Festival Reports

By Ali Moosavi. Writer-director Igor Drljaca shows us the wide gap and the glaring contrast between the haves and have nots in Sarajevo.” In Tabija / The White Fortress, Faruk (Pavle Cemerikic) is a young Muslim boy living in Sarajevo. His mother has passed away and since his parents were […]

Honeyland By T.R. Merchant-Knudsen. From the carefully curated selection of films and grouped programs… there were a variety of options for viewers, from talks with directors and conservationists, shorts that highlighted issues from around the globe, and feature films at the edge of documentary filmmaking. At the beginning of 2020 […]

Grimm re-edit (Alex van Warmerdam) By Gary M. Kramer. The AFI European Union Film Showcase, being held virtually at https://afisilver.afi.com/ December 2-20, offers an eclectic assortment of nearly 50 films. Here is rundown of a half dozen impressive features screening at this year’s fest. Writer/director Jurgis Matulevicius’s auspicious debut, Isaac, […]

À L’Abordag (Guillaume Brac, France, 2020) By Gary M. Kramer. The Philadelphia Film Festival, now in its 29th year, offered more than 100 films, shorts, and documentaries online, with select programming at the Film Society’s drive-in theater. There were some great documentaries and feature films from around the world screening […]

By Ali Moosavi. San Sebastian is a beautiful coastal town in the Basque region of Spain. It has one of the oldest film festivals in the world which somehow has not become as prestigious or glamorous as Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Toronto. Perhaps that is not such a bad thing. […]

By Gary M. Kramer. There are 40 shorts screening in six programs (as well as in front of features) at this year’s AFI Fest presented by Audi. Here are ten highlights from the festival, which unspools November 14-21 in Los Angeles. Sin Cielo is writer-director Jianna S. Maarten’s quietly powerful […]

By Ali Moosavi. Three interesting documentaries screened at the Open City Documentary Festival in London, September 4-10, 2019. Sergei Loznitsa, the distinguished Ukrainian director known for films such as A Gentle Creature (2017) and Donbass (2018), in fact started off as a documentary filmmaker. In his return, Trial (2018), he has put […]

By Mina Radovic. A lady patiently cleans her house. The yellow lights of Athens peer in through the windows as her husband smokes a cigarette and between puffs complains to her about his job situation. Her daughter walks past, asking for something new, and complaining about her brother. The family […]