New York Jewish Film Festival 2016 – Critic’s Choices
Senior film critic Kurt Brokaw selects his favorites from the 25th edition of the NYJFF, which runs January 13-26, 2016. Among them are Ellis, Rabin, The Last Day, Dear God, and The Law.
Senior film critic Kurt Brokaw selects his favorites from the 25th edition of the NYJFF, which runs January 13-26, 2016. Among them are Ellis, Rabin, The Last Day, Dear God, and The Law.
“The whole process from rehearsing to shooting was really fascinating, enjoyable, challenging and difficult,” Chevalier actor, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, told The Independent at NYFF 2015. They rehearsed on location and brought their own ideas on character and improvisation. “I had a feeling that everything could change at any moment and that added a lot to film,” he said.
“Yes, it’s a portrait,” explains Laszlo Nemes about his debut feature Son of Saul. “It’s a very reduced scope of an image and it actually corresponds to the limitations of a human being: you see very little, you know very little in a concentration camp. And the human experience, with hindsight, is different but the people who were there knew much less. I wanted to convey how limited we could be in this kind of situation.”
In 2001, Athina Rachel Tsangari graced our cover. Fourteen years later, Dana Knight sat down with Tsangari, NYFF’s 2015 Filmmaker In Residence, at the Sarajevo Film Festival. Learn why men ask: “We’re not like that and who are you, a woman, judging us in this way?” about Tsangari’s latest film, Chevalier.
Fittingly, Frederick Wiseman attended the 40th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival with his 40th documentary, In Jackson Heights, about a diverse New York neighborhood in flux. The Independent asks Wiseman to discuss the editing process, the communities he discovered in Jackson Heights, and the notion of screening all of his films in a continuous 100 hour stretch.
Counting is a personal, essayistic documentary in 15 chapters where Cohen composes images, sound and music with remarkable intensity, combining them into a hypnotic foray through the metropolises of our world: New York, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Istanbul, Porto and a city intended to remain unknown. Time passes and stands still at the same time. Counting has it’s North American Premiere at BAMcinemaFEST 2015 on Saturday, June 27th – a Q&A with Cohen will follow the screening.
“What’s your writing process like?” Asks Knight. “Pretty basic.” Replies Alex Ross Perry.
“It is indeed a documentary about a huge fiction!” says Sophie Deraspe, the director of The Anima Profile, to Staff Writer Dana Knight, during their recent conversation.
The Filmatic Festival is a forum for that film geek and science nerd in all of us. It describes itself…