Interview

By Alex Ramon. Speaking with Film International last year, François Ozon asserted that, for him, “the story comes first” when choosing a project. In his new film, By the Grace of God (Grâce à Dieu) Ozon draws for the first time on current events for the narrative, telling the story of […]

By Yun-hua Chen. A hidden gem in the sidebar section “Concorso Cineasti del presente” at Locarno Film Festival, Trương Minh Quý’s Nhà cây (Tree House) is a co-production from Singapore, Vietnam, Germany, France and China which sets in the futuristic 2045 but recounts a story of the past. In the imagined […]

By John Duncan Talbird. Grady Hendrix is a novelist, sometimes-journalist, essayist, and screenwriter. He’s written several horror novels, including the very recent We Sold Our Souls, “a heavy metal take on the Faust legend.” He is one of the founders of the New York Asian Film Festival and, on his […]

By Tom Ue. Aaron Harvey is the writer and director of several award-winning feature films including Catch.44 (2011), starring Bruce Willis, Forest Whitaker and Malin Akerman, and The Neighbor (2018), William Fichtner, Michael Rosenbaum and Jessica McNamee. Into the Ashes (2019), his latest, centres on Nick (Luke Grimes), a former […]

By David A. Ellis. Fifty-year-old Mike Hall is a film composer who lives in Le Claire Iowa. He grew up in the small town of Tipton. He has over twenty-five years experience in sound design, composing for films, TV and record. For a few years he performed in several bands, […]

By Jeremy Carr. On the occasion of two recently published collections – Cinematic Encounters: Interviews and Dialogues (2018) and Cinematic Encounters 2: Portraits and Polemics (2019), both from The University of Illinois Press – Jonathan Rosenbaum discusses a career’s worth of experience. Sharing his views with Film International, he reflects […]

By N. Buket Cengiz. The 12th edition of Documentarist, the sole independent documentary festival in Turkey, was held on 15-20 June 2019 in Istanbul with the support of the European Endowment for Democracy, consulates of Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Check Republic, Denmark and other institutions such as the Goethe Institute. Among the […]

By Ali Moosavi. Pendulum is the first film made by Amir Ganjavie, an Iranian diaspora film critic (and a Film International contributor), based in Toronto. Ganjavie is engaged in a wide variety of cinematic activities. He has pioneered the Iranian Film Festival in Toronto, an annual festival showcasing the cream of […]

By N. Buket Cengiz. Documentarist, an independent documentary film festival held in Istanbul since 2007, had the acclaimed British documentary filmmaker Sean McAllister as its honorary guest this year. The festival audience found the opportunity to watch five feature films of the director: A Northern Soul (2018), shot in Hull […]

By Alex Ramon. As the place that produced the likes of Wajda, Polański, Kieślowski and Skolimowski, and that, under the current Rectorship of Mariusz Grzegorzek, continues to nurture new talents in cinema and theatre, Łódź Film School remains the most storied and prestigious of such institutions in Poland. It’s the […]