By Gary M. Kramer. Silverdocs, at the AFI Silver Spring, MD, is the biggest American festival for non-fiction film. This year’s slate featured several observational documentaries, including El Bulli: Cooking in Progress (Wetzel, 2010) and El Velador (Almada, 2011). Here are some observations about a half dozen films featured at […]
The New Flesh: A Critical Analysis of 1980s Metamorphosis Cinema
By Alexander Kirschenbaum. ‘Am I different somehow? Is it live or is it Memorex?’ (Seth Brundle [Jeff Goldblum] in David Cronenberg’s The Fly [1986]) For the purposes of this article, ‘metamorphosis cinema’ refers to a specific canon of 1980s-produced feature films that are about transitional physical states, about the grotesque […]
The Efficacy of Vacuity: Deciphering The Quiet Art of Keanu Reeves
By Alexander Kirschenbaum. There is something to be said for instinct as a crucial acting tool. Cinematic acting is as much a passive and reactive art as it is an assertive one. So much of the story can be conveyed in frame composition, editing, and visual and aural mise-en-scene, that […]
The Arbor (2010)
By Jacob Mertens. If art is a reflection of our lives, then what becomes of art when we look at it through its own prism? In Clio Barnard’s genre-defying The Arbor, we see the artistic process fold in on itself, like a complex origami machination of narrative and documentary that […]
Film International 51: coming soon
June 30, 2011
I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE! Insane cinema ‘Psychiatry quit defining madness after widespread experiments exposed shocking errors in diagnosis. Sanity is indexed to reality but reality is cultural and transient, of no fixed abode. ‘Well adjusted’ to what: 1930s Berlin or 1960s […]
The Tunnel (2011)
By Carolyn Lake. Enjoying its world premiere on May 18 at Sydney’s Popcorn Taxi, Carlo Ledesma’s Australia indie horror flick, The Tunnel, has already garnered an audience of over seven hundred thousand, and that’s just the downloads. The brainchild of writer-producers Enzo Tedeschi and Julian Harvey, The Tunnel took an […]
Liverpool Arabic Film Festival (LAFF) 2011
By Omar Kholeif, Film Programme Curator. Curatorial Statement FACT is delighted to announce its expanded collaboration with the Liverpool Arabic Arts Festival (LAAF), with the first formal incarnation of the Liverpool Arabic Film Festival (LAFF). Presenting a broad programme of new film releases alongside re-mastered classics, the programme presents hard-hitting […]
57th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, May 5-10, 2011 | Beyond Competition: Archive and Discourse, Part II
By Shekhar Deshpande. This is the second of two parts about the Oberhausen festival. Read Part I here. The five seminar-workshop sessions organized by the festival this year, in the cozy but somewhat inadequate ‘Festival Space’ across the theater that holds most of the screenings were focused on different aspect […]
57th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, May 5-10, 2011 | Beyond Competition: Archive and Discourse, Part I
By Shekhar Deshpande. This is the first of two parts about the Oberhausen festival. Read Part II here. ‘The More festivals spring up, the more necessary it becomes to strengthen the ability to differentiate’, says the Festival Director of the 57th Oberhausen Short Film Festival, Dr. Lars Henrik Gass. With […]
Film as politics
By Joacim Blomqvist. The Swedish general elections of September 2010, confirmed that Sweden is becoming a less tolerant society in many ways. For the first time a xenophobic nationalist party entered the parliament of a country that has long been perceived, in an international perspective, as a transparent and democratic […]