Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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International Film Festival Rotterdam 2020: The Gaze of the Old Filmmaker
Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? — William Blake As one of the centerpiece programs at the 49th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), “The Tyger Burns” was a canny display of un-hipness. What a joy it was to pay repeated witness to such a mammoth series of movies so gleefully, so wilfully out of touch. What better way to undercut the widespread love of emerging voices, new talents and young geniuses than to turn to aging, even senile artists who have either fallen […]
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Sundance 2020 Final Dispatch: Softie, Farewell Amor, A Machine for Viewing, Infinitely Yours
Previously, when attending a premiere heavy festival like Sundance, I was usually lucky enough to be present as part of a team of programmers. We divided the screenings between all of us to cover as many of the films as possible. (There are spreadsheets and rating systems involved.) Watching films as a freelancer, I realized over the first few days at Sundance that I was playing it safe by watching films by filmmakers I was already familiar with for the guarantee that at least the film would appear finished at the screening. For programmers working at festivals like Sundance, what […]
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Looking for the New at the 2020 Sundance New Frontier
Like couture as the harbinger of everyday fashion, Sundance positions New Frontier — New Frontier at the Ray, New Frontier Central and the Biodigital Theatre — as the pilot showcase for what is coming down the pike for moving-image storytellers (a likely justification for programming what only relatively few people wearing headsets can experience at a film festival, which, by definition, caters to large audiences). Begun in 2007 with art installations, Sundance’s New Frontier shifted in 2012 with Nonny de la Pena’s Virtual Reality Hunger in Los Angeles, and now the exhibition portion of NF exclusively shows new technologies. I […]
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True/False Film Fest Announces 2020 Lineup
The lineup is out for this year’s True/False Film Fest, running March 5 to 9. Find the full list below (including this year’s Neither/Nor retrospective sidebar, focusing on Missouri born and raised filmmakers, and a retrospective for True Vision honorees Bill and Turner Ross) along with links to trailers and some previous coverage of a few directors from our end. All descriptions from the festival. 45365 Dir. Bill & Turner Ross; 2009; 94 min. An ode to the colors and characters of small-town Americana, True Vision honorees Bill and Turner Ross’ debut is a sweeping portrait of their birthplace, Sidney, […]
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“Power and Organizational Pressure Win Over Logic”: Kazuo Hara on Reiwa Uprising at Rotterdam 2020
Kazuo Hara has always aligned himself with the political left, but it was nevertheless surprising to hear about his latest film, Reiwa Uprising, which depicts the ascent of Japan’s newest left-wing political party, Reiwa Shinsengumi, from grassroots agitators to seated parliamentarians during the 2019 election. It is not unusual for Hara, best known for Extreme Private Eros (1974) and The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987), to take almost a decade or even longer between films, yet Reiwa Uprising follows Sennan Asbestos Disaster by just two years. That expedited time to completion was largely out of necessity: Reiwa Shinsengumi was […]
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“Can’t Tell That to the Landlord”: Abel Ferrara on The Projectionist, Tommasso and Crack City Terminator
Abel Ferrara is a hurricane. And like a hurricane, it is close to impossible to anticipate where he’s going to go at any given time. More than that, any hope of influencing the outcome of either is well beyond the limits of human control. Admirers with the good fortune to spend some time with the man can attest that getting Ferrara to stick to the script is largely a fool’s errand. In my case, it was because he had two new movies (The Projectionist, Tommasso) playing at consecutive festivals (Doclisboa, the Viennale) I happened to attend. At a certain point […]
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“Sometimes Directing is Not Saying Anything and Just Putting Vodka Shots in Front of People”: Luis López Carrasco on El Año del Descubrimiento at Rotterdam 2020
At a festival as big as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, early screenings are essentially shots in the dark. There is no buzz yet, and most films have little written about them or are by filmmakers whose previous works have received relatively little exposure. I opted on the second day to give Luis López Carrasco’s El Año del Descubrimiento a shot partly because I had heard of his previous feature, El Futuro, but mostly because its 200-minute runtime helped it to stand out amid a slate of films I knew next to nothing about. From the very beginning, its use […]
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Viennale 2019: Liberation and Squalor
I had been waiting years to see Sílvia das Fadas’ movies. Whatever the circumstance, I knew it would be a waiting game. By implicitly “limiting” her audience in only showcasing the work in 16mm, Fadas gives her movies a second life. She puts the brakes on the consumption machine. Perhaps fewer people will see them. Perhaps. “Accessibility” itself is a vague, even dubious premise in a rarefied festival world dominated by powerful distributors with the means to withhold movies for different audiences at will. For many of those with the desire to seek out her movies, the individual films, in […]
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To the Mauna: the 39th Hawai’i International Film Festival
Attendees of this year’s Hawai’i International Film Festival enjoyed the organization’s usual blend of contemporary world cinema, Hollywood Oscar bait, gala celebrations and various other initiatives, but it was events off the screen—and the festival’s response to them—that made 2019 a year to remember for many. The re-emergence of a powerful indigenous cultural movement, fueled by the fight against the proposed Thirty Mile Telescope on the Big Island’s Mauna Kea mountain and similar native land-rights issues on Oahu (HIFF’s home base), was the talk of the community when the festival took place in November and lent a different kind of […]
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Sundance 2020 Dispatch 9: Dick Johnson is Dead, Tesla
I don’t have anything like Six Takeaways From This Year’s Sundance to structure my final dispatch: The most I can offer is my general peer group’s consensus that the fiction side was relatively quiet while nonfiction work was stronger and more attention-getting, including the four-film launch of Concordia Studio. They arrived with, among others, my personal best-of-fest Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets and Time, and ended their first Sundance with the (reported) $12 million sale of verité doc Boys State to Apple and A24. Also high on the nonfiction priorities list, via Netflix, was Kirsten Johnson’s Dick Johnson is Dead, which premiered with the director […]
