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 […]
The Mother’s Role in Bergman’s Persona
January 20, 2014
By Terence Diggory. CONTENTS The Critical Audience Dramatis Personae Child’s Play Alma Mater Sons and Lovers Fear of Lying Fear of Dying The Primary Audience The Critical Audience Ingmar Bergman saw the first hints of a new film as “a brightly colored thread sticking out of the dark sack of […]
Diva Directors Around the Globe: Spotlight on Caroline Link
January 17, 2014
By Anna Weinstein. Due to an error during printing one page of this interview was replaced by an ad when it was originally published in Film International 66, vol. 11, no. 6/2013. Therefore we have chosen to republish it here in its entirety. German director Caroline Link has written and directed for both television […]
Editorial issue 66: The Bechdel Test and the Biases of Cinema
By Daniel Lindvall. Recently four Swedish cinemas, all run by Folkets Hus och Parker (‘The People’s Houses and Parks’, an organization with roots in the labour movement), decided to start rating the gender balance of their films according to the so-called Bechdel test. The test, named after the American cartoonist […]
Kiss the Water (2013)
January 17, 2014
By Cleaver Patterson. When someone is the subject matter of a film memoir, they must have a magical quality if they are never physically seen—either in person or in the form of archive footage—yet leave the viewer with the impression that they have met them and that their presence permeates […]
Rififi (1955)
January 15, 2014
By Jeremy Carr. The blacklist that shrouded the Hollywood community in suspicion, paranoia, and tragedy during the 1940s and ’50s, a steadily spreading outgrowth of the tactics formulated and executed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), would leave its tarnishing mark on many in the film industry: screenwriters, actors, […]
Diva Directors Around the Globe: Spotlight on Claudia Llosa
January 14, 2014
By Anna Weinstein. Peruvian director Claudia Llosa, described by Variety as “one of Latin America’s fastest-rising femme helmer-scribes,” has written and directed three features, including Madeinusa (2006) and Milk of Sorrow (2010), which was nominated for an Oscar. Her most recent film, Aloft (2014), is her English-language debut, starring Jennifer […]
True Love, Pride, and Passion: Re-viewing Stephen Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
January 13, 2014
By Lesley Brill. In Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (most of the plot of which Frears’s Dangerous Liaisons follows faithfully), love and passion dominate religion until the end. Concluding his epistolary novel, however, Laclos sends Cécile de Volanges back to the convent to become a nun and visits […]
The 19th Annual Cucalorus Film Festival
January 12, 2014
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, […]
Scott McGehee and David Siegel: What Maisie Knew
January 9, 2014
By Paul Risker. Author Henry James continues to find work posthumously, and last year directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel lifted James’ psychological 1897 novel of the dysfunctional couple amidst divorce in What Maisie Knew from the page and projected it onto the cinema screen. McGehee and Siegel discussed with Film International’s Paul Risker the […]