Darkness falls around 4 p.m. every day in late November when you’re as far north as Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, whose annual Black Nights (PÖFF) nods to the presiding nocturnal mood. Most of the winter light is up on screen, where the festival’s vast programming unspools across 17 days that also are chock full with industry forums and meet-ups. A city of some 400,000 that feels like a village, the Tallinn most visitors experience divvies up between its tourist-speckled Old Town, whose medieval bonafides are rooted as far back as 1154, and the modern design/tech neighborhood Teleskivi, with acres […]
by Steve Dollar on Jan 14, 2020Cinephiles looking to cook up a zesty decade recap of the best in American indie film could have taken a Polish holiday this fall and landed in the eastern European cultural capital of Wroclaw for the 10th annual American Film Festival. The intensive marathon nods to red-white-and-blue archetypes in branding, which makes festival avatars of such staples of American mythology as motorcycle cops, 18-wheelers, Afro-sporting disco queens, football running backs, astronauts and desperadoes. Its mission, however, is at once more incisive and expansive than all that apple-pie iconography, distilling highlights and discoveries from the year’s major U.S. film gatherings, sprinkled […]
by Steve Dollar on Dec 30, 2019This was the year Cameraimage brought it all back home. The much-vaunted Polish cinematography festival, which launched in 1993 in Toruń—a UNESCO World Heritage site whose history dates back to the 8th century—returned to its native soil after two decades away (first in Łódź, the industrial locus so close to David Lynch’s heart and host to the national film school, and for the last nine years in Bydgoszcz). The homecoming inspired a comical short starring two of the festival’s best-loved regulars on a mission to “save” Cameraimage, with the wiry and wild-haired Chris Doyle wheeling Ed Lachman, signature fedora firmly […]
by Steve Dollar on Dec 19, 2019After Hurricane Katrina turned New Orleans into a wasteland, visiting film and television productions looked further north for their Louisiana gothic vibes. Over the years, the riverfront city of Shreveport, with a population of some 260,000 (including the adjacent Bossier City), has been a popular location, the backdrop for supernatural thrillers (The Mist, the series Salem), multiple actioners (Shark Night 3D, The Mechanic), comedies (Super, I Love You Phillip Morris) and everything Nic Cage (Drive Angry, Trespass, Season of the Witch). There’s been a lot less such activity in recent years, as the Crescent City got back on its feet […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 14, 2019Every year, the Camden International Film Festival manages a nifty magic trick. Its ambition swells within the concise duration of what amounts to a holiday weekend (if the second Friday of September was deemed, say, National Non-Fiction Day), with the same handful of venues, including two opera houses and a gorgeous vintage bijou, in three adjacent towns in northern seaside Maine. Marking its 15th year this September, CIFF–produced under the umbrella of the Points North Institute – consistently ups the stakes for filmmakers and audiences, without suffering from the dreaded festivalitis: the condition that arises when film festivals become all […]
by Steve Dollar on Sep 27, 2019Cinematic overdrive takes effect every summer for an 11-day spree at the New Horizon festival in Wroclaw, Poland, a “best-of” assortment of festival bangers from Rotterdam, Berlin, Cannes and elsewhere that also splinters into provocative sidebars, career retrospectives and funky late-night fare. The companion festival to fall’s American Film Festival likewise unspools at Kino Nowe Horyzonty (New Horizons), a contemporary multi-level nine-screen movie complex embedded in the city’s nightlife hub, well-designed as a life support system for cinephiles embarked on 14-hour immersive viewing sessions. (Which is to say, espresso and marvelous pastries are never far from reach). I’ve gotten to […]
by Steve Dollar on Aug 26, 2019Arriving back in New York, a city with which he is synonymous, Abel Ferrara has been popping up everywhere the past few weeks: from the Tribeca Film Festival, where his documentary The Projectionist had its world premiere, to the Museum of Modern Art, where a near-complete retrospective unspools a half-century of unruly cinema through May 30. The victory lap comes as the Bronx-born expatriate, who now lives contentedly in Rome, ushers a cluster of new work onto screens, including the long-delayed domestic release of Pasolini, starring Willem Dafoe as the radical Italian filmmaker and kindred spirit, as well as the […]
by Steve Dollar on May 18, 2019Blood and guts in high school is a theme that never loses its appeal to filmmakers, even as its universality—from Zero for Conduct to Heathers—demands greater risk and originality from filmmakers who, arguably more often than not, are recasting episodes from their own diaristic memory banks. This year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which wrapped up last week, served up a predictable share of films that fit into the coming-of-age category, yet the most notable of those efforts proved to be anything but cookie-cutter. The best film I saw at the festival, Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin, even felt like something brand […]
by Steve Dollar on May 13, 2019Now that every 10-year-old has a pocket-sized film studio and multiplex in their hands via the smartphone, and debates over the cinematic legitimacy of streaming platforms rage on, there’s a certain sweet nostalgia associated with dead formats of a less pixel-saturated age. VHS was perhaps the most physical—and vulnerable—of physical media: cheap plastic shells containing magnetic tape that could easily tangle in a faulty player. Yet, along with the camcorder, which likewise came into common use in the early 1980s, it has found a permanent niche in pop-culture consciousness that is, perhaps, greedy for a certain archival innocence—a throwback to […]
by Steve Dollar on May 7, 2019Few things at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM for short) felt more San Francisco than being at the packed-to-the-rafters Castro Theatre on Good Friday to cast one’s eyes recklessly into the image pool rippling across the 24-foot-high screen. The visuals belonged to Maya Deren, the mystical dynamo of American independent cinema, whose core of 16mm work (At Land, The Very Eye of Night, Ritual in Transfigured Time and Meshes of the Afternoon) is a motherlode of the avant-garde, and fervent evidence of a mid-century bohemia that bloomed on the West Coast, a legacy kept alive through outfits […]
by Steve Dollar on Apr 30, 2019