An Enclave for Chinese Art Cinema: The 13th Xining First International Film Festival Zhaoyu Zhu and Jiakai Nie October 2021 Festival Reports Xining is located in a river valley on the eastern side of the Tibetan Plateau. Due to its proximity to Tibet and Xinjiang, the city has a strong mult...
Alberto Lattuada at the 74th Locarno Film Festival Sofie Cato Maas October 2021 Festival Reports “The cinema is unequaled for revealing all the basic truths about a nation.” Alberto Lattuada Two years since the last physical edition of Locarno, ...
Embarrassment Of Riches: The 59th New York Film Festival Nolan Kelly October 2021 Festival Reports About three-quarters of the way through the New York Film Festival’s press screenings, which unfolded in an orderly pace at Lincoln Center’s Walter Re...
A Fortnight Alone with the 69th Melbourne International Film Festival Jacob Agius October 2021 Festival Reports When the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) rolls around in early August, that final month of winter always feels a little warmer in Melbour...
Brave New World: the 2021 Cannes Film Festival Daniel Fairfax August 2021 Festival Reports How does it feel to return to the cinema? I asked myself this question as my plane taxied on the runway at Nice airport one fine July morning, the shi...
The Realm of the Sensible and the Short Film: The 67th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen Shekhar Deshpande July 2021 Festival Reports The 67th edition of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen went online for the second successive year, this time with wider ambitions. It ex...
To Be Crossed and Shattered: Solidarity as Disruption at the 67th International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen Steffanie Ling July 2021 Festival Reports In last year’s festival report of Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen I lamented a number of programs that were postponed, including the theme prog...
Familiar and Not-Familiar: An Uncanny Journey Through the 22nd Jeonju International Film Festival Marc Raymond July 2021 Festival Reports Last year, for the first time since 2007, I was unable to attend the Jeonju film festival, as it was in effect canceled, although there was still a pr...
Disenchantment of the World: IFFR 2021 Madeleine Collier May 2021 Festival Reports It feels like every week since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic has contained more than a year’s worth of news events, and the week of the Internati...
IFFR 2021: High art, casual conversation Tara Judah May 2021 Festival Reports There is no festival in my home, only lockdown. But, there is a familiar and comforting Tiger that graces my television screen. It reminds me that the...
Rediscovering the Forgotten Gems of a Decade: Austrian Auteurs of the 1970s at the Viennale Maria Giovanna Vagenas May 2021 Festival Reports The 2020 Viennale was an extraordinary and memorable event. Carried by the courage, conviction and tenacity of its director Eva Sangiorgi and her team...
Pandemic Dreams: The 71st Berlinale Carmen Gray May 2021 Festival Reports 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, bu...
Some Winners and Then Some: Sundance 2021 Bérénice Reynaud May 2021 Festival Reports I From the comfort of my home, and the peace of my computer, I didn’t miss the long lines in the cold, or my shoes soaked in dirty snow, nor did I mi...
Forgotten Wars: The AFI FEST/AFM 2020 (Virtual Events) Bérénice Reynaud May 2021 Festival Reports AFI FEST Presented by Audi Two Invisible Wars Ensconced in the mountains of the Southern Caucasus, a disputed breakaway enclave within Azerbaijan, ...
Making Visible: The 2021 Cinéma du Réel Andrew Northrop May 2021 Festival Reports An immediate glance at the International Selection of 2021’s Cinéma du Réel identifies familiar films from IDFA, International Film Festival Rotterdam...
Only the World and Everything In It: The 2021 Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra Jay Kuehner April 2021 Festival Reports In its young history Punto de Vista (International Documentary Film Festival of Navarra) has staked out a distinguished identity, owing foremost to a ...
Dreaming of the Mountains: The 9th Dharamshala International Film Festival Sucheta Chakraborty January 2021 Festival Reports In March of 2020, around the time India went into a nationwide lockdown in response to the rise in COVID-19 cases, the Dharamshala International Film ...
Ghost Cities: The 58th Viennale Leonardo Goi January 2021 Festival Reports Legally speaking, I wasn’t sure if the trip would amount to trouble. I’d read the news, and made a few calls, and checked online. The website of the I...
