The Tokyo International Film Festival is having something of an identity crisis. This year saw the arrival of Yasushi Shiina as the festival’s Director General. He acknowledged that the festival faced a list of problems. Chief amongst them is that despite it being the 26th year of the event, it hardly registers a blip on the overcrowded film festival calendar. “What I think is my job is that we tell the world that the Tokyo Film Festival exists in Japan and we let the world know that,” Shiina said. “We don’t want to be isolated.” He cited a number of problems […]

The Busan International Film Festival saw the launch of Screen X, a cinema technology that promises to offer audiences an immersive cinematic experience without the need to wear glasses. The South Korean company behind the technology, CJ CGV Screen X, owns the CGV cinema chain and currently operates one American location in Los Angeles. To showcase the technology, CJ CGV Screen X commissioned The Good, The Bad, The Weird director Kim Jee-Woon to make The X. Ostensibly a spy thriller, it’s really just an excuse to show off the technology that augments the action on screen, by projecting images onto […]

Douglas Trumbull has been behind some of cinemas most spectacular special effects. His impressive C.V. includes working on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner and most recently Tree of Life. He also directed Silent Running in 1972 and Brainstorm in 1983, most remembered as the final film appearance of Natalie Wood. He has also been one of cinema’s great pioneers, always pushing technology to its limit, whether that be designing films for World Fairs, making rides for Universal and Luxor Hotels, or simply backing new technologies such as IMAX. Never standing still, the self-proclaimed […]

Everyone knows Rome wasn’t built in a day. So to expect the former Venice Film Festival artistic director Marco Mueller to transform the fortunes of Rome’s film fest within eight months of taking the job would have been unfair. The event this year was about building foundation stones for the future, shaping an event and identity that would have the film world believing that all roads lead to Rome. It’s the seventh year that the Eternal City has been hosting a film festival and the hope that it would become the leading festival in Europe’s packed autumn festival season has […]