By Daria Kabanova. A man walks into a conference room where a Formula One pre-race meeting is about to begin. The camera loves the man’s face, even though it is tired, conflicted, frustrated. The room is full of people, but the camera is only marginally interested in them: it follows […]
Declarations of Independence: American Cinema and the Partiality of Independent Production, John Berra, (2008)
Book review by Sebastian Manley. Variously characterised as an American art cinema, a B-division of Hollywood, and a marketplace of talent and ideas, the US ‘independent’ sector has inspired a good deal of stimulating debate and speculation since its inception. In this decade in particular, independent film has been the […]
Edinburgh Film Festival | 15-26 June, 2011
By Yun-hua Chen. This year’s EIFF feels very different in all aspects, not only led by the new producer Jimmy Mulligan but also affected by the general budget cut in the UK. It is thus an interesting occasion to observe how film festivals tackle restraining material resources. Instead of red […]
Silverdocs Film Festival, 20-26 June, 2011
July 6, 2011
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 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 […]
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 […]