Queer and Australian Features at the 2020 Adelaide Film Festival Stuart Richards January 2021 Festival Reports Held primarily at Palace Nova in the CBD’s Eastend, the Adelaide Film Festival was one of only a few festivals in Australia that were able to hold in-...
Korean Cinema’s Self-Portrait: The 25th Busan International Film Festival Marc Raymond January 2021 Festival Reports The 25th Busan International Film Festival was originally scheduled to take place in early October, as usual, with a full lineup and screenings, albei...
Live Through This: The 2020 Adelaide Film Festival Saige Walton January 2021 Festival Reports In a year marked by apocalyptic imagery and an eerie sense of the science-fictional, the Adelaide Film Festival’s decision to open its socially distan...
“Sense of Place”: The 33rd Tokyo International Film Festival Kohei Usuda January 2021 Festival Reports The Tokyo International Film Festival commenced on October 31 under the most unusual of circumstances, in the backdrop of a deadly pandemic that upend...
The 57th Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival: Enclave Amidst the Chaos? Maja Korbecka January 2021 Festival Reports Taiwan is one of the few countries that managed to suppress the spread of COVID-19 very early on, drawing from the traumatic experience of the early 2...
The 34th Cinema Ritrovato Has Full Resuscitation under COVID Roger Macy October 2020 Festival Reports Bologna in 2020 was destined to be different, with COVID-19 still lapping around. Frankly, when I saw the postponement announcement, that was the last...
Women at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival Alexandra Heller-Nicholas October 2020 Festival Reports In 2016, the 5050x2020 campaign was launched by the Swedish Film Institute at the Cannes Film Festival, and big names were there to share in the annou...
Lest We Forget: the 31st FID Marseille Leonardo Goi October 2020 Festival Reports Are you ready to attend the first “real” festival post COVID-19? The invite came in early July, four and a half months since my last memory from the f...
A Vitalising Cinema in an Agitated Age: The 58th New York Film Festival Jake Pitre October 2020 Festival Reports The 58th New York Film Festival, which took place September 17 to October 11, was inevitably unique in a year of disease and unrest. Taking place at d...
Locarno 2020: The Open Doors Experience Maria Giovanna Vagenas October 2020 Festival Reports Because of COVID-19, the structure of the 74th Locarno Film Festival was rethought. Under the motto “For the future of films” and opting for a hybrid ...
Your Daughters Come Back to You: The 28th Pan African Film and Arts Festival Bérénice Reynaud July 2020 Festival Reports The label of “auteur cinema”, whether poetic or political, is often the cloak under which African cinema is “discovered” and appreciated. We know the ...
Reimagining the Film Festival Landscape in the Time of a Global Pandemic: The 27th Sheffield Doc/Fest Sofie Cato Maas July 2020 Festival Reports Cinema is one of those rare forms of art where the relation and tension between aesthetics and ideology, past and present, and formalism and realism, ...
Closer Than Ever? The 1st Long Distance Film Festival Leonardo Goi July 2020 Festival Reports For all the festivals forced to cancel their yearly rendezvous in response to the COVID pandemic, there’s a tiny contingent that have blossomed under ...
More Like Collage Than Contest: The 67th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen Online Steffanie Ling July 2020 Festival Reports The 66th Edition of the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen went online too, and we all know why. A moment to note and speculate on some persona...
The Last Film Festival: the 2020 Berlinale Daniel Fairfax April 2020 Festival Reports I must confess, loyal reader, that there can occasionally be something of a lag between the end of a film festival that I am covering and the moment w...
AFI/AFM 2010 – Places to Fly Away From Bérénice Reynaud April 2020 Festival Reports I believe in ghosts, vampires and public employees That a certain morning fly away from their houses. Because I am a man in love. — Luis Caicedo P...
Pandemic Diary of a Lonely Cinephile: CPH:DOX 2020 Pernille Lystlund Matzen April 2020 Festival Reports When reality starts to look increasingly like a dystopian sci-fi film, how does a film festival concerned with the documentary genre respond? For CPH:...
Collective Heroes: Activism and Activation at the International Film Festival Rotterdam Tara Judah April 2020 Festival Reports As I write, supermarket shelves sit empty. People are stockpiling toilet paper, hand sanitiser and other household goods in preparation for a lockdown...
