Author Carmen Gray

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-state-funded films of independent Ukraine, made as the USSR...

“I see Mount Ararat — it stands high in the blue sky. With its gentle, tender contours, it seems to grow not out of the earth but out of the sky, as if it has condensed from its white clouds and its deep blue,”...

Shuffling from bed to couch, stove-brewed coffee in hand, and firing up the laptop may make for an unusually leisurely way to start a festival day, but who wouldn’t have traded it to be rushing through the biti...

Forests in flames dominated some of most searing media images to round out the decade, as their link to human failing, greed and potential extinction took on an air of increasing catastrophe and crisis. The doc...

Batumi, Georgia’s third-largest city, has become known as the ”Las Vegas of the Black Sea”, due to the reliance of its economy on gambling. It’s true you can’t stroll far in any direction without spotting a “Ca...

If you were around in the 1980s and even a passing consumer of Hollywood action movies, you’ll probably remember Chuck Norris as an elite troop facing off against Lebanese terrorists in The Delta Force (1986) –...

The notion all reality is just an opinion is something you hear a lot these days in documentary circles. That cinema is always an edit, and an act – with a conscious agenda or not – of ideological imposition ov...

“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-modernising country in his 1971 documentary classic to get to ...

Hearing critics talk about European documentary festivals you could often be fooled for thinking they start and end with Amsterdam’s IDFA and its sexier (in its all-out embrace of the blurred lines of the ficti...

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 bizarre communist-era needle of high-tech architecture plun...

Joseph Roth wrote in 1933 that rising nationalism had temporarily defeated Jewish writers in Germany, but not before they’d given its literature something great: the theme of the city. He’s one of a number of l...

The Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, named for the winter darkness that cloaks the capital at that time of year, held its 20th edition last November. It was the year Estonia also celebrated 25 years of indep...

To shape a schedule that hits on the best of the 500 titles in Rotterdam’s jammed program depends on a combination of good tips, luck and intuition. When only in town a few days, a degree of hit-and-miss random...

The rise of populist parties in Europe, Brexit, and Trump: all were mentioned by DOK Leipzig festival director Leena Pasanen in her opening speech as phenomena of a world suddenly more polarised and confrontati...

Finland’s Midnight Sun has in its three decades become known among cinema aficionados as one of the world’s most legendary and unique film festivals. Its reputation as something of a rarity is enhanced by the f...