Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE: A TORONTO 2012 PREVIEW
The optimist and the contrarian may find common ground in anticipation; to be a festivalgoer at the Toronto Film Festival is to be a bit of both. Particularly when preceded by negative reviews trickling out of earlier festivals in Cannes, Locarno, Venice and Berlin or less-than-enticing trailers, the debut of new work from filmmakers who have proven themselves capable of greatness can have cinephiles’ hearts in their throats. What if the hype is true, and your favorite living director is no longer creating essential work? Yet with reports of boos just might come a sneaking desire to go to that movie anyway. See […]
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TELLURIDE: MAVENS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
Over the years, many friends and colleagues had mentioned the cinephile haven that is Telluride, but I was either too busy or too far to make the trip to the mountain tops. Finally I caved in to the (positive) peer pressure and applied to be a volunteer for the 39th Telluride Film festival over Labor Day. The deal is simple: work 40 hours over 4 days and you will eat for free, see incredible films and probably get hooked for the rest of your life. Enticing. Telluride is not easy to get to: you will need multiple connecting flights, an […]
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Laura Poitras’s Spy Theater
There was a spooky feeling at the Whitney Biennial one Friday night this past April. Visitors to Laura Poitras’s “Surveillance Teach-In” were forcibly detained as they tried to enter the museum, while downstairs a masked man handed out leaflets with lists of addresses (NSA listening posts?), sinister in their nondescription. Slides flashed, of the anonymous desert buildings that house the servers that index our every email, phone call, transaction. And on the dais, an odd couple riffing one acronym after another: “NSA, NARIS, AES….” Hacker Jacob Appelbaum, black clad, with earrings, played something of a straight man, even as the […]
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Locarno Critic’s Notebook #3
Leviathan. You may have heard the title by now. By the time it screened to press, the film had already gained some momentous hype, and I’m pleased to report it does not disappoint. Often exhilarating, Véréna Peraval and Lucien Castaing-Taylor‘s creation is a unique viewing experience—loud, disorienting, frightening, exciting and visually awesome. The best film from the main competition, at the very least, Leviathan (above) offers the sort of sensory adventure that cinema can but rarely does offer. Using cheap GoPro digital cameras, the filmmakers show us images and perspectives we’ve never seen before. Apparently, Apichatpong Weerasethakul did not like […]
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LOCARNO CRITICS NOTEBOOK #2
Philosophical musings on the nature of time, an unlikely friendship between a sexy Cali chick and an elderly woman, a bizarrely fast-forwarded comical look at a very sad life, and an indictment of systemic oppression in China: these are the subjects of the four films from Locarno’s main competition (“Concorso internazionale”) that I’ve caught over the past few days. First on the docket is Peter Mettler’s intriguing but disappointing—relative to his other work, at least—The End of Time, an epic non-narrative film about the multitude of perspectives that render an objective definition of linear time meaningless. At times expressive and […]
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CHEMO INSTEAD OF GRASS
A rough road from the existential world to the sickie ward to the movie screen, dodging hungry demons and embracing cinematic gems, while maintaining a clear eye on the tall grass on the horizon. For several years, my life revolved around attending film festivals and screening movies and writing reviews. Then the bomb dropped. The C-bomb! Now I’m fighting cancer and enduring chemotherapy and struggling as a whacked-out Chemo Head. Unlike Speed Heads and Flop Heads and Crack Heads, whose chem-soaked brains are tightly wrapped around a single heat-seeking obsession and whose emotions are riveted to one Pavlov […]
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JUAN IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER: LATINBEAT AT FSLC
Solitude: It can come from choice, or by default. An unusual number of movies made across South and Central America over the past year have as a central theme the existential state of loneliness, be it operative or merely a hovering threat. In an umbrella culture that honors celebration, music, and gossip, being shunned, marginalized, or discarded is a declaration of non-being, a metaphoric death sentence. Does the stereotype of Latin Americans as gregarious, affable extroverts hold water? The annual Latinbeat exhibition at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (August 10-23), curated by Marcela Goglio and Richard Pena, measures the […]
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A QUICK SAIL THROUGH THE 21ST ANNUAL WOODS HOLE FILM FESTIVAL
Two days is not nearly enough time to cover the Woods Hole Film Festival, which started as a “one day, one hour” event over two decades ago, and now for eight days takes over this tiny idyllic town on the Cape, otherwise known for its world famous Oceanographic Institution, and where the moneyed can catch a ferry to Martha’s Vineyard. Luckily, I used my 48 hours wisely, hopping from venue to quaint venue – including the Lillie Auditorium at the Marine Biological Laboratory, the 120-seat Woods Hole Community Hall, and the 70-seat Old Woods Hole Fire Station – and taking […]
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THOU SHALT NOT WORSHIP FALSE GODS BEFORE ME: ISRAELIS, CHILDREN, AND THE 2012 JERUSALEM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
We learnt from Abraham that when it comes to the hierarchy between our children and God, God comes first…but this story, with all its profound meaning, has been lost and denied—for many understandable reasons-by contemporary Israeli culture…a fact that can be seen in two films I recently viewed at the 2012 Jerusalem International Film Festival. Dover Kosashvili’s new feature, Single Plus (above), tracks the story of a woman and her 35-year-old single daughter. The mother is so distraught by the fact that her daughter has not yet reproduced that she comes up with an outrageous ruse. The mother lies to […]
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LOCARNO CRITICS NOTEBOOK #1
The Locarno Film Festival has carved out a role for itself since Olivier Père took over three years ago, in which it offers the best of all festival worlds. Acting as perhaps the best cross-section of contemporary cinema—or something very close to it—available on the festival circuit, it has often been described as one of the true “cinephilic” fests. Additionally, in order to make this possible, Locarno still needs to be something of a hotspot, and the “glamor” that makes such a reputation possible is also a key component. However, Locarno manages to avoid being an industry-driven media frenzy like […]
