Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Freezing Filmgoing in Tromsø and the Phenomenon of Site-Specific Cinema
The Tromsø International Film Festival has always pushed the boundary when it comes to open-air cinema. The only international film festival that takes place in the Arctic Circle has a Winter Cinema, an open-air cinema with sofas positioned on top of the snow in front of a large screen with picturesque hilltops on the horizon. Most of the program is made up of short films made for children that play in the dark afternoons, but this year Festival Director Martha Otto put on a late-night screening of Dead Snow to boot. It added a new challenge for the audience, to […]
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“I Jumped on a Running Train:” Interim Artistic Director Mart Dominicus on Rotterdam 2014
The Artistic Director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam since 2008, Rutger Wolfson had begun work on this year’s edition of the festival, the 43rd, when fate interceded. In November, Wolfson was hospitalized with a rare autoimmune disease. (Happily, he is expected to make a full recovery.) With the festival two months away from its starting date, Mart Dominicus — a lecturer at the Netherlands Film Academy, a screenplay and editing coach, and a member of the festival’s Supervisory Board since 2010 — stepped in to become Artistic Director for this year’s festival. At the festival’s end, Filmmaker sat down […]
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True/False Film Fest Announces Innovative “Pay the Artists!” Program
Today, the True/False Film Fest‘s Paul Sturtz and David Wilson announced the launch of their organization’s innovative (and highly laudable) “Pay the Artists!” program. The heads of the 10-year-old Columbia, MO-based festival (which runs February 27 – March 2), initiated the patronage program as a way of helping to sustain the documentary film ecosystem, and this year will be offering $450 to the filmmaking teams who attend the festival. (T/F already covers travel, accommodation and food expenses.) It is Sturtz and Wilson’s hope that in the next few years, this amount will increase to $1,000. There has long been a […]
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At Rotterdam, Cinema’s Components Stretched
The International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) prides itself on being devoutly non-mainstream and an unabashed patron of independent cinema. Now, “independent” doesn’t necessarily mean “good” (something the Rotterdam programmers would do well to realize). However, it does let one explore work that exists on the fringes of conventional formats, be it artistically or technically. As it happens, I saw two films at the festival — within 12 hours of each other — that challenged the norms of a movie and its components. The resulting juxtaposition left me quite intrigued by the experiments undertaken, and whether there was some method to […]
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Caveh Zahedi’s CineMart Diary
Filmmaker Caveh Zahedi attended the 2014 International Film Festival Rotterdam CineMart with a film seeking financing: The Sky is Blue Like an Orange, about the artist Joseph Cornell. For three days he and screenwriter Arnold Barkus met with assorted financiers. Zahedi’s diary is below. December 10, 2013 I receive an email informing us that our project about the artist Joseph Cornell’s relationship with a waitress in the early ’60s, has been accepted to Cinemart. January 21, 2014 We receive our list of meeting requests. We have 37 meetings scheduled over a three-day period. The last time I was at Cinemart […]
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Eastern Oregon Film Festival 2014 to Host Filmmaker Showcase
The Eastern Oregon Film Festival, which runs from February 20 to 22 in La Grande, OR, is one of those great regional film festivals that you feel lucky to stumble upon. Brandon Harris attended EOFF last year and called it a “hidden gem” in his report. This year, co-director of programming Ian Clark, who was one of our “25 New Faces” back in 2012, graciously invited Filmmaker to program a showcase, which will feature Eddie Mullins’ droll slacker comedy Doomsdays (a 2013 Best Film Not Playing selection) and “Qasim,” the latest episode from High Maintenance by our 2013 “New Faces” Katja Blichfeld […]
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SXSW Releases 2014 Features Lineup
Here we go. Unlike many other major festivals who favor an incremental approach, South by Southwest unloads 115 films from their extensive lineup (barring the midnight and shorts selections) in one fell swoop, so there’s plenty to parse through here. 68 of the featured films are directorial debuts, a number of which can be found in the Visions section, which housed my favorite discovery from last year’s festival: Petra Costa’s Elena. That’s not to say there aren’t a few familiar faces: Lawrence Michael Levine’s Wild Canaries will premiere in the Narrative Competition, while Festival Favorites boasts Sundance selections from a bevy of […]
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Rotterdam Announces the 2014 CineMart Awards
The International Film Festival Rotterdam tonight announced the winners of its 2014 CineMart Awards. A feature project about the youth generation following the war in Bosnia and an Italian-French co-production setting personal stories in North-East Italy picked up the two top prizes, while three projects received €10,000 grants funded by the Global Film Initiative. Winning the Eurimages Co-Production Development Award for the best CineMart 2014 project with a European partner was Tabija, Igor Drljaco (Bosnia and Herzegovina), a production of SCCA/pro.ba. Said the jury in a statement, “This is a project with great urgency developed by a young team, in […]
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Angular Visions: Vertical Cinema at Rotterdam
What would vertical cinema be like? It is a question that must have percolated in the minds of many a cinema enthusiast. After all, there is no rule decreeing that a film can be made only in horizontal format. But, of course, theaters, distributors and historical viewing practices have made us think of cinema in no other way. However, there could have been an alternate universe where films resembled portraits, not landscapes. At the 43rd International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), underway right now, delegates got a peek into that alternate universe through a special section called Vertical Cinema. A Sonic […]
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Park City Critic’s Notes #5: Short Shrift
There were movies. Some, like New York Times film critic (and my fellow SUNY Purchase Film alum) Manohla Dargis, said there were too many — even before she saw any of them. Sales, at least during the festival, weren’t robust; perhaps some of the weary execs, including a couple she overheard dishing on their inability to sit through American Hustle while in line for a theater, are taking her advice and sitting on their pocketbooks. Perhaps we’ll find some of these movies on VUDU or Seed&Spark or NoBudge. Maybe someone will tap an unexpected and unforeseen audience outside of the […]
