Festival Dispatch
Visits to cinema showcases around the world
What started in 1994 as a two-day, modestly attended, parochially English affair has, in the decades following, tripled in length, welcomes more than ten times the number of visitors, and is now a tent-pole event on the international documentary industry calendar.
Kashish has grown into south Asia’s biggest queer film festival, was voted as one of the top five LGBT festivals in the world, and is today India’s only LGBT film festival given official permission to be held in a mainstream cinema hall.
Arabian Nights is essentially composed of a series of indulgences and digressions—some angry and some absurd, all imaginatively composed and unconcerned with the boundaries of traditional storytelling.
The strain from the unfortunate state of worldwide film funding has been felt more than ever at this year’s festival. Features Louder Than Bombs, In the Shadow of Women, One Floor Below.
It was when winter finally started conceding to spring, with arctic temperatures reversing course overnight into short-sleeve weather and blinding sunshine, that word came through that Albert Maysles had passed away.
Berlin oder ein Traum mit Sahne (Berlin or a Dream with Cream), The Measures, Seven Signs That Mean Silence, Letters to Max, Babash, Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air, Broken Tongue, Sugarcoated Arsenic, The Dragon Is the Frame
Film festival programming isn’t, and frankly should never be, an exact science.
Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, Manoel de Oliveira’s The Old Man of Belem, Gabriel Abrantes's Taprobana, Eugène Green's La Sapienza, Alexandre Larose’s brouillard - passage #14, Eric Baudelaire's Letters to Max
David Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, Olivier Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria, the Dardennes' Two Days, One Night, Lisandro Alonso's Jauja
Bertrand Bonello’s Saint Laurent, Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep
The True/False Film Fest, the little doc survey that takes place in Columbia, Missouri, every late winter, is among the best programs on the continent.
Magic Mushroom Mountain Movie, Around the World (aka Speedy Speedy California Sky), Liahona, The Invisible World, Movement in Squares, Figure-Ground, murmurations, Falling Notes Unleaving, Ten Notes on a Summer Day
Monument Film sculpture, anders, Molussien (differently, Molussia), Phantoms of a Libertine, Audition, When Faces Touch, Collections, Martina’s Playhouse, From Romance to Ritual, Spying, Confidential Pt. 2, The Extravagant Shadows
Juan Sebastian Jacome's Ruta de la Luna, Kenya Márquez’s Fecha de caducidad, Ana Endara Mislov's Curundú, Vero Bollo's Burwa dii Ebo