Authors — Vadim Rizov
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“Dis/Oriented”: Arguing with Chung Kuo China Through Dance
Ten minutes before Yin Mei’s “Dis/Oriented: Antonioni In China” kicked off at New York’s Asia Society on Sunday, a woman two seats to the right of me pulled out a hard-boiled egg and ate it as sustenance for the long journey ahead. “I wanted to see the film,” the egg eater complained to her friend, explaining why she’d bought a confused ticket without realizing the nature of the event, “but now it’s too late.” I had to wonder how many people had shown up thinking they were going to see the film rather than “a dance theater ‘conversation’ with the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 18, 2013 -
True/False Film Festival
At the end of introducing their film Detropia at the 9th annual True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Mo., Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady directed compliments for the documentary festival at their peers. “It’s so great to hang out with all you filmmakers outside the environment of Sundance,” they noted, “which is kind of a pressure cooker.” SXSW got invoked even more; Janet Pierson’s name was frequently mentioned over the four days as directors swapped notes over their next stop there. It’s clear that True/False’s boons for festival-circuit-weary press and directors alike include the lack of film-affiliated publicists, barely visible industry […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 17, 2012 -
TRUE/FALSE DISPATCH, PART 2
In its ninth year, the True/False Film Festival sold over 37,000 tickets. This is my third year attending, but no serious growing pains have been felt with the increasing numbers of first-time attendees: screenings start on time, it’s not overwhelmingly difficult to get into anything if you have an advance ticket, and the programming is unusually trustworthy. (If anything, True/False has a terrific track record of exhuming gems lost in the festival cycle; it’s a good doc fest-of-fests, but a great festival for discovery.) The festival encourages/lubricates sociability without distracting from daily film-watching. This year seemed special even by the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 8, 2012 -
TRUE/FALSE 2012, PART ONE
Film festivals encourage connecting dots that don’t necessarily exist, a logical by-product of seeing four films a day. In covering this year’s installment of Columbia, Missouri’s True/False Film Festival (a lovely documentary festival whose actual atmosphere I’ll discuss in the next post), I’d like to accordingly divide the films into two broad categories. In the second post, I’ll talk about (very loosely/speciously categorized) personal, dewy stories of love; in this initial dispatch, I’d like to discuss films which look at lives regulated by top-down political decisions and climates. The most obvious example is Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s staggeringly well-controlled Abendland (“evening land”), […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 4, 2012
