SXSW Lite: Mutating Social Hustle Into Couch Potato Charm Dirk de Bruyn April 2020 Festival Reports Five days before I got on a plane to SXSW, the world turned. All international travel was cancelled by my institution. A hammer blow. It took time to ...
A Festival is a Space in Time: the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival Leonardo Goi April 2020 Festival Reports As I type these words, a few months after leaving the 60th Thessaloniki International Film Festival (TIFF), I don’t exactly know when the next fest wi...
Digging for Gold: To Save and Project: The 17th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation Tanner Tafelski April 2020 Festival Reports In a city bursting with monthly repertory programming, the Museum of Modern Art’s To Save and Project series stands out as an annual must-attend event...
In Praise of Collective Viewing: True/False 2020 Jordan M. Smith April 2020 Festival Reports It’s impossible to think about the 2020 True/False Film Festival outside of the context of the COVID-19 pandemic which really only began to reveal its...
A Resilient Ann Arbor Digs Deep Dirk de Bruyn April 2020 Festival Reports Ann Arbor Film Festival is the longest running avant-garde and experimental film festival in North America. 1963 was its foundation year. This year wo...
Sundance 2020 Bérénice Reynaud April 2020 Festival Reports What are you looking at when you’re looking at me? As Sundance may be one of the last film festivals I will cover for a while, maybe it is a good tim...
Korean Cinema in the Shadow of Parasite: The 24th Busan International Film Festival Marc Raymond January 2020 Festival Reports Busan 2019 marked a year of celebration, with multiple retrospective screenings in honour of the 100th anniversary of Korean cinema coinciding with Bo...
Dispatch from Reykjavík: Hot Films at a Cool Festival Randy Malamud January 2020 Festival Reports At Reykjavík International Film Festival’s 16th edition, strong opening and closing feature films – End of Sentence and Parasite – bookended a program...
StopTrik from Head to Toe and the Eisenstein International Network Amanda Barbour January 2020 Festival Reports The 9th edition of StopTrik and the inaugural conference of the Eisenstein International Network (EIN) took place, borderline consecutively, in Octobe...
About the Cliché in Films, or the Opportunity for a New Consciousness at a German Film Festival: A Report on the FilmFest Hamburg Vivien Buchhorn January 2020 Festival Reports Two women by the sea, their faces framed by cloth that give protection from the wind. They look at each other, the sea is foaming, the beach studded w...
Right-wing Conservatives Against Film Lovers: The 20th Tbilisi International Film Festival Levan Tskhovrebadze January 2020 Festival Reports In Georgia, a country empty of non-commercial movie theatres, the local cinephiles’ only destination for art-house cinema is the Tbilisi International...
The Grain of the Real, The Grain of the Surreal, and the Grain of Light: Vancouver International Film Festival 2019 Bérénice Reynaud January 2020 Festival Reports The Grain of the Real Always the champion of the most cutting-edge documentaries from Asia, the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF) presente...
Forests of Life and Death: 2019 in Documentary Festivals Carmen Gray January 2020 Festival Reports 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 ...
A Report from the Cottbus Festival of Eastern European Cinema Jendrik Walendy January 2020 Festival Reports From the wide avenues around the train station, the bus lines meander through narrow streets with renovated historic buildings. The streets open up ag...
“A Hundred Years Ago”: 1919 in Cinema, at Il Cinema Ritrovato, 32nd edition, Bologna, Italy, June 22-30, 2019 Peter Rist January 2020 Festival Reports It has become a tradition for the annual festival of rediscovered and restored films, Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy to focus one of its “Time ...
Experimental Cinema in Times of Protest: IV Cámara Lúcida Libertad Gills January 2020 Festival Reports Cámara Lúcida began in 2016 as a small gathering of friends in the city of Cuenca, Ecuador’s third most important city after Quito and Guayaquil. At t...
Autumn in a Small Town: The 3rd Pingyao International Film Festival Daniel Fairfax January 2020 Festival Reports It has become a truism, now, to speak of the global proliferation of film festivals in the last few decades. Worldwide, they presently number in the t...
Of liberation, and of states of undress and redress both: The 54th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Cerise Howard October 2019 Festival Reports Oftentimes reports of mine on the venerable Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) have looked a mite askance at its gender politics. But al...
