Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats: Style over Substance

By William Frasca. I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats simply because I was able to recognize very early in the film he put “style over substance.” Not to say that there is not a message in the film about love and friendship, but that […]

Film Scratches Blog #2

By Liza Palmer, Review Section Editor. Welcome to June 2011! I am so pleased to see how the new Film International website has been developing. Thanks to all your hard work and excellent contributions, the site is becoming an excellent resource for all things related to film. I’m particularly excited […]

The Tree of Life (2011)

By Janine Gericke. A tree has wide spread roots – thousands of forking lines that twine into a long straight trunk – and branches, which themselves twine up and away toward the sun. And that is the very structure of the story elements woven into Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. This […]

Hunger for power: Limitless

By Rajko Radovic. I like films that tell me something about the world we live in. I like to see mechanics exposed, a provocative plot line that does not only connect the dots but also shows the ways in which cogs fit together inside the clockwork. And this is where […]

CFP: Short Film Studies (2.2)

Read below or download the PDF Aims & Scope: Short Film Studies is a peer-reviewed journal designed to stimulate ongoing research on individual short films as a basis for a better understanding of the art form as a whole. In each issue, two or three short films will be selected […]

Far East Film Festival, Udine, Italy

By Moira Sullivan. The Far East Film Festival in Udine, Italy is an outstanding annual showcase of popular, mainstream films from Asia. For the 13th edition of the festival (April 29 – May 7) there were 50 films in the program. Several experts for the festival who live in or […]

Contemporary Cinematic Documentary and The Rebirth of Content

By Jez Owen. Abstract Documentary suggests ‘fullness and completion, knowledge and fact’ (Nichols, 1994:1). A documentary text can provide a representation of life that an audience will read as a truthful expression of an actuality. The last fifteen years of film production have witnessed an explosion in the number of […]

Pier Paolo Pasolini Museum, Casarsa della Delizia, Italy

By Moira Sullivan. In northeastern Italy lies the autonomous region of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia.  “Friulan”, a romance dialect, is spoken in Friuli. Casarsa della Delizia is one of the towns of the area and is where the mother of Pier Paolo Pasolini was born. During the Second World War, the Italian poet […]