By Daniel Lindvall. Babak Najafi was born in Teheran in 1975 and came to Sweden as a boy in the mid-1980s. He went to film school (1998–2002), specializing in documentary film-making, and then made a series of well-received short films, mostly documentary, gaining him a ‘Bo Widerberg grant’ in 2004. […]
You Don’t Know What Love Is
By Daniel Garrett. The book Annie Proulx’s short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is amazing: detailed, observant, naturalistic and smart, it is a story about men and land and love and society – in Wyoming, a state of mountains and valleys, greenlands and deserts. Annie Proulx’s language is mostly spare, though a […]
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 Luni, 3 Saptamini si 2 Zile, 2007)
By Steven Yates. One of the most surprising successes of 2007 was Cristian Mingiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (4 Luni, 3 Saptamini si 2 Zile). A film set in the Ceausescu period and detailing the events prior to an illegal abortion in a hotel may not have […]
Let’s Kill the Moonlight in Electric Park: a Futuristic Interpretation of Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s Dear Wendy
By Angela Tumini. Introduction There were times in Europe when the traditions of the past were thrown aside and rejected in favor of the spirit of experimentation, and when manifestos were a recurrent avant-gardist feature expressed in extreme rhetoric, intended for shock value in order to achieve a revolutionary effect. […]
Jake’s Addiction: Dances with Smurfs vs. the Tweedle Dummies and the Proof of Artificial Gods
By Dustin Griffin. In Avatar, it is easier to believe in the marriage and integration of living and non-living and the world that was created a lot more than other contemporary CGI fests like say Alice. This is due to how the creative team structured the visuals and the storyline. […]
29th Vancouver International Film Festival, October 2010
By James Udden. It is hard to imagine a film festival better run that the Vancouver International Film Festival, now completing its 29th year during the first two weeks of October 2010. Hardly the largest or the most famous of film festivals, this does not seem to concern the organizers, […]
10th ERA New Horizons International Film Festival, Wroclaw 22 July – 1 August, 2010
A Report by Rob Dennis. Judging from the selections in the International Competition, boundless cheer was never likely to be a hallmark of the 10th Era New Horizons Film Festival, held in the welcoming and lively Lower Silesia town of Wroclaw. Festival director Roman Gutek promised a programme highlighting the […]
Festival International du Documentaire de Marseille, July 7-12, 2010
By Philip Cartelli. “Everything is burning. The universe is burning. I am burning.” So repeats the main character in Reason, Discussion and a Story (Jukti Takko Aar Gappo, 1974), one in a retrospective of films by the idiosyncratic Indian-Bangladeshi filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak (1925-1976) at this year’s Festival International du Documentaire […]
The 15th Annual San Francisco Silent Festival, July 15-18, 2010
By Janine Gericke. The 15th Annual San Francisco Silent Festival did not disappoint, offering everything from the genius of George Méliès to the majesty of a newly restored Metropolis. This year’s theme seemed to echo that of previous years: What’s lost has now been found. Friday’s Amazing Tales from the […]
Il Cinema Ritrovato, June 26 to July 3, 2010, Bologna, Italy
July 10, 2010
By Patrick Keating and Lisa Jasinski. Organized by the Cineteca Bologna, “Il Cinema Ritrovat” honors forgotten films rediscovered in the world’s archives, along with recently restored prints of major classics. For eight days in the summer of 2010, an international crowd of moviegoers ambled the porticoed streets of Bologna, a […]