Festival Reports

By Robert Buckeye. Cannes may be a place, but it is not place as we understand it, except as it exists as cinephilia on a screen. Berlin is a place, its past always brought to bear whenever the city or its people are mentioned. At ArtFilmFest in Trenčianske Teplice and […]

By Michael Miller.  AFI Docs, now in its second year, unspooled June 18-22 at multiple venues in the District of Columbia and all three screens at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland. Eager fans of non-fiction film queued up for mostly sold out screenings of some of the […]

By Mark James.  It’s fitting that “Art House Convergence” spells it with two separate words. Without the specificity that the term “Arthouse” commands in the film world, “Art House” can enjoy a far wider interpretation. The Art House Convergence, which started as an adjunct to the Sundance Film Festival in […]

By Gary M. Kramer.  For the second year, AFI Docs showcased non-fiction shorts and features at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, MD, and at various Washington, D.C. venues. The festival was bookended with celebrity portraits, as director Scott Teem’s Holbrook/Twain: An American Odyssey opened the festival and Steve […]

Ever wonder how film festivals come together? Noah Charney, Selector of Feature Films for the first annual Bled Film Festival, provides an inside look. Six weeks, thirty-five films, eight slots to fill. I was brought in, rather on the late side, as Selector of Feature Films for an exciting new […]

By Sam Littman.  Festival Overview Cluj-Napoca, the second largest city in Romania with approximately 350,00 inhabitants and home of the Transylvania International Film Festival, aspires to become the Youth Capital of Europe by 2015. This might seem outlandishly ambitious for any European city; Paris would have to compete with Barcelona, […]

By Mark James. The San Francisco International Film Festival, which ran April 24 through May 8th of this year, is true to its name in that its greatest strength has always been its international slate of movies. This year, the Festival’s 57th (remember it is the longest running Festival in […]

By Michael Miller. At this year’s Tribeca Film Festival several films—both narrative features and documentaries—probed the theme of masculinity from different perspectives. In the buddy film Land Ho! (directed by Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz), Mitch (Earl Lynn Nelson) and Colin (Paul Eenhoorn) are two retired guys each trying to make […]

By N. Buket Cengiz. The 33rd International Istanbul Film Festival was held between April 5th and April 20th, 2014. In the International Competition, The Golden Tulip—named in memory of Şakir Eczacıbaşı, the late director of the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV)—was given to Blind, directed by Eskil Vogt. […]

By Gary M. Kramer. The 13th annual Tribeca Film Festival wrapped up on April 27th, and by and large the documentary films were the festival’s highlights. The narrative features were more of a mixed bag, with strong performances saving familiar stories. Here is a run down of several films that […]