Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Berlinale 2022 Critic’s Notebook: Queens of the Qing Dynasty, Dry Ground Burning, Rewind and Play, Camouflage, Happer’s Comet, The Middle Ages
My favorite film of the Berlinale was Queens of the Qing Dynasty, Ashley McKenzie’s ambitious and otherworldly fantasia about a “queer friendship romance” between a suicidal young woman and a Chinese immigrant she meets while hospitalized. Inspired by two teenagers she befriended during the casting of her previous feature, Werewolf (2016), McKenzie first sketched out the central character, Star (Sarah Walker), whose everyday life is mediated by endless negotiations with social workers, doctors, guardians, landlords and the various bureaucracies that employ them. Star is aging out of child protective services and has been deemed unfit to live independently, so as […]
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True/False 2022: Reconvening
One of my favorite memories of attending a decade-plus of True/False is from the 2015 edition of the now-defunct Neither/Nor sidebar, annually dedicated to a small retrospective with accompanying monograph. A selection of unknown-to-me Polish cinema programmed by Ela Bittencourt structured that year’s on-the-ground experience from my first screening, Marcel Łoziński’s 1981 How to Live, as hilarious as promised by its description: “In the 1970s, young Polish couple [sic] attend a government-sponsored summer camp where they learn to become the ideal communist family.” The sidebar produced a number of related beguiling sights, not least the now very senior filmmakers in attendance […]
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Unsparing and Risky Visions: The 2022 First Look Festival
Although its current edition overlaps the waning days of industry monolith SXSW, the Museum of the Moving Image’s annual international showcase First Look originally really was the first look. A scarce few days into the new year, New Yorkers had the opportunity to sample stateside premieres of often boundary-fuzzing selections from the global festival circuit, kicking off the next round of the same even ahead of Sundance, which it could hardly resemble less. The timing has shifted since the festival’s launch in 2011, under now-New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim, but if anything the mission has become more […]
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DIY Photogrammetry: Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner on Constant
One of the highlights of this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, Sasha Litvintseva and Beny Wagner’s 40-minute not-quite-documentary Constant considers how the meter was standardized. It’s a topic that sounds drawn from one of the numerous popular history bestsellers of the last few decades explaining how some obscure topic is actually the key to understanding how the modern world came to be—and, indeed, one of the three source texts Constant credits is Ken Adler’s The Measure of All Things, which tells the story of the codification of the metric system. That story, however, is wild, involving in part a seven-year, on-foot journey undertaken by […]
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I Love My Dad, Master of Light Win Top Feature Prizes at SXSW
At its live awards ceremony SXSW announced tonight the jury and special award winners of the 29th annual SXSW Film Festival. James Morosini’s I Love My Dad — starring the writer/director along with Patton Oswald — won the Narrative Feature Competition, and Rosa Ruth Boesten’s documentary about painter George Anthony Morton, Master of Light, won the Documentary Feature Competition. Other notable winners include Iliana Sosa, a Filmmaker 25 New Face whose What We Leave Behind won two awards: The Fandor New Voices Award and the Louis Black Lone Star Award. Films will continue to be available on the SXSW platform […]
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Watch: MoMI’s Trailer for the 2022 First Look Festival
With the 2022 edition of Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look festival beginning on Wednesday, the series has just dropped a trailer — a brisk 1-minute+ showing the range of this year’s selections. The First Look schedule now includes a number of recently announced additions, including a screening of Jenny Perlin’s documentary Bunker followed by a discussion with the film’s producer, the well-known critic A.S. Hamrah; Deniz Tortum and Kathryn Hamilton’s single-channel video installation Our Ark (now viewable in the gallery); and Charlie Shackleton’s single-viewer VR experience As Mine Exactly. Also, there are a number of films in the program from […]
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The Lost Daughter Wins Best Feature at the 2022 Independent Spirit Awards
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter was the big winner today at the 2022 Independent Spirit Awards, taking Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Among the other top awards, Zola‘s Taylour Paige and Red Rocket‘s Simon Rex won Best Female Lead and Best Male Lead, respectively. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s Summer of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised) won Best Documentary, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car won Best International Film, and Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby won the John Cassavetes Award (given to a film budgeted at under $500,000). The complete list of winners follows. BEST FEATURE The Lost Daughter […]
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Berlinale 2022 Critic’s Notebook: The Novelist’s Film, Both Sides of the Blade, Robe of Gems
2020 got off to a fine start. In February I made my first visit to the Berlinale, where I interviewed a couple of filmmakers and indulged in the competition lineup, a King Vidor retrospective and the 50th anniversary of Forum. Like all of my festival trips, I considered it a working vacation—a chance to see friends, explore a city and escape for a few days from my suburban, white-collar life. At the last press screening I attended, another critic asked if I was Italian before taking a seat a few feet away. Even in the cloistered environment of the festival, […]
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Rotterdam 2022 Critic’s Notebook: Third Grade, Met mes, The Dream and the Radio
It’d been nearly a decade since I’d seen a Jacques Doillon film during its premiere festival run, but Third Grade almost immediately reminded me what his work, since at least 2003’s Raja (where I first came in), feels and looks like. Restless characters roam with the sharklike compulsion of actors determined to charge every single moment; the camera slowly pans or dollies to keep everyone just within the frame’s boundaries, resting during the occasional static composition but rarely for long. Conflict is everyone’s inevitable destination, and sooner rather than later; people begin at such virulent odds that you fear for both their physical […]
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“Images are Moving Away From the Eye”: Dane Komljen on Afterwater
The opening minutes of Afterwater, Dane Komljen’s second feature, might fool viewers into thinking they know what they’re in for. At a university, a young man sketches varieties of fishes preserved in jars of glass. A young woman attends class in a lab with microscopes on every table. They don’t speak, their expressions remain impassive. We observe them in static and meticulous compositions, as if they themselves were specimens. When a character reads from a book about limnology, i.e. the study of lakes, and the word “microcosm” cues a shot of Berlin’s central train station bustling with commuters, the cut […]
