Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Berlinale 2015: Jafar Panahi, Promising Newcomers and the Decline of Terrence Malick
In the weeks leading up to this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the festival’s press office revealed an increasingly enticing succession of titles competing in its main slate, generating very high expectations. Somewhat incredibly, they were met. While the Berlinale’s Competition customarily offers a few good films amongst a lot of mediocrity, the trend was reversed this time around, with easily the most outstanding selection in recent memory. In an equally welcome turn, the prizes awarded by Darren Aronofsky’s jury fully reflected the program’s quality, rewarding the most deserving entries while confirming the Berlinale’s avidly nurtured reputation as the most politically […]
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Miami 2.0: Transmedia at FilmGate Interactive
Part conference, part festival – and packed with live events, workshops, parties, and even a “Tech Playground” – FilmGate Interactive uniquely combines cutting edge storytelling with a laidback Miami Beach vibe. I must admit, after reading my colleague Randy Astle’s fascinating interview with FilmGate Interactive founder and executive director Diliana Alexander, my mind’s bar was set high for this young transmedia fest, but this three-year-old event still managed to exceed my expectations and then some. Along with an enthusiastic grassroots team, producer/programmer Alexander — a world traveling Bulgarian and recent Miami transplant — has an uncanny knack for making FilmGate […]
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The Raisers’ Edge: MoMA’s Transcendent “Documentary Fortnight”
Low and high art come to fruitful blows in the 14th edition of one of New York’s most substantive — and absurdly unsung — cinema exhibitions, the International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media, aka Documentary Fortnight (February 13-27). Low? For 120 years, film has been on the short end of the cultural totem pole, and host venue Museum of Modern Art has never made any bones about the distinction. In this case, however, the medium is infused with accomplished elements from other art forms ranking among the cognoscenti. Long before complementary fora like DOC NYC and the Film Society’s […]
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The 2015 True/False Film Fest Lineup
Here’s the 39-film strong main lineup of this year’s True/False Film Fest, the increasingly-prominent annual documentary festival (with room for what that means) that takes place in Columbia, Missouri. Our coverage begins when the festival does; this year it runs from March 5th-8th. Almost There (Aaron Wickenden, Dan Rybicky) — “Almost There is a coming-of-(old)-age story about 83-year-old Peter Anton, an “outsider” artist living in isolated and crippling conditions whose world changes when two filmmakers discover his work and storied past. Shot over eight years, Almost There documents Anton’s first major exhibition and how the controversy it generates forces him […]
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SXSW Announces 2015 Midnight and Shorts Lineups
On the heels of last week’s feature program announcement, SXSW has just released their selections for Midnighters and Shorts. In addition to several Sundance holdovers — including Jury Prize winners World of Tomorrow and Oh Lucy! — the several shorts programs feature new work from Leah Shore (HALLWAY), ornana (All Your Favorite Shows!), James M. Johnston (Melville), and DANIELS (Interesting Ball), as well as the latter’s very viral music video Turn Down For What. Find the full list of added features and shorts below. FEATURES MIDNIGHTERS Scary, funny, sexy, controversial – provocative after-dark features for night owls and the terminally curious. The Corpse of Anna Fritz (Spain) Director: […]
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“Awful!” vs. Applause: Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups
When it was announced late last year that Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups would be in competition at the 2015 Berlinale, many read this as a sign of hope – that the festival could still manage to snag a world premiere that most would assume was destined for Cannes. At the other end of the scale, there were those who, sight unseen, took this as confirmation that its unspooling here is a telltale sign that the film simply must be second-rate. That divide was as evident at the finale of Sunday’s press screening, where the first sound heard in the packed […]
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Previewing Berlinale 2015: Malick, Herzog, Panahi and More
Given that Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel kicked off the Berlinale the last two years, the response was less than enthusiastic when Isabel Coixet’s Nobody Wants the Night was announced as this year’s opening film (though, predictably, many a Twitter wag delighted in the film title’s pliability for expressing what it is that nobody wants). The Greenland-set period drama stars Juliette Binoche as Josephine, the wife of arctic explorer Robert Peary, and follows her attempt to rejoin her husband on his mission to reach the North Pole. When an Inuit woman comes to her aid on […]
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Rotterdam at 44, Volume #3: Then There Were Winners
Rotterdam #44 came and went with less fanfare than in the past. The Hivos Tiger Awards, the main competition’s top prizes, were given out to a trio of films Friday night. The winners — Carlos M. Quintela’s German-Cuban-Argentine co-production La Obra Del Siglo, Jakrawal Nilthamrong’s odd and dreamy Thai drama Vanishing Point and Juan Daniel F. Molero’s pomo comedia-tragedia Videophilia (and other Viral Syndromes) — each took home 15,000 euros. All three remain unseen by this critic, as does the FIPRESCI prize winner Battles, by Isabelle Tollenaere, the KNF Award winner Key House Mirror, by Michael Noer, and the IFFR Audience […]
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Sundance 2015, Dispatch 5: The Chinese Mayor, Cartel Land and City of Gold
The vast world of Chinese independent documentaries was finally acknowledged by Sundance with the inclusion of Zhou Hao’s The Chinese Mayor. That’s not to bag on the festival for an anomalous oversight: this exciting and politically urgent strain of films has been happening for 15 years or so but not often acknowledged by U.S. festivals at large. This is a very good starting point. The mayor of Datong, Geng Yanbo, confesses that he’s happiest with communing with China’s past, so it makes sense that he plans to revitalize the country’s most polluted city by restoring its ancient wall, part of […]
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The 2015 Slamdance Award Winners
Self-explanatory: here are this year’s Slamdance award winners, with descriptions provided by the festival and the respective juries for each category. Slamdance certainly wins some kind of prize for pragmatism in its awards; surely many films and filmmakers would love to receive $3,500 worth of legal services. AUDIENCE AWARDS Audience Award for Narrative Feature: Across the Sea, dir. by Nisan Dağ & Esra Saydam Damla is a Turkish immigrant estranged from her homeland; she lives in New York City with her husband, Kevin, and they’re expecting their first child. But Damla is still haunted by memories of her first love and […]