This Is the Way the World Ends: The 10th Odesa Film Festival Leonardo Goi October 2019 Festival Reports Midway through my second year at the Odesa International Film Festival (OIFF), a curious feeling began to emerge from my screenings. To the extent tha...
22nd Revelation Perth Film Festival David Morgan-Brown October 2019 Festival Reports The unpredictable notion of control is beneficial for conflict in storytelling, particularly in the features and documentaries of the 22nd Revelation ...
Sharing My Journey: Women and the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival Alexandra Heller-Nicholas October 2019 Festival Reports To say that in recent years that broader amorphous beast loosely called “the film industry” has been the centre of often high-profile discourse about ...
The Rhizomatic Underground of Contemporary Animation Curatorship: The 9th Under the Radar Festival Dirk de Bruyn October 2019 Festival Reports The 9th Under the Radar animation film festival took place in the MuseumsQuartier, the Blickle Kino and the Filmhaus Kino in Vienna from 1-5 July. The...
The Old Hands Have It: The Batumi International Art-House Film Festival Carmen Gray October 2019 Festival Reports 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 ...
Of Art Cinema, its Discontents and its Triumphs: The 72nd Locarno Film Festival Jaimey Fisher October 2019 Festival Reports This year’s edition of the Locarno Film Festival, the 72nd, welcomed a new artistic director, Lili Hinstin, after the departure last year of Carlo Cha...
A Decade+ in Review: The 2019 Toronto International Film Festival Darren Hughes October 2019 Festival Reports On 31 December 2018, the fundraising arm of the Toronto International Film Festival sent a year-end email solicitation, urging recipients to support c...
Il Cinema Ritrovato 2019 Peter Hourigan October 2019 Festival Reports Ritrovati e Restaurati – Recovered and Restored – is one the programming strands for Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato. These terms, along with “rescued” and...
Back to Basics: The New Spirit of Cinéma du Réel Maria Giovanna Vagenas July 2019 Festival Reports In Paris, during the grey and wintry month of March, dazzling colours and geometric patterns on the famous glass and steel façade of the Centre Pompid...
Looking Forward and Looking Back: The 20th Jeonju International Film Festival Marc Raymond July 2019 Festival Reports 2019 marked the 20th anniversary of the Jeonju film festival, which celebrated with its largest program to date, with an emphasis on both the history ...
Echoes of Exclamation: The 65th Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen Steffanie Ling July 2019 Festival Reports The Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen is like a restaurant that everyone keeps going to even though the quality of the food is consistently unpre...
Tricky Women/Tricky Realities and the Body Politic Amanda Barbour July 2019 Festival Reports Vienna is pretty much a combination of The Lord of the Rings and a mental asylum. Tolkienian because of its baroque architecture and contained lunacy ...
An Unlikely Oceanic Feeling in Middle America: True/False Film Festival 2019 Jordan M. Smith July 2019 Festival Reports This year was my fifth consecutive visit to the American midwest, lovingly described by the True False Film Festival’s press liaison as “the middle of...
A Vintage Year – the 21st Far East Film Festival Chris Berry July 2019 Festival Reports Udine’s Far East Film Festival celebrated its twenty-first birthday with a vintage selection of excellent films. Despite a public funding cut of 150,0...
Islands in the Current: The 16th IndieLisboa Film Festival Leonardo Goi July 2019 Festival Reports I am flicking through the notes of my second year at IndieLisboa, and sensing a pattern. Writing from Portugal a year ago, I remember praising a handf...
Screening Desire: BFI Flare London LGBTQ+ Film Festival James Lawrence Slattery July 2019 Festival Reports Founded in 1986, BFI Flare is now a well-established festival screening new LGBTQ+ films from around the world. Held at London’s British Film Institut...
Recovering Hidden Histories: The 27th PanAfrican Art and Film Festival Bérénice Reynaud July 2019 Festival Reports The Voice in the Church For the opening night of its 27th edition at the Directors Guild of America, the PanAfrican Art and Film Festival (PAFF), lan...
Youth in motion: the 18th Transilvania International Film Festival Leonardo Goi July 2019 Festival Reports It took an open-air screening of Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy - held in the courtyard of an abandoned castle in the middle of Transylvania, and with lead act...
