’s what they feel like. While on the one hand the rain complements the film festival, on the other, it has to jostle for space – literally in this case – with a month-long shopping festival, the [...]
He put his face between her breasts. “We don’t know how long it will be before Reptilicus is sighted over Copenhagen, but until he is, let’s make every moment count. – Reptilicus (1961), a novel by ‘Dean Owen’ (i.e. Dudley Dean McGaughy) Among its many other charms and attractions – it’s habitually ranked among the [...]
“Ideas are on the street.” –Abu Othman Amro bnu Bahr al-Jahed (776 – 869) “The cinema is there to mend wounded souls.” – Egyptian filmmaker, Yousry Nasrallah “There is no better prospective project for a filmmaker than to participate, with his modest means, in the radical and systematic transformation of his society to build a [...]
Stepping off the TGV at Cannes-Ville railway station, and onto the Rue Jean-Jaurès early on a Wednesday afternoon, the sentiment becomes palpable. The heaving throng of people being disgorged from the station exits, unceremoniously battling each other to get through to the street, the signs held up for arriving minor celebrities, with limos in abeyance [...]
Two important figures of the cinephilic landscape left Los Angeles in 2010. One was Rose Kuo, who since 2007 had assumed the direction of the AFI Film Festival; the other was Scott Foundas, film editor of The LA Weekly. Both are now working for the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York – one [...]
Unlike older and more established Australian international film festivals (the Melbournes, the Sydneys, even the Brisbanes) the still very young Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival (BAFF) has, as yet, by no means earned an unquestionable right to exist as part of the city’s cultural landscape. Despite its dynamic and very notable successes – its innovative programming, [...]
It’s at Sundance that independent queer cinema was launched in the US media. Since Todd Haynes’ Poison (1991) (1) and Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992), the notion of queer cinema has evolved, but Araki is still active, and still welcome on the snowy slopes of Park City. His first two films, Three Bewildered People [...]
For two years running I’ve attended the Fribourg International Film Festival. The timing of my engagements with the festival has been propitious; it strikes me that the FIFF is a festival just now coming into its own. In 2011 it applied only a few fine tunings to the many renovations to its core mission effected [...]
Organised by L’AMREC (Association marocaine de recherche et d’échanges culturels), (1) the 5th annual National Festival of Amazigh Film was held 15-18 December, 2010 at the Palais des Congrès in Ouarzazate. The location is important not only because Ouarzazate is considered to be the Hollywood of Africa but also because the local population, located in [...]
A feeling of cautious optimism pervades Germany for the first time in years. The stock prices of Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen have never been higher; according to the latest prognoses, unemployment, the perpetual spectre of national anxiety since unification, will be almost non-existent by the summer. And yet, it would be a mistake to want [...]
Well they got some damn songs, now, hell, a man can’t even figure out what in the hell’s going on, don’t you know. But the old songs, usually they was made in telling a damn story. A lot of the old English, old Irish ballads–they’d tell you story, a tragic story, usually. But they make [...]
Has Rotterdam gotten too big? In its 40th year, and under an “XL” banner that included forty new locations to augment the festival’s eight already sizable venues, the answer, at least geographically, might be yes. While keeping its core programs intact – the features and shorts in competition for the Tiger Award, the Bright Future [...]
“We are conscious of cinema’s role in society.” – Nour-Eddine Saïl, Director of the Centre Cinématographique Marocain Tangier: the city that inspired and attracted so many artists, writers and bohemians, called the “Dream City” by Paul Bowles and popularly known as “la ville du Détroit”, because of its singular geographical location on the Strait of [...]
It’s not easy being Greek. As an outsider, I can see it in their faces, faces etched with struggle, pain, desire, hope. Of course, this is a cinematic panoply in itself, a drama “behind the scenes” playing out in various configurations, in a setting that is a veritable hotbed of forces (see Petro Alexiou’s report [...]
The misty mornings and evenings at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival evoke a cinematic atmosphere that by turn feels celebratory and melancholy. In the time of the IMF and European Union Memorandum, which hangs over Greece’s economic future like the Sword of Damocles, there is a mood of pessimism throughout the country. Paradoxically, the Greek [...]
In an early scene from the opening night film of FILMeX 2010, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, a dying man is visited by his estranged son who appears in non-human form. It’s a shocking moment not least because of the naivety of the illusion: Weerasethakul eschews digital technology and instead [...]
If we can say that the 48th New York Film Festival offered films that were for the most part concerned with social issues, we certainly cannot accuse the selection committee of putting together a one-note program, or of being restricted only to socially conscious films produced within the traditions of film realism. Of the politically [...]
It is difficult to describe the Lucca Film Festival due to its informal nature, which is very different from many other Italian realities. However, in searching for a good formula, we could probably adopt the title (in its singular form) of an important film that the Festival showed this year: “free radical”. So let’s say [...]
As they cheered and hooted, they were far more confident than the film actors on display, who seemed ill at ease when they stepped from their cars, like celebrity criminals ferried to a mass trial by jury at the Palazzo, a full-scale cultural Nuremberg furnished with film clips of the atrocities they had helped to [...]
The celebration of the 15th anniversary of the Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF) this year was a bit of a balancing act. On the one hand, festival organisers sought to dazzle visitors with a panoply of cinema, seminars, and star-studded galas, all emphasising its continued leadership in an increasingly crowded and competitive regional scene. At [...]
In most parts of Quito, Ecuador, the fact that you make, study or are passionate about cinema can only be understood as a hobby, a recreation, a pasttime. When I opened my bank account, for instance, the clerk asked me what I studied as an undergraduate. I responded the way I always respond. I say, [...]
The past few years have been ones of ascendancy for Brisbane’s “screen culture”, the government anointed term for what used to be called cinema appreciation. The depressing closure of the Dendy on George Street – the city’s venerable arthouse twin – in 2008 was off-set by increasing instances of independent programmers screening classic, cult, horror [...]
