Zurich 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 -
New Mexican Films Shine at the Zurich Film Festival
Quickly gaining stature as one of the best of Europe’s newer players on the fall festival scene, the Zurich Film Festival wrapped its ninth edition last weekend after it’s longest and most wide ranging event yet. One hundred and twenty-two films screened over the course of 11 days in Switzerland’s largest city, one which besides being a capital of world banking is among of the oldest continuous settlements in Europe, dating back over 6,400 years. The festival, run by Karl Spoerri and Nadja Schildknecht, featured its most star-studded group of guests yet, with the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Harrison Ford, […]
by Brandon Harris on Oct 10, 2013 -
2011 ZURICH FILM FESTIVAL
A few years back, the Zurich Film Festival burst onto the map, but for all the wrong reasons. In 2009, Roman Polanski, en route to the festival to receive a lifetime achievement award, was apprehended shortly after landing on Swiss soil. He was never extradited to the United States to stand trial for his mid ’70s sexual escapades with the then underaged Samatha Geimer in Jack Nicholson’s Hollywood Hills home, and now he’s free, having returned for the seventh edition of Zurich’s increasingly important film festival. He screened his “film memoir,” which I simply loathed for its canned, staged quality, […]
by Brandon Harris on Dec 16, 2011 -
“CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN” IS ALWAYS A GLASS MOSTLY EMPTY: ON “THE IDES OF MARCH”
Note: the following piece contains spoilers. One time in my fleeting youth, I encountered George Clooney in the Warner Brothers screening room on 53rd Street after a National Board of Review screening of Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German. This is before I had, despite my ongoing poverty and lack of renown, spent ample time around movie stars and the merely sort-of famous at sundry locations, both foreign and domestic, becoming relatively at ease in their strange company. I still often felt not unlike the protagonist of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, as he follows William Holden through a blustery New Orleans afternoon, sensing some […]
by Brandon Harris on Oct 6, 2011 -
WHEN IN ZURICH, PRINT THE LEGEND: ON “ROMAN POLANSKI: A FILM MEMOIR”
Succumbing to the most numbing of documentary aesthetics, Laurent Bouzereau’s Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir had its “secret” world premiere at the Zurich Film Festival Tuesday night. Aftering being hyped as a groundbreaking work of filmic autobiography, what unspooled in this most expensive of European cities consisted mainly of footage shot by longtime Polanski friend and former producer Andrew Braunsberg, who convinced Polanski to spend 20 hours talking with him in Polanski’s Gstaad estate during his house arrest following his apprehension at Zurich’s ambitious young festival a few years ago. The film’s cumulative effect is rather enervating given its fascinating subject, […]
by Brandon Harris on Sep 29, 2011
