By Elias Savada. Another year and another annual rite of passage for short form filmmakers and screenwriters (the event is fully titled DC Shorts Film Festival & Screenplay Competition), which arrives here for 11 days in September. With all the angst coming from the White House up the street, it’s time […]
Film Scatches: A Diagram of Agony and Joy – Waiting for Sevdah (2017)
August 3, 2017
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Waiting for Sevdah is a 41 minute poetic self-portrait by Saidin Salkic, a Bosnian filmmaker now based in Australia. The film […]
Film Scratches: The Unlived Lives of Parents – My Heart is an Octopus or My Father on the Shore of the Black Sea (2016)
August 3, 2017
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. My Heart is an Octopus or My Father on the Shore of the Black Sea, by Bulgarian filmmaker Neno Belchev, is […]
Call for Contributions: Artist, Transport, Travel
July 31, 2017
From Guest Editor Gary McMahon. Texts are invited for a Film International issue on this theme: Artist/Mode of Transport, or: Genre/Mode of Travel. The rest of the remit is yours to navigate. The artist may be before or behind the camera. Surveying film-making this way need not to be exhaustive but rather impressionistic. […]
Film Scratches: Tutorials for the Apocalypse – La Fuga (2014)
July 24, 2017
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. La Fuga is a suite of many linked short videos by Mexico-based artist Adrián Regnier Chávez. The videos are modular in […]
Film Scratches: Dark Comedy of Dangerous Rhetoric – Stenography (2016)
July 24, 2017
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Stenography, Lee Murray’s fabulously complex, sophisticated and enthralling hour-long epic comedy about political turmoil in Munich 1923, begins modestly with a […]
Film Scratches: Meditations on the Ordinary – The Short Trilogy of Peace (2016)
July 23, 2017
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Martin Sagadin in a Slovenian filmmaker living in Canterbury, New Zealand. His Short Trilogy of Peace consists of three shorts, which […]
Call for Submissions: The Trail of the Zodiac Killer – Essays on Popular Culture (Edited Collection)
This past spring marked the tenth anniversary of the release of David Fincher’s Zodiac, the legacy of which continues to increase. Viewers and scholars continue to analyze the narrative power of Fincher and screenwriter-producer James Vanderbilt’s journalistic rendition – based on Robert Graysmith’s gripping works of journalism – of the […]
Film Scratches: Conjuring with Cameras – Savage Witches (2012)
July 1, 2017
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Savage Witches, a feature length film by Daniel Fawcett and Clara Pais (collectively known as The Underground Film Studio), is itself […]
Film Scratches: Canaries in the Mine – Focus (2014)
June 26, 2017
Film Scratches focuses on the world of experimental and avant-garde film, especially as practiced by individual artists. It features a mixture of reviews, interviews, and essays. A Review by David Finkelstein. Focus is a thoughtful, intriguing 7 minute film essay by Simon Welch. The film is a portrait of Pierre, a retired […]