Festival Reports

By Jacob Mertens. I keep trying to think of a breezy anecdote to encapsulate my experience at SXSW this year, but I’m realizing it would be something of a lie. The festival, as great as it was (with perhaps the strongest overall line-up I’ve seen in my several years attending […]

By Boukary Sawadogo. Sundance Film Festival is to independent cinema what Hollywood is to mainstream commercial cinema around the world. The best of independent filmmakers’ works compete for awards but also for visibility that could translate into distribution contracts. It is a festival that screens non-U.S. films in different competing […]

By Yun-hua Chen.  The 64th Berlinale opened with Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, a fitting festival film that set a playful tone and brought glamour to town, thanks to which we saw the presence of Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray and Saoirse on the red carpet. In this yearly […]

By Yun-Hua Chen.  November in Berlin is a busy month for film buffs in the capital, as there are three major independent film festivals: Afrikamera, Interfilm, and Around the World in 14 Films. Among these, Afrikamera is organised by the nonprofit cultural association, Toucouleur e.V. It brings rarely screened African […]

By Brandon Konecny and Jacob Mertens. Tucked away on the coast of North Carolina, there is a festival dedicated to the weirdly beautiful, the perversely provocative—a lovingly programmed lineup, taking shape as an island of misfit films that find refuge with their own kind. Carefully placed at the year’s end, […]

By Michael Miller. AFI Fest unspooled along Hollywood Boulevard November 7-14, 2013 to almost entirely full houses. The event permits a sizable number of free tickets available to the public via an online lottery. This enables a large, diverse audience to partake of the equally diverse cinematic fare. Here is […]

By Jacob Mertens.  At some point during the madness of Halloween—in which flying monkeys from Wizard of Oz gave pedicab rides, No-Face from Spirited Away handed out candy to strangers, and Sleeping Beauty staggered drunk through the streets—downtown Austin yielded to a strange confluence of cinema and life. It was […]

By Gary M. Kramer. At this year’s AFI Fest, a quartet of international narrative features depicted the realism of everyday life, as various characters struggled with drama big and small. However, one film reversed that logic. The naturalistic approach of the filmmakers to their subjects and the remarkable performances by […]

By Yun-hua Chen.  Viennale 2013 is, as always, a feast of well designed program and an audience-friendly film festival, with events, talks, DJ-set and parties welcome to all audiences. There are well-acclaimed festival feature films such as Closed Curtain (Pardé, Jafar Panahi and Kamboziya Partovi), Nobody’s Daughter Haewon (Nugu-ui Ttal-do […]

By Davide Caputo. After a five-year absence, this year I returned to the Zurich Film Festival to find that the predictions I made regarding its potential in my previous review for FilmInt (6.1, 2008) had been exceeded. The festival now takes over far more of the city, expanding well beyond […]