By James Murray-White. This year’s Sheffield DocFest felt like the most buoyant, optimistic and stimulating festival experience so far, of the 3 I’ve attended. With over 2,500 delegates attending the 5 days, and 83 films screening, including 10 outdoors; half a dozen pitching sessions and several million pounds of funding […]
Queer Bangkok: Twenty-First-Century Markets, Media, and Rights, Peter A. Jackson, ed., (2011)
Book Review by Yvette Lim. We have all heard scathing and cruel remarks about transgendered bodies; they are often cast in tragicomic roles in films that end with these queer bodies marginalized or destroyed, restoring power and order to the heteronormative and the patriarchal. The well-known Thai movies Iron Ladies […]
Project X, or the New Teen Nihilism
By Christopher Sharrett. I have just re-screened on disc Nima Nourizadeh’s Project X (2012), which I saw in a nearby multiplex this past season. I wanted to see it again not because I feared I missed something in the plot (there is hardly any of this, nor characterization, nor any […]
Interview with Ethan de Seife, Author of Tashlinesque
By Leo Collis. Following the release of his book Tashlinesque, I caught up with author Ethan de Seife to discuss writer, director and animator Frank Tashlin, the development of the book and why Tashlin has been so grossly neglected by filmmakers and scholars alike. Leo Collis: Ethan, can you tell […]
Ill Manors (2012)
By Sebastian Clare. Better known as the musician responsible for the critically-acclaimed UK Chart-topping album The Defamation of Strickland Banks, Ben Drew a.k.a. Plan B attempts to bring his creative talent to another medium with an ambitious cinematic debut, Ill Manors. A gritty, unrelenting look at the social underbelly of […]
Interview with Russell Owen, Welcome to the Majority’s Director
By Leo Collis. Russell Owen has worked in film and television for almost a decade. Through this time, he has done countless jobs and worked on numerous projects with a whole range of directors. Taking all that he’s learnt over the years, Owen has ventured into the world of directing […]
Cannes 2012: Palme d’love
By Marcin Radomski. This year’s Cannes Film Festival was a special event for the filmgoers. It was the 65th anniversary under the patrona of the forever beautiful Marilyn Monroe. This international event boasts having the largest film festival audience in the world. Cannes festival gathers film lovers, film professionals, filmmakers […]
CinemAfrica 2012
By Daniel Lindvall. The warm winds of the Arab Spring swept through the thirteenth edition of Stockholm’s African film festival, CinemAfrica (March 21-25). Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia together supplied ten out of fourteen films (excluding the shorts, but including two Franco-Moroccan co-productions). The making of 18 Days involved ten […]
Hysteria (Tanya Wexler, 2011)
By Carolyn Lake. While comedy is an inevitable feature of a film loosely based on the invention of the electronic vibrator, Tanya Wexler’s Hysteria comes off as surprisingly light despite its fascinating historical subject matter. Hugh Dancy stars as Mortimer Granville, a progressive doctor living in Victorian London during the […]
Bristol Radical Film Festival | 27th February – 4th March, 2012
By Steve Presence. Organised by students and lecturers at the University of the West of England, Bristol, the first Bristol Radical Film Festival showed that explicitly political cinema – and audience demand for it – is alive and kicking. Held in a variety of venues over the course of a […]