Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS? VIEWS FROM MARCH 2012’s THESSALONIKI DOC FEST
It’s the Greek moment. Again. Still. Thousands of years of civilization, and we’re still anxiously awaiting an epistle from Hellas! In the first hours after Sunday’s fraught second Parliamentary election of the year, few analysts are confident there won’t be a third election or that even the successful formation of a coalition government would last, or be able to withstand the growing force of the Euro-wide economic crisis. The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, also known as “Images of the 21st Century,” in its fourteenth year, took place in mid-March 2012, before the inconclusive May 6 elections had even been set. Here […]
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SEATTLE FILM FEST CLOSES ANOTHER SPRAWLING, MONTH-LONG AFFAIR WITH AWARDS
When you go to the Seattle International Film Festival, you hear often that it is the largest, most highly attended film festival in the United States. 460 Films! 25 Days! 70 Countries! 160,000 attendance! Bigger is better! However, as I learned during the dying days of this year’s event, what makes SIFF one of the country’s more interesting festivals isn’t its size per se. Sure, other than pre-Rutger Wolfson Rotterdam, I can’t think of a festival that has approached this level of sprawl. So one can with relative fleetness dispense with the “this is my grand theory of modern cinema in […]
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THE 2012 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH FILM FESTIVAL
The strength of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival is also its weakness. This year’s 23rd edition boasts 16 doc and fiction flicks from 12 countries – yet most fall firmly in the category of solid ITVS fare (in fact, only three are narrative features). Like with the agribusiness detailed in Micha X. Peled’s Bitter Seeds, about the epidemic of farmer suicides in India, variety is often an illusion – especially when U.S. or U.S. co-productions are in the majority. This is another way of saying that, yes, the chances of seeing a stinker at HRWFF are slim, but there’s […]
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12 Tips on Networking from the Cannes Film Festival
While the concept of dropping into the world’s largest film event and competing with 999 other short filmmakers for the industry’s attention may seem like a Survivor-like TV show, it’s the reality each year for participants in Cannes’ Short Film Corner. Many of the filmmakers who screen their works in the basement of the Palais are arriving in Cannes for the first time, and the event is a crash course in networking and navigating the business side of film markets. “You can get lost in a sea of films,” admits filmmaker Bradley Montesi (pictured here with producer Elle LaMont), attending […]
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THE SANTA CRUZ FILM FESTIVAL
The “Keep Santa Cruz Weird” campaign in the northern California city that’s been host to the Santa Cruz Film Festival for nearly a dozen years now seems more than a cheap ploy to sell bumper stickers (though the one that read “You’re just jealous because the voices are talking to me” probably captures the essence of the place even better). It’s a serious – and controversial – plea to retain a way of life. For Santa Cruz is nothing if not, well, weird. So exotic, in fact, that SCFF should probably qualify as a foreign film festival showcasing American flicks […]
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CANNES PRESIDENT ADDRESSES ABSENCE OF FEMALE DIRECTORS
In an interview published yesterday in The Guardian, Cannes Festival President Gilles Jacob addressed the issue of the 2012 edition’s lack of female directors in Competition, saying, “I am sure that next year the chief selector, Thierry Frémaux, will look more carefully to find films by women.” Countering critics, he said that the festival does aim for some sort of gender balance in its selections. “The job of feminists and of people like me who like the work of female film-makers is to say to [Frémaux]: ‘Are you sure there isn’t somewhere a film by a woman that deserves to […]
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“AMOUR,” “BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD” WIN AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
Michael Haneke picked up his second Palme d’Or in a row today when the Cannes jury awarded the Austrian director the festival’s top prize for Amour (pictured), his tale of an elderly couple dealing with the wife’s catastrophic health issues. The award was surprising only in its lack of surprise — while the preceding prizes had been unanticipated choices, Amour, to be released later this Fall by Sony Pictures Classics, was easily the consensus pick of critics and Competition viewers. In other awards, the Camera d’Or for Best First Film went to American independent Benh Zeitlin for his Beasts of […]
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AT CANNES: THE SUN SHINES AT THE WETTEST FESTIVAL
Is there anything worse than some other guy going on about the weather? When Angelenos extoll their perpetually sunny climes, it always feels a bit like a reproach to those who live anywhere else. Pacific Northwesterners discuss their persistent rain quietly, as if wearing some old war medal. But journalists in Cannes? What do readers feel when reading reports of how cold and soggy it is in the south of France? Sympathy? Schadenfreude? Or perhaps just disinterest? Despite my suspicion that it is the latter, I still have to go there because, yes, the rain has been the most notable […]
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Photos and Notes from the Maryland Film Festival
The Maryland Film Festival, which wrapped its 2012 edition on Sunday, is one of the East Coast’s most intimate and engaging film events. With 40 features, over 70 shorts and an amazingly healthy contingent of loyal filmmakers annually making the trip to Baltimore, Maryland functions as both a discovery festival and friendly pit stop for directors on the independent circuit. John Waters hosts a movie — this year Barbara Loden’s seminal and still influential Wanda — and takes the audience out partying afterwards; the Opening Night consists of shorts, not some star-bloated, sub-standard mini-major feature; and, for the second year […]
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Marks Elijah Rosenberg Talks Rooftop Films
As a writer and filmmaker just beginning to branch out into indie festival programming, I’ve been looking for an excuse to chat with Mark Elijah Rosenberg for quite some time. The man behind the granddaddy of open-air cinema (hard to believe Rooftop Films is now in its 16th year!) has seen his DIY endeavor expand from avant-garde shorts shown on a roof above his humble apartment to Academy Awards-destined features screened in diverse outdoor venues throughout NYC’s boroughs (and beyond). But what’s most impressive to me is that he’s managed to accomplish all this while staying firmly grounded in his […]
