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 […]
Scoring Films Quickly, with Inspiration: An Interview with Mike Hall
David A. Ellis
July 31, 2019
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, […]
Joining the Flow: An Interview with Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jeremy Carr
July 25, 2019
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 […]
The Arab Comrades in the Spanish Civil War: Amal Ramsis on You Come from Far Away
N. Buket Cengiz
July 23, 2019
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 […]
The Immigrant Dream Life: An Interview with Amir Ganjavie on Pendulum
July 15, 2019
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 […]
Dreaming on, Despite Brexit: A Conversation with Sean McAllister
N. Buket Cengiz
July 3, 2019
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 […]
Exposing the Filmmaker: An Interview with Ewa Banaszkiewicz and Mateusz Dymek About My Friend the Polish Girl
July 2, 2019
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 […]
“If You Don’t Learn from the Greats, You’d Be Stupid”: An Interview with Cinematographer Robin Vidgeon
David A. Ellis
June 6, 2019
By David A. Ellis. Robin Vidgeon BSC born in August 1939 is a retired cinematographer. For many years he was a focus puller, working with the late cinematographer Douglas Slocombe and camera operator Bernard (Chic) Waterson. His last outing with them was on Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple […]
Violent Urban Transformation: Ali Vatansever on Saf
N. Buket Cengiz
May 7, 2019
By N. Buket Cengiz. Ali Vatansever’s Saf (2018) was one of the outstanding films at the Human Rights in Cinema Competition at the 38th Istanbul Film Festival (2019). The film, which made its premiere at the 43rd Toronto Film Festival (2018), has received the Honorable Mention at the New Voices New Visions […]
Surveying Shorts in 2019: A Interview with Sharon Badal (Tribeca Film Festival)
April 22, 2019
By Gary M. Kramer. This year, the Tribeca Film Festival had more than 5,100 submissions for its shorts programs. With help from an international programming team, curator Sharon Badal has compiled 11 shorts programs with various themes from the annual New York shorts program – this year’s entry, Streetwise is […]