Festival Circuit
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Cannes 2012 pt. 1
Normally the spotlight at the Cannes film festival is stolen by attractive young celebrities and hip, hot films (Tarantino’s, for example). This Cannes was a little bit different. The most interesting films addressed Big Issues and, perhaps coincidentally, were awarded the top prizes. They are mature films, for the mature. Two provocative topics stood out. CONFRONTING OLD AGE Very different takes on living out the geriatric years are apparent in Austrian director Michael Haneke’s French production Amour, which took the Palme d’Or, and Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s Japanese film, Like Someone in Love (no prize, because, even if it […]
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True/False Film Festival
At the end of introducing their film Detropia at the 9th annual True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Mo., Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady directed compliments for the documentary festival at their peers. “It’s so great to hang out with all you filmmakers outside the environment of Sundance,” they noted, “which is kind of a pressure cooker.” SXSW got invoked even more; Janet Pierson’s name was frequently mentioned over the four days as directors swapped notes over their next stop there. It’s clear that True/False’s boons for festival-circuit-weary press and directors alike include the lack of film-affiliated publicists, barely visible industry […]
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International Film Festival Rotterdam
Terence Nance, the Brooklyn-based, wavily afro’d, avant-garde director of An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, remarked that Rotterdam, where his movie had its international premiere, was the only film festival with a 24-hour DJ. I can’t say whether he’s right or not, but I hope he’s wrong. Surely some other place knows how to put on a festival as dynamic. If such an event exists, however, I’ve yet to find it. The International Film Festival Rotterdam, now in its 41st edition, has garnered a reputation for its sprawling, catholic tastes and commitment to new media and the avant-garde. It is much […]
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Berlin Film Festival
How does one best measure the success ofa film festival? Are record-breaking ticket sales enough, or do other factors, such as quality of the films screened, quantity of A-list celebrities walking the red carpet and overall “buzz” generated, come into play? If revenue is the sole gauge, then there’s no question that the Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (colloquially known as the Berlinale) is one of the world’s most prosperous annual film events. By 7 a.m. each morning of the 10-day festival, hundreds of sleepy Berliners can be found queuing up at the makeshift ticket office in the Potsdamer Platz shopping mall, […]
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SXSW Film Festival
Among the many things SXSW is known for — barbecue, the Alamo Drafthouse and long lines, for example — one is breakout apps. Twitter and Foursquare both got enormous boosts from launches or promotions during previous editions of SXSW Interactive. Last year, the buzzword at the tech fest was contextual search and, indeed, you’re seeing that functionality being built into products this year from Apple, Google and others. In 2012, the buzzed-about app heading into the fest was Highlight, a sort of social version of Foursquare. Installed on your phone, it alerts you to other Highlight users nearby. “You can […]
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Sundance Film Festival
The majestic chords of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet blasted through the doors of the New Frontiers exhibition space at Sundance this year, beckoning viewers into a dark room with a wall-size screen and, in a bin, those staples of the modern multiplex, 3D glasses. Donning the glasses, you were confronted with a looped, three-minute mash-up of history as seen through the lens of Hollywood cinema. Composited across the 3D canvas, like some kind of American Museum of Natural History diorama on acid, were the great characters who, by our repeated viewing, resonate as deeply in our consciousness as real historical […]
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Una Noche at the Berlinale
Two weeks ago I was on the phone to a lab in Canada, who were holding our film, telling them that 6 lab rolls of Una Noche were missing. The movie was supposed to premiere in Berlin in a matter of days. I proceeded to go through every frame of footage in the NYC lab double-checking to see if the shots were there. They were not. I did not tell anybody. I did not want to believe it myself. When the colorist, Martin, told me that we might have to use black slates with “missing shot” written on them, my breathing spontaneously […]
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Sundance 2012
Robot and Frank (director, Jake Schreier) I got into film because I was spectacularly mediocre at everything else. I loved art and performance, but wasn’t much of an actor, was a pretty bad keyboard player and couldn’t draw at all. When I got to try out filmmaking at an NYU summer high school program, it was the first time where the things I made vaguely resembled the ideas I had in my head. That doesn’t really explain why Robot & Frank had to be a film, except that in my hands it would have made for a really cheesy song […]
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Thessaloniki International Film Festival
Rome fell. Athens fell. Unelected representatives of European banks were installed in Italy and Greece, elections distant down the road. Interesting times in the south of Europe, with a rush of drama in the outside world to match the 100-plus films slated during 10 eventful days of November’s 52nd edition of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. The event was trim, yet taut, light wind in its sails from a two-year budget infusion from the European Regional Development Fund. Photo exhibits, publications, masterclasses and retrospectives still accompanied the international competition, the Balkan Survey and Open Horizons programming sections. If one weren’t […]
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Abu Dhabi International Film Festival
Taking place in one of the world’s strangest, most transcendently inauthentic cities, the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (Oct. 13-22, 2011), started in 2007 as the Middle East International Film Festival and began to make a name for itself internationally after acquiring former San Francisco and Tribeca festival director Peter Scarlet. As a programmer, Scarlet is know for his strong taste in Middle Eastern selections (perhaps making him a natural for the post) and, as a festival director, someone who never saw a velvet rope he didn’t like, which makes for some hard-to-penetrate party bouncers. In the third year on the […]
