film festivals
ronald.bergan
Greece is in economic meltdown. Austerity is hitting most of the population very hard. Businesses are closing down. The amount of homeless has increased. There are strikes and huge anti-government demonstrations throughout the country. What better time to hold a huge film festival?I confess that I was a little surprised that the 53rd Thessaloniki International Film Festival was to take place this year. But then I underestimated the tenacity and pride of the Greeks. They were determined to show the world that it was business as usual. From the images I had seen on television, I imagined a Read more ...
Ismene Brown
For Darcey Bussell it’s Baryshnikov in The Turning Point; for Carlos Acosta it’s The Red Shoes. No one at last week's starry premiere of Love Tomorrow at the Raindance Film Festival, when I asked them for their favourite dance film, mentioned Black Swan. Films about the ballet life are rareties - are the memorable ones those that are realistic about their strenuous world or are they the expressionistic shockers that let rip with the curtains and OTT fantasies?Indeed, it’s unusual to see a dance film being made at all, let alone picked for a celebrated indie film festival like Raindance this Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Clare Stewart arrived in London from Australia a year ago this month, into one of the biggest jobs in the UK film industry. For film buffs, it might seem like she entered a giant playground, a job to die for. Stewart is Head of Exhibition at the British Film Institute, a newly-created role that brings together responsibility for the day-to-day programming of the BFI Southbank and IMAX and for the institute’s festivals, including the London Film Festival, of which she is the festival director. Her first LFF, which theartsdesk will be covering extensively, is about to kick off.It’s a massive Read more ...
Steven Yates
Almaty may have lost its capital status to Astana in 1997, but this city of 1.6m inhabitants, about nine percent of the country's population, remains the commercial and cultural hub of Kazakhstan. The Eurasia Film Festival was first held here in 1998 with the support of the Filmmakers Union as a forum for movies from the CIS and Baltic countries. Though initially intended as an annual event, some years there hasn't been a festival at all - in 2009 it officially closed only to resume again in 2010. Prior to 2011 the program leaned heavily towards Central Asian films, but last year more Read more ...
james.woodall
The most radical Locarno ever: it's in the upper 20s Celsius in the southern Alps. The sky is cloudless blue. Moreover, not for one, or two, or three, or four nights in a row, but for FIVE has it not rained in this small resort. Next year no doubt it will again be the normal business of deluges in the Piazza Grande, and an air of anti-climactic, soul-freezing damp will prevail.Good weather helps the mood but does not, of course, affect the quality of films. Of the ones I’ve seen in the Piazza (not in competition) only Pablo Larraín’s No, about a 1988 referendum in Chile to extend or bring an Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It’s a normal day in Cannes, which means that I’ve just chatted to Mexican heart-throb Gael García Bernal on the beach, while a mini sand storm battered the doors of our marquee. Bernal is in town with his new film, No, about the events leading to the fall of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. But he took a moment to reminisce about his first year here, in 2000, when Amores Perros took Cannes by the scruff of the neck. The film that helped to ignite the Mexican New Wave was not even in the official competition that year, but it was the title on everyone’s lips.As the first week of this Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
It's a real pleasure to see Tim Roth strutting his stuff in Cannes, on screen and off. Roth knows the place well, having been here as an actor in Pulp Fiction, and as the director of The War Zone. This year he’s president of the jury for the un certain regard section of the festival – the second rung of the official selection, but often containing the more adventurous material. The role suits a man whose own career choices have been constantly edgy and surprising. “I’m hoping and expecting to find our deliberations excruciating,” he declares wonderfully in the programme.Roth is also starring Read more ...
ellin.stein
This weekend Robert Redford and his Sundance Institute are bringing a sort of taster version of the world’s leading showcase for independent (non-studio) English-language films to London. No one’s going to mistake Greenwich’s O2 Centre for an upscale skiing resort in the Rockies, home of the famed Sundance Film Festival which is held in January, but if Sundance London lacks the funky screening venues and bars of Park City, Utah, it also doesn’t require standing in line in the snow and freezing cold.The other thing that’s hard to replicate is the possibility that you might find yourself in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
This year’s Venice Film Festival has been awash with great directors from what one might call the old guard: David Cronenberg, Roman Polanski, William Friedkin, Aleksander Sokurov, Philippe Garrel. But when the jury presents its prizes tonight, I hope that it honours some of the new, young film-makers who have been the ones to set this festival alight.Chief amongst those has been a Brit, Steve McQueen, who follows his extraordinary debut, Hunger, with a second film that has shaken and stirred the critics here. The focus of Shame is Brandon (Michael Fassbender), a successful New Yorker whose Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Once upon a time - and for a very long time, at that, under its hard-line Marxist leader, Enva Hoxha - world cinema was represented in Albania by Norman Wisdom. Today, 26 years after Hoxha's death and 21 years after the fall of Communism there, Durrës, the country's second largest city, has just hosted an international film festival whose guests included Francis Ford Coppola, Jiří Menzel and Claudia Cardinale. Times are changing, it would seem, and Albania is emerging at last from its wretched isolation into sophisticated cosmopolitan glamour. Though not quite as quickly or smoothly as Read more ...
james.woodall
Think what you will about Switzerland and the Swiss – calm, ordered country, treasured environment, cautious, democratically precise people – but look behind the scenes and things can seem quite scary. Vol spécial (Special Flight), by Swiss-French-speaking Fernand Melgar, is one of the most intense documentaries I have ever seen. Depicting asylum seekers in a detention centre, it is a vibrant portrait of human (entirely male) endeavour warping into despair under an unkind but, as the Swiss see it, necessary law of repatriation: in 1994, they voted for what is known as the federal law on Read more ...