Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2016 – Critic’s Choice
Senior Critic, Kurt Brokaw views all 21 features at the 21st annual festival which runs March 3rd to 13th
Senior Critic, Kurt Brokaw views all 21 features at the 21st annual festival which runs March 3rd to 13th
Slave rebellion, a romance for the history books, and girls being their odd, tough selves combine for one potent antidote to Hollywood’s dearth of black lives on screen. Credit goes to Sundance 2016, according to staff writer Neil Kendricks, who says this festival “defiantly flies a multi-racial flag of true diversity.”
ITVFest’s executive director Philip Gilpin thinks the peaceful Vermont location adds an invaluable dimension to the festival focused on Internet entertainment. Plus, he said that when execs are shocked by the line-up because “what they’re seeing is better than what they are watching most nights on TV. A lot of these projects are screen ready.”
“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.
Remