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...
Children of the Apocalypse: the 2019 Cannes Film Festival Daniel Fairfax July 2019 Festival Reports Picture this, dear reader: from the very beginning of this year’s Cannes film festival, I had been having nightmares about the prospect of getting int...
Under the Moon in Sharjah: The 1st Sharjah Film Platform Carmen Gray March 2019 Festival Reports 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...
The Unspeakable finds Voice: The 48th International Film Festival Rotterdam Dirk de Bruyn March 2019 Festival Reports The 48th edition of the International Film Festival of Rotterdam was IFFR director Bero Beyer’s fourth iteration. The four program groupings that he i...
The 2018 Mezipatra Queer Film Festival: An Adventure Beyond Reality into a Queer Liminal Space Stuart Richards March 2019 Festival Reports Themes of liminality run through the Mezipatra Queer Film Festival in Prague. The event is held in November each year, as Europe slowly turns to the c...
Questions of Agency: Sundance 2019 Bérénice Reynaud March 2019 Festival Reports The Warden and the Young Man In 2012, Ava DuVernay made history by becoming the first black woman filmmaker to get a major award at Sundance. Since t...
Back to the Wolf Pack: the 22nd Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival Leonardo Goi March 2019 Festival Reports “You’ve come prepared,” a member of the guest management team from the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF, in its Estonian acronym) giggled at m...
All the Feels: The 48th International Film Festival Rotterdam Leonardo Goi March 2019 Festival Reports The tote bag I picked up at the headquarters of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) had four fluorescent words printed on it, one for eac...
Thessaloniki International Film Festival: Reflexivity and Realism in the Romanian Retrospective Yaron Dahan March 2019 Festival Reports The Thessaloniki International Film Festival has long had a tradition of foregrounding Balkan cinema through its Balkan Survey. In a retrospective of ...
The Marginal and the Misplaced: To Save and Project: The 16th MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation Tanner Tafelski March 2019 Festival Reports In this day and age, to watch an older movie, or really any movie, is to watch a digital copy – a file code made up of ones and zeros. That is to say,...
Rendez-vous in Autumn: China-US Summit/American Film Market/AFI FEST Bérénice Reynaud March 2019 Festival Reports On Oct 30, the day before the American Film Market opened in Santa Monica, the Asian Society of Southern California had organised the US-China Enterta...
“Il faut souffrir”; or, Why the personal was (mostly) not the political at the 69th Berlin International Film Festival Marco Abel March 2019 Festival Reports “Il faut souffrir,” Fritz Lang, playing himself in Jean-Luc Godard’s masterful Le mépris (Contempt, 1963), laconically declares to screenwriter Paul J...
The Centre Cannot Hold: the 2019 Berlinale Daniel Fairfax March 2019 Festival Reports In the wake of recent political events that have shaken the four-decade-long neoliberal consensus, sundering the political terrain of the major Wester...
#Youmustsee: The 2018 Adelaide International Film Festival Saige Walton December 2018 Festival Reports The last Adelaide Film Festival under the stewardship of Artistic Director Amanda Duthie proved to be a decidedly populist affair— a programming bent ...
Towards the De-masculinisation of Korean Cinema: The 23rd Busan International Film Festival Marc Raymond December 2018 Festival Reports The latest edition of the Busan International Film Festival featured the usual lineup: a number of films getting their Asian or Korean premieres after...
Between Hollywood and the Socialist/Colonial East: The 5th Hanoi International Film Festival Lucian Tion December 2018 Festival Reports Already at its fifth edition, the Hanoi International Film Festival (HANIFF) cannot exactly be said to have made world headlines. However, in a countr...
Film Culture and Corporate Enterprise at the 62nd BFI London Film Festival Tara Judah December 2018 Festival Reports The British Film Institute (BFI) is both the physical home and funding body behind the lion’s share of film activity in the UK. It is a beacon for fil...
American Drama: The 56th New York Film Festival Jackson Arn December 2018 Festival Reports Film festivals – like film shoots, or warzones – waver between exhilarating and dull. One minute you’re thanking the heavens that something as wondrou...
In Stockholm, Bergman is (Literally) on the Money Randy Malamud December 2018 Festival Reports A movie ticket with popcorn in Stockholm costs about 200 kroner, and if you pay cash you’ll notice that the 200 kroner bill features Ingmar Bergman’s ...
