Festival Reports

By Michael Miller. The 14th Tribeca Film Festival unspooled April 15-26 at multiple venues in Manhattan. Notable this year is the fest’s major presence in the Financial District downtown; a very short walk from the World Trade Center memorial site. Ten screens were in use at the Regal Battery Park […]

By Mark James.  Conceived in 1957 by film exhibitor Irving “Bud” Levin as a way to expose the locals to foreign film, the San Francisco International Film Festival is the oldest in the Americas. The 58th SFIFF will exhibit more than 180 films from 46 countries in its two-weeks. Noah Cowan, […]

By Yun-hua Chen. The 65th Berlinale celebrates two generations of German cinema, featuring Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert and Wim Wenders’ Every Thing Will be Fine, alongside Andreas Dresden’s Als Wir Träumten and Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria in the competition category. Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, made under extremely difficult circumstances, earned […]

By N. Buket Cengiz. It was the festival fever once again heralding the coming of spring in Istanbul when the 34th Istanbul Film Festival started on the 3rd of April with great energy as always. Even richer this year with the addition of the National Documentary Competition to its longtime […]

By Zhuo-Ning Su. The Berlin International Film Festival—or the “Berlinale”—celebrated its 65th edition earlier this year (Feb. 5- 15). Locked in bitter, continental weather with little sunshine and no palm trees, Berlin is no match for Cannes both in terms of glamour and prestige. In the past decade, the growing […]

By Gary M. Kramer.  This year’s Tribeca Film Festival provided a showcase for a pair of fascinating documentaries and a quartet of intriguing genre films. Here are reviews for a half-dozen films from the fest. Uncertain, which earned directors Anna Sandilands and Ewan McNicol the Albert Maysles New Documentary Director […]

By Gary M. Kramer.  The Tribeca Film Festival’s shorts programs, curated by Sharon Badal offer slices of life that are often more satisfying than the features that play alongside them. The programs are thematically linked. The New York programs—one narrative, one documentary—are always highlights of the fest. In the “New […]

By Amir Ganjavie. Since March 5, Toronto International Film Festival’s screening programme, TIFF Cinematheque, has presented a series called “I for Iran: A History of Iranian Cinema by Its Creators”. According to its website, “Selected by fourteen top Iranian filmmakers, the films in this essential retrospective comprise a capsule history […]

By Brad Weismann. The success rate is dismal. All the rules have changed. How does a film festival feel its way forward? The Boulder International Film Festival (BIFF), which took place this year from March 5th through March 8th, began its second decade by keeping its head down and sticking […]

By Axel Andersson. It was still cold when Stockholm’s documentary film festival Tempo opened in early March. The miserable rain underlined the city’s forlorn dampness for both old and new inhabitants. Roma hounded out of their central European homes by prejudice and persecution to beg through an unforgiving Nordic winter […]