Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Cannes 2024: Megalopolis
Now that Megalopolis has premiered, nothing has actually changed. The film is a self-consciously impractical act that few would care nearly as much about if it weren’t very publicly known to have cost $120 million of Francis Ford Coppola’s personal money. That’s the kind of extravagant gesture you don’t get to ever see on this scale, and hence destined to be praised for being willed into existence amidst a sea of algorithimically conceived risk-aversion—or, alternately, decried as a hubristic folly in the trades with a palpable subtext of “how dare he?” Megalopolis is praiseworthy for mostly predictable reasons: lavish eccentricity, […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 17, 2024 -
Cannes 2024: This Life of Mine, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
At dinner my first night at this year’s Cannes, a friend asked our waiter if this was his restaurant’s busiest time of year. Not even close; that would be MIPIM, “the world’s leading real estate market event,” taking place in March and drawing 26,000+ people—a number handily dwarfing the 13,000+ market attendees, plus assorted press and filmmakers, at last year’s festival. It was a useful perspective check: if Cannes is roundly conceded the status of world’s biggest film festival when all components are accounted for, that doesn’t mean too much in the global scheme of things, where cinema, as we […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 16, 2024 -
Jeonju 2024: Walker, A Chronicle in Spirals, Puan
“I’m so happy,” producer Park Tae-joon said at the Jeonju Cinema Project awards, one of the ceremonies indicating the festival was drawing to a close. “Every day I drank […] festival drinking.” Park’s admission was funny and honest, the kind of thing no one on-stage at an American festival would say even/especially if it were true (bad optics). But in fact, Jeonju was one of the most temperate festivals I’ve ever attended, with official parties ending by 10:30 or 11 and many choosing to go back and sleep after that. They could, if they liked, go to Soseul, unofficially dubbed […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 13, 2024 -
Jeonju 2024: Cinema Projects Past and Future
It’s not necessarily that, in a pathetic version of Henry Hill’s childhood desire to be a gangster, I’ve “always wanted to attend a pitch forum.” But I’ve admittedly been curious to see how this particular part of the festival-film apparatus works and never had ready access; impelled by both that and ties of friendship, I went on my third day at this year’s Jeonju International Film Festival to the Jeonju Cinema Project pitching panel. Fellow Filmmaker writer and pal Blake Williams was one of the seven projects—four Korean, three international, with one finalist selected from each category—selected to pitch at […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 9, 2024 -
AI, UHD and 35mm: Arbelos Films’ David Marriott on the Present and Future of Film Restoration
Launching in 2017 with a reissue of The Last Movie, Arbelos Films grew out of co-founders’ David Marriott, Dennis Bartok, Craig Rogers and Ei Toshinari’s experiences working at Cinelicious Pics. Since then, their slate of reissues have included Sátántangó, whose restoration opened up a relationship with the Hungarian National Film Archive that’s led to further Hungarian films being put out by the company, including Son of the White Mare and Twilight. In addition to Arbelos, Marriott has now started a second company with Jonathan Doyle, Canadian International Pictures, specifically focused on his native country’s cinema. Invited to the Jeonju International […]
by Vadim Rizov on May 7, 2024 -
Visions du Réel 2024: The American Way and Other Options
Having living abroad for 19 years, music critic Philip Sherburne recently described the culture shock of returning home and trying to navigate an American supermarket: “the self-checkout machine accuses me of stealing and runs back video of me while calling for an employee to come intervene. Every time you turn around, it seems like a corporation is trying to screw you out of yet more money via another hidden fee. It’s no wonder Americans seem pissed off all the time. It’s a fundamentally hostile environment.” For me, some of the fun of attending Visions du Réel, a Swiss festival focused […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 24, 2024 -
“With a Documentary, It’s More Difficult to Find Humor”: Martín Rejtman on Riders
A decade ago, I interviewed Argentinian filmmaker Martín Rejtman for an hour, walking through the general scope of his career before discussing his then-most-recent feature, Two Shots Fired, which may help flesh out the parts of this interview relating to his first feature, Rapado. Rejtman’s new film, Riders, is only his second documentary. As I wrote in my dispatch on Visions du Réel 2024, where the film premiered, Riders kicks off in May 2020, with extended global lockdown fatigue ramping up; after an opening rally of delivery drivers protesting their horrible conditions (“It is inadmissable to normalize the bodies of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 24, 2024 -
Fluid(s) Filmmaking: Lance Oppenheim and Daniel Garber on Spermworld
Like Lance Oppenheim‘s first feature, 2020’s Some Kind of Heaven, his follow-up Spermworld follows three nonfiction protagonists through a niche American context. Heaven focused on three residents of The Villages, a retirement community in Florida that’s the largest in the world, through cleanly composed, academy-ratio images of seniors who’ve self-selected to live in something like Back to the Future’s ’50s backlot suburbia writ large. Per its title and subject, Spermworld is a grimier follow-up in the wider 2.1 ratio, all sickly blue and green colors and degraded frame edges, following three main sperm donor subjects who tell themselves different stories about […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 29, 2024 -
“Nine Pages a Day of Heavy Dialogue”: Bob Byington and David Krumholtz on Lousy Carter
In 2012, Bob Byington won a Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival for Somebody Up There Likes Me; last year, he returned with Lousy Carter. Writing about the festival, I said of the film: Introducing Bob Byington’s Lousy Carter alongside the writer-director, star David Krumholtz preemptively noted that while the film was shot and is set there, “Whatever you think of Texas, its politics have nothing to do with the film.” The disclaimer is accurate—this is another of Byington’s immaculately mean comedies with an underlying sentimental streak, a blend he’s been iterating with various degrees of sharpness for […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 28, 2024 -
True/False Film Fest 2024: Creative Subjects
“Are you getting what you want, bitch?” Philly Abe, the focus of Elizabeth Nichols’s Flying Lessons, repeatedly offers similarly styled examples of “director-subject negotiations,” in which the latter grumbles before giving the former what they want, now with the added gift of self-reflexive dramatic tension. Director-subject relations are currently an especially fashionable topic (cf. the recent, clearly-titled film Subject); at this year’s True/False Film Fest, Flying Lessons provided its most interesting treatment. Abe is presented first as a representative of a vibrant and unprofessionalized ’80s downtown NYC arts scene but has an equally important relationship to the filmmaker, whose presence […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 20, 2024
