The recent DocPoint NYC featured 47 Finnish documentaries in celebration of the Helsinki festival’s 10th anniversary. Here, Stuart Nusbaumer considers two in a weekend that bounced him between DocPoint and the Brooklyn Film Festival. Part 2: DocPoint New York City Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland Reindeerspotting is set in northern Finland in the town of Rovaniemi, which is not important since a junky is never part of a town. The central character, 19-years-old Jani, is not particularly important since junkies are nearly all young and mostly all alike. The overwhelming importance of their drug addiction makes the junkies overwhelming the same. […]
by Stewart Nusbaumer on Jun 16, 2011Part I: Brooklyn Film Festival Two film festivals just wrapped-up in New York City, the Brooklyn Film Festival which screened more than 100 narratives and documentaries — 36 by New York City based directors, and over a dozen shot in Brooklyn — and the DocPoint NYC which featured 47 Finnish documentaries in celebration of the Helsinki festival’s 10th anniversary. I ping-ponged between the two festivals, between Brooklyn the mecca of American independent film and Manhattan the site of the Finnish event, Finland being part of Scandinavia a powerhouse of European filmmaking. Good cinematic bloodlines for both fests. First, three films […]
by Stewart Nusbaumer on Jun 13, 2011