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 […]
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 […]
The director who must (not?) be forgotten: Elio Petri and the legacy of Italian political cinema, Part 2
By Larry Portis. This article was originally published in Film International 46, vol. 8, no. 4, 2010. We republish it here in homage to our most valued and missed collaborator Larry Portis who passed away suddenly on June 4, 2011. Read Part 1 here. In the first part of my […]
The director who must (not?) be forgotten: Elio Petri and the legacy of Italian political cinema, Part 1
By Larry Portis. This article was originally published in Film International 44, vol. 8, no. 2, 2010. We republish it here in homage to our most valued and missed collaborator Larry Portis who passed away suddenly on June 4, 2011, age 67. Read Part 2 here. The great political […]
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 […]