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 ...
Leadership Transitions, Critical Voices and Experimental Cinema at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival Darren Hughes December 2018 Festival Reports In 2018, the Toronto International Film Festival joined Sundance, Berlin, Locarno and Vienna in announcing major changes in leadership. After 36 years...
Vancouver 2018 – Not-so-strange Bedfellows Bérénice Reynaud December 2018 Festival Reports Beyond the Great (Digital) Divide Posited at both ends of the aesthetic spectrum (French auteur cinema versus Sundance alum), Doubles Vies (Non-Ficti...
New Stars, Old Dreams: The 75th Venice Film Festival Leonardo Goi December 2018 Festival Reports In the weeks leading up to the 75th Venice film festival, buzz around the festival had less to do with its stellar lineup (arguably the most promising...
The Frame as a Border: Defining Cinema’s Political Territories at the 56th Viennale Maria Giovanna Vagenas December 2018 Festival Reports In mid-October, slender, elegant pink flamingos appeared on the walls of buildings in the monumental and austere centre of the Austrian capital, annou...
“Reality” as Embattled Story: Donbass in Odesa and Their Own Republic at Doclisboa Carmen Gray December 2018 Festival Reports 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 – w...
Thin Air, Long Lines: 45th Telluride Film Festival Maria San Filippo December 2018 Festival Reports This will not be a typical festival review, in that it will not offer in-depth commentary – or even a “best of” roundup – on a sizable selection of wh...
A Time of Reckoning? The 53rd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Cerise Howard October 2018 Festival Reports This year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) was always going to have a lot to address. For Czechs (and Slovaks), 2018 is a year overl...
Showcasing a Myriad of Landscapes and Cityscapes: The Odessa International Film Festival Giuliano Vivaldi October 2018 Festival Reports Odessa boasts an impressive although often overlooked film history and the idea of staging Ukraine’s major international festival in this city is cert...
The Hope for Fissures: the Night Sight Program at the Crossing Europe Film Festival Dennis Vetter October 2018 Festival Reports “It's a cutthroat world.” Such is the slogan that justifies the first murder of a woman in Alice Lowe's slasher film Prevenge (2016). The victim is an...
Marty Finally Comes to Bologna: Cinema Ritrovato XXXII Peter Hourigan October 2018 Festival Reports It was not the typical balmy Bolognese summer’s night – I was grateful for a pullover – but the Piazza Maggiore was more crowded than I can remember f...
Taking a Chance on Film: 21st Revelation Perth International Film Festival David Morgan-Brown September 2018 Festival Reports For folks in the second most isolated capital city in the world, the Revelation Perth International Film Festival (affectionately abbreviated to Rev) ...
Cold Wars: The 2018 Cannes Film Festival Daniel Fairfax June 2018 Festival Reports “Think with your hands.” Godard’s pronouncement – which the attentive viewer may have heard spring from his mouth two or three times before – opens Le...
Breaking Down Borders in the Midwest: True/False 2018 Jordan M. Smith June 2018 Festival Reports When looking at a map it’s hard to fathom the success of the True/False Film Festival, a four day celebration – in every sense of the word, with live ...