“What would you need from this event?” That was among the first questions Paul Harrill and I asked when we were invited to meet with Visit Knoxville in December 2022 to discuss the possibility of launching a new film festival. Keith McDaniel, founder and longtime organizer of the Knoxville Film Festival, had announced that he was stepping away from the fest after leading it for nearly two decades, bringing it to an end. If all of us on the Zoom meeting agreed this was a project worth taking on, then we needed to plant our flag by issuing a press […]
by Darren Hughes on Dec 15, 2023“It was a highly anticipated scene for me,” Hannah Gross told me with a laugh. “It’s just so absurd. For anyone who has a complicated relationship, spoken or unspoken, with a sibling, it’s the ideal scenario: to get to express your grievances through the safety of these voices.” I’d asked her about a memorable moment near the end of The Adults, Dustin Guy Defa’s follow-up to Person to Person (2017). Gross, Michael Cera and Sophia Lillis star as estranged siblings still reckoning with the death of their mother and still adjusting, unsuccessfully for the most part, to the disappointments of […]
by Darren Hughes on Jun 27, 2023Last year at the 2022 Berlinale I had the uncanny experience of watching Hito Steyerl’s documentary The Empty Center (Die leere Mitte, 1998) in a 75-seat theater hidden away beneath The Sony Center. If you’re unfamiliar with The Sony Center in Berlin, take a second to Google it, or think back to the sterile postmodern backdrops of Brian De Palma’s Passion, in which architect Helmut Jahn’s eight-building complex plays a prominent role. The Empty Center is, in part, about the obscene land grab that occurred after German reunification, when multinational corporations like Sony, Daimler-Benz and ABB swept in to stake […]
by Darren Hughes on Mar 29, 2023My favorite film of the Berlinale was Queens of the Qing Dynasty, Ashley McKenzie’s ambitious and otherworldly fantasia about a “queer friendship romance” between a suicidal young woman and a Chinese immigrant she meets while hospitalized. Inspired by two teenagers she befriended during the casting of her previous feature, Werewolf (2016), McKenzie first sketched out the central character, Star (Sarah Walker), whose everyday life is mediated by endless negotiations with social workers, doctors, guardians, landlords and the various bureaucracies that employ them. Star is aging out of child protective services and has been deemed unfit to live independently, so as […]
by Darren Hughes on Mar 22, 20222020 got off to a fine start. In February I made my first visit to the Berlinale, where I interviewed a couple of filmmakers and indulged in the competition lineup, a King Vidor retrospective and the 50th anniversary of Forum. Like all of my festival trips, I considered it a working vacation—a chance to see friends, explore a city and escape for a few days from my suburban, white-collar life. At the last press screening I attended, another critic asked if I was Italian before taking a seat a few feet away. Even in the cloistered environment of the festival, […]
by Darren Hughes on Feb 19, 2022On the shuttle from the airport into Berlin I snapped some pictures as we passed Brandenburg Gate, Victory Column and the Television Tower. My hotel was just a few blocks from Checkpoint Charlie, so several times a day, as I made my way to and from Potsdamer Platz, I would walk over the brick-drawn lines in the sidewalk that mark the former location of the Berlin Wall. East into west, west into east—that and a meal with friends at Stadtklause, the pub where Bruno S. would perform with his accordion, satisfied whatever interest I had in playing tourist. Except for […]
by Darren Hughes on Mar 3, 2020At the risk of being canceled, I’ll admit that in the days since I watched The Salt of Tears, I’ve found myself wondering, “Who will make films like this when Philippe Garrel is gone?” (The best answer I’ve heard so far: Louis Garrel.) By “this” I mean a stereotypically oh-so-French comedy with an existential bent. Or a season in the life of a dour-faced, impoverished young artist who beds every beautiful woman he meets and is too young and too myopic to realize he’s a gaping asshole. Or the story of a boy who loved, disappointed and mourns for his […]
by Darren Hughes on Feb 27, 2020Two days into my first trip to Berlin, I haven’t quite got my bearings yet—for the physical landscape of the fest or for the sprawling program, which includes more than 340 films from 71 countries. Along with being a milestone year for the Berlinale (the 70th), this is also the 50th anniversary of Forum, the festival’s program of boundary-pushing work, and the first edition under the co-leadership of Executive Director Mariette Rissenbeek and Artistic Director Carlo Chatrian. Rissenbeek joined the fest after nearly four decades in the German film industry; Chatrian moved to Berlin from Locarno, where he’d served in […]
by Darren Hughes on Feb 24, 2020In his introduction to “The Spying Thing,” a 20-title selection of espionage films that he curated with Gustavo Beck, long-time IFFR programmer Gerwin Tamsma goes back to the deep well of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and finds in it a timely new metaphor. Jimmy Stewart’s wheelchair-bound peeping tom is now a 21st-century government or multinational corporation, collecting data from his neighbors without their knowledge or consent, constrained only by the length of his lens (technology) and by the walls of his apartment (the pesky rule of law that governs democracies and capital). Grace Kelly’s wealthy socialite, then, is the […]
by Darren Hughes on Apr 2, 2019“My life is not what one would term heroic.” The narrator of Romina Paula’s second novel, August, returns to her home town in Patagonia to memorialize a childhood friend five years after his death. Emilia’s in her early 20s and has been living with her brother in Buenos Aires. She’s still in college; her boyfriend is in a band. Once back home, she reunites with the love of her youth, Julián, who is now a father, married, somewhat happily. Emilia’s a familiar character making familiar first steps into adulthood, but Paula heightens every sensation and plumbs every potential cliché for […]
by Darren Hughes on Feb 18, 2019