Issues
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Toronto International Film Festival 2011
Toronto multitasks. It has to. The North American launching pad for second- or third-tier commercial releases with stars from lists A through C, the festival includes a rather high proportion of Galas and Special Presentations — a majority of them apparently uncurated. Many Torontonians, a cinephilic bunch, as well as peripatetic journalists and programmers, seek out more esoteric fare — almost all of it carefully selected by experts in different geographical zones (plus docs). Discovery, Contemporary World Cinema, Real to Reel, Visions, Masters, Mavericks, City to City: These are festival strands. The Galas and Special Presentations seem, well, booked. What […]
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Karlvory Vary International Film Festival 2011
The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (July 1-9) is in its 46th year, but as the premiere cinematic gathering in the Czech Republic it feels even older. The fest takes place in a tiny historic town nestled inside a country that’s seen both Nazism and communism, a spa resort popular with German and Russian tourists and famous for its abundant healing mineral springs. (Goethe and Beethoven were frequent visitors.) Karlovy Vary was also the first Czech city to screen the Lumière Brothers’ shorts back in 1896. (Over a century later it would serve as a location for one of my […]
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Networking Frenzy
This year the Independent Filmmaker Project, the nation’s oldest and largest advocacy program for independent filmmaking, moved it on up, transferring its signature event, Independent Film Week, uptown to the sparklingly new Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, home of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. In her introductory remarks, Amy Dotson, IFP’s deputy director, described the relocation as a “homecoming.” The IFP’s original Market began as a sidebar to the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, and both organizations were thrilled to be working in partnership again. For the lucky producers, writers and directors whose projects had been selected […]
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New Age Viewing
Now in its 42nd year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center has been a hallmark of the New York exhibition scene and one of the world’s most esteemed presenters of international and independent cinema. With its annual New York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films, as well as the bevy of year-round repertory programming in the Walter Reade Theater since 1991, it’s a destination for cinephiles the world over. Earlier this past summer the Film Society moved its center of gravity across 65th Street to the new Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. A long-planned, state-of-the-art triplex that has been under […]
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Once Upon a Time
As the late ’60s wore on, African and African-American filmmakers began to descend on UCLA’s campus, recruited as part of a concerted effort by the university’s School of Theater, Film and Television to include more students of color. Among them were Charles Burnett, who arrived at UCLA to pursue a degree in film after thinking he’d become an electrician, and Haile Gerima, the son of an Ethiopian poet who had briefly studied drama in Chicago. They would be the lynchpins of a group of politically engaged black film students who ended up forming a subgenre of alternative cinema all their […]
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From the Rubble
I arrived in Kabul in late May of 2011 with seven weeks to realize two objectives—shoot a new video in the ruined Darul Aman Palace on the outskirts of the city and teach a one-month video workshop at the Center for Contemporary Art Afghanistan (CCAA). The CCAA is a small nonprofit, based in a dusty-pink villa on a side street in Kartechar, that offers classes for female students in cooperation with the Fine Arts Faculty of Kabul University. CCAA students typically spend their mornings at the university and their afternoons at the center. Like other such arrangements in operation around […]
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Editor’s Letter
I was talking to someone about moderating panels and events, and I said the only secret is this: you have to assume the role of the audience member. You have to assume that if you’re bored by what the panelists are saying, your audience is probably bored as well and you should ask another question. But if you’re interested, they probably are too. I was really interested in what director Doug Liman had to say at Emerging Visions, a new RBC-sponsored partnership between IFP and the Film Society of Lincoln Center that was held just before we went to press […]
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Love on the Run: Wes Anderson on Moonrise Kingdom
Set in and around a children’s summer camp off the coast of New England in 1965, Wes Anderson’s captivating Moonrise Kingdom is a movie about two 12-year-olds, young lovers who escape the adult world of counselors, parents and social workers to find a few magical moments in the film’s eponymous beachside paradise. A movie about childhood, Moonrise Kingdom is also, more importantly, a movie that feels of childhood. With its evocatively off-scale production design, tempered adult performances and moments of playful abandon, Moonrise Kingdom is stuffed with feelings and visions that, no matter what your age, transport you through time […]
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Flash Crash: Writer/Director David Cronenberg on His Don DeLillo Adaptation, Cosmopolis
In his 1977 novel Players, Don DeLillo told the story of a crumbling marriage amidst terrorism on the New York Stock exchange. In the 1973 Great Jones Street, he portrayed a wealthy rock star escaping the solar of his own fame by walking off his tour and hiding out in a downtown Manhattan apartment. And in Mao II (1991), he sent a reclusive, blocked novelist away from the world of cultural production into the zeitgeist of Middle East political violence. The emotional affect of a hypermediated society, the ways in which personal relations are shaped by the white noise of […]
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Of Time & The City
Artistry, despair and rage — the New York City of the 1980s and ’90s was defined by its fusion of these elements as artists and activists became frontline soldiers in the fight against the health crisis of AIDS. “Silence = Death” was the slogan of activist group ACT UP, an admonishment to all those who’d deny the severity of the epidemic by not taking a position. And as ACT UP members took direct action against fearful politicians, a generation of artists incorporated the movement’s anger and social critique into their own passionate work. These New York years form the backdrop […]
