By Brenda Benthien. Cinefest, Hamburg’s international festival of German film history, focused this year on New Directions in Documentary Film. A range of volatile films from the 1960s through the 1980s illustrated how social upheaval and new technologies began to empower documentary filmmakers working to counter mainstream media. Since 1988, […]
Dream Stories: An Interview with Andrew Adamson on Mr. Pip (2012)
By Paul Risker. When writer-director Andrew Adamson set out to adapt Lloyd Jones’ novel Mr. Pip (2006) Adamson was no stranger to the literary bloodlines that run through the cinematic art form. As the writer/director of the fairytale-inspired Shrek films to the adaptations of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, Adamson’s oeuvre […]
The One I Love: Another Film Lost in The Cosmos
By Wheeler Winston Dixon. Godard called his masterwork Weekend (1967) “a film lost in the cosmos – a film found on the scrapheap” in that movie’s intertitles, but at least it opened in a theater in New York, played there for months, and then made the rounds on the university […]
The Lofty and the Humdrum: Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery
By John Duncan Talbird. No person looks into the camera in a Frederick Wiseman documentary. Some critics use the term cinéma vérité to describe his type of filmmaking, but Wiseman rejects this label. He says it suggests a guy showing up and hanging around, filming whatever happens to be there. […]
Interstellar: A Faltering Exercise in Space-Bound Theatrics
November 30, 2014
By Forrest Cardamenis. In what may prove to be Interstellar’s most memorable scene, Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper (that’s a last name; curiously, he is never given a first) is transported into a teserract in which time is physically navigable. While there he tells TARS, a helpful robot who has been with […]
Lucky: 2011
November 27, 2014
By James Teitelbaum. Durban is the third-largest city in South Africa, and is the biggest port town on the continent’s Indian Ocean coast. Although about half of the city’s population are black African and over a third of the population considers Zulu to be their first language, Durban is also […]
The Radical Film Network: for sustainable, oppositional film culture
By Steve Presence. “Today we do not really have any ‘centralized’ hubs like Indymedia anymore. What we do have is a proliferation of independent media collectives that are all more or less working in the same direction but that nevertheless remain relatively scattered.” (Jerome Roos, ROAR Magazine Manifesto, 2013) “We […]
Brighton Palestine Film Festival 2014
By Anthony Killick. The Brighton Palestine Film Festival is one of the latest contributions to the worldwide proliferation of film festivals dedicated to Palestinian liberation. Taking place from the 7th–9th November at the soon to be demolished Brighton Arts Centre, the festival hosted screenings and talks, with a focus on […]
Different Faces of Syria: Director Mohammed Ali Atassi on Our Terrible Country (2014)
By Yun-hua Chen. Mohammed Ali Atassi brought his second documentary, Our Terrible Country, co-directed with Ziad Homsi, to the Viennale 2014. The film follows the perilous journey of the Syrian intellectual Yassin al-Haj Saleh, at a time the country has been torn apart by the ongoing war. This road trip […]
Nightcrawler: Blood from All of Us
By Matthew Sorrento. He can “work all day, and creep all night,” stated Dr. James Grigson, nicknamed Dr. Death (for his penchant for sending the accused to the chair) about Randall Adams, the man wrongfully accused for the murder of a Dallas policeman featured in Errol Morris’ exemplary documentary The Thin […]