Abu Dhabi Film Festival
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2014: The Year in 11 Film Festivals
The start of the Sundance Film Festival is when film festivals traditionally reboot. A new wave of films comes in with the new year and festival films that have been trotting around the globe throughout 2014, especially the last three months of the year, will fall by the wayside. The changing modes of distribution of recent years, and the increased number of films being released, has meant that frequently the only time to catch certain films – often the best of the year – is at film festivals. A few years ago, some were questioning whether film festivals were still relevant, […]
by Kaleem Aftab on Jan 13, 2015 -
Men, Women and Children: The 8th Abu Dhabi Film Festival
In Abu Dhabi, it’s easy to let the smoke cozy up to your eyes. The festival, now in its 8th year, unfolds in one of the city’s most dazzling corners, with the mammoth, labyrinthine, five star Emirates Palace as its proverbial hub. Gold dripping from its vending machines and balconies alike, the place is sheer, 11 billion Dirham, stadium sized spectacle. As a festival guest, you are chauffeured from the seaside St. Regis tower to screening venues in a designated Mercedes, which, barring the unwanted sexual advances that come with being a long-haired, white American female, can make you feel […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Nov 4, 2014 -
Desert Storm: the 7th Abu Dhabi Film Festival
Poor Tobe Hooper. It’s got to be tough to be best known for movies made over 40 years ago and desperate enough for a paycheck to make something like Djinn, the first movie I saw at this year’s Abu Dhabi Film Festival and perhaps the most astoundingly inane motion picture I’ll see all year. “Rosemary’s Baby meets The Shining in an ominously empty residential tower halfway between Dubai and Abu Dhabi” is apparently a pitch that gets you $9 million from ImageNation, the Abu Dhabi-based film finance outfit to make a rote and clumsy and predictable horror movie, with waves […]
by Brandon Harris on Nov 8, 2013 -
AMERICAN INDIE HIDES OUT IN THE MIDDLE EAST
Director Sam Neave and his producer/star Marjan Neshat are both Iranian born, but the films they tend to make together, which include the unfortunately titled 2003’s Sundance entry Cry Funny Happy and their terrific new two shot high-wire act Almost in Love, tend to focus on the romantic travails of upper-middle-class Westerners. As such, they are naturals for the American independent festival scene, where such films usually find their natural constituency, that being other upper-middle-class Westerners. Not so for Almost in Love, their daring second feature collaboration, which had its world premiere this past weekend at the 5th Abu Dhabi […]
by Brandon Harris on Oct 20, 2011 -
ABU DHABI FILM FESTIVAL
Rich in oil and excess, Abu Dhabi, unlike its slightly more hip and newly bankrupted Emirate cousin Dubai, is for the time being at least, a city on the come. It’s also a place that is a symbol of “progress” in an age when that term has come to have no meaning. Why else would they set the irrepressibly offensive Sex and the City 2 there or have a skyscraper which is unfinished but already in the Guinness Book of World Records for being18 degrees crooked or build a so called “zero emission” city that no one may ever live […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 19, 2011
