Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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15 Films and Programs to Anticipate at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival kicks off today, a hybrid event that combines last year’s digital platform with in-person screenings for vaccinated viewers. (Just two days ago Canada’s Border Agency announced that fully vaxxed international visitors do not need to quarantine upon arrival.) The festival boasts about 100 films, roughly double last year’s selection but still much less than a normal year. That said, film historians will look at this ’21 edition to see what imprint the pandemic has made upon the films themselves. As our list of picks below indicates, a large number of films traveling to the festival […]
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Critic’s Notebook: The 2021 Fantasia International Film Festival
Long before “fantastic cinema” became a thing, Montreal’s Fantasia already was an institution. The grand-peré of North American genre film festivals marked its 25th edition this summer, its second in this nervous and conflicted new age of hybrid online/IRL presentations, and despite the obstacles and anxieties inherent in such, the event as ever stuck to its fundamental mission. Montreal was founded by Catholic missionaries 1642, but the festival’s lower-case catholic taste is its strong suit. Even while checking off all the boxes – Russian Screen Life freakouts (#Blue_Whale), Japanese stop-motion cyber-horror (Junk Head), revivals of obscure Swiss mid-60s spy thrillers […]
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U.S. and Canada in Progress Program Extends Work-in-Progress Deadline to September 17
U.S. and Canada in Progress, the event taking place during Wroclaw’s American Film Festival each November, has extended its submission deadline for American and Canadian independent filmmakers with works-in-progress seeking post-production support to September 17. The program offers selected American and Canadian projects in final production stages European sales agents, distributors, and festival programmers) and partnering Polish top post-production companies (including Fixafilm, Orka Studio, Soundflower, XANF). In-kind services valued at $40,000 will be awarded, and the Polish Film Institute additionally offers a prize of $10,000 in Polish post-production services. There’s no fee to apply, and submission details can be found […]
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“The Cinema Needs Video”: Yuri Ancarani on Venice 2021 Premiere Atlantide
Director and documentarian Yuri Ancarani carries significant reputation and exposure in the art world—he is arguably vaunted there more than in cinema—but his recent Venice premiere Atlantide unexpectedly evokes some unlikely multiplex-oriented fare. As more audiences and critics see this work, will comparisons reign towards Michael Mann’s irrepressible Miami Vice from 2006? What about—of all things—the Fast and the Furious franchise? There are little streets and tarmac in Atlantide’s observation of the Venetian lagoon, so the disaffected local adolescents must channel their energy (and indirectly, their sexuality) into pulsating barchino (speedboat) races—and we all know about the proportionate relationship between motorsports […]
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Venice Film Festival 2021 Critic’s Notebook: Parallel Mothers, Il Buco and The Cathedral
In a tender moment in Pedro Almodóvar’s Parallel Mothers, the opener of this year’s Venice Film Festival, the older of the eponymous mothers teaches the other how to peel potatoes while wearing a t-shirt that says “We Should All Be Feminists.” Since Janis (Penélope Cruz) is at the cusp of middle age, whereas Ana (Milena Smit) has only just turned 18, there’s a suggestion of baton-passing in this Jeanne Dielman reference. One wonders, then, what Chantal Akerman might have thought of the scene in which Ana relates, with a casualness pitched ambiguously between PTSD and nonchalance, that her pregnancy was […]
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Venice Film Festival Critic’s Notebook 2021: Dune and The Card Counter (An Oscar Isaac Double Feature)
Two of this year’s high-profile Venice premieres, Dune and The Card Counter, are auteurist works recognizable by multiple of their makers’ signatures. Both star Oscar Isaac and arrive as pandemic-affected productions that (try to) bear no trace of that circumstance. Dune finished principal photography before COVID-19’s global spread, while The Card Counter was 3/4 of the way through production when it hit; Isaac completed its rescheduled remainder before flying to Hungary for Dune reshoots. Optimistically subtitled Part I (this covers the first of the novel’s three volumes)*, Dune arrives with the unplanned burden of attempting to make the case for the Big Screen Experience—Denis Villeneuve’s been very […]
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Cinema is Back (?): Locarno Film Festival 2021
In light of the ongoing pandemic and, more pertinently, its repercussions on the public screening of films, weighing in on a festival in any peremptory way might be trickier than ever. This year’s Locarno Film Festival, which returned to its physical form after last year’s hiatus, is a case in point. If the mere fact of being once again able to enjoy a film in the safely distanced and masked company of dispassionate strangers is cause for celebration, the work can still be indigestibly lousy even under these jubilant circumstances. The relative joy and definite privilege of being able to […]
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“A Deteriorating Mind Condemned to Hell…”: Sadri Cetinkaya on Fantasia Doc Lost Boys
I first encountered Joonas Neuvonen’s Lost Boys, a sort of “unintended sequel” to 2010’s spectacular look at self-destructive Subutex addicts in rural Finland, Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland – which was co-written and edited by Lost Boys co-director Sadri Cetinkaya – at this year’s virtual CPH:DOX. At the time I tried but failed to take notes while watching. The film just got under my skin in a way that froze me to my laptop screen. Atmospherically, Neuvonen’s decade-later doc brought to mind the sensation of being trapped inside a Nine Inch Nails video. Memorably narrated by Pekka Strang (Tom of Finland), Lost Boys picks up where Reindeerspotting left off: After […]
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The Camden International Film Festival Announces Its 2021 Hybrid Edition Lineup
The Camden International Film Festival announced today the features and shorts comprising its 2021 edition. The festival’s in-person component will take place September 16 – 19 at venues in Camden and Rockland, Maine while an online edition will stream for North American audiences from September 16 – 26. Thirty-seven features and 33 shorts from 30 countries will be presented, with just over half — 52% — directed or co-directed by POC directors. Women directed or co-directed 57% of the titles. Liz Garbus’s National Geographic Documentary Films production Becoming Cousteau will open the festival while Flee, a NEON release that won […]
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“We Edited the Film in a Sort of Circle – Without the Credits It Could Even Be Played in a Loop”: Tea Lukač on Her Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Debut Roots
Premiering in the East of the West Competition at this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (August 20-28), Roots is an unexpected documentary gem from filmmaker and video artist Tea Lukač. Through striking cinematography and the simplest of concepts the Serbian director takes us on a journey to present-day Dvor, the Croatian town that Lukač and her family fled when war came and she was just six years old. Intriguingly, we get to know the rural locale not through travelogue but through the back seat of a moving car, where seven distinct stories unfold via passengers of ascending age. Costumed […]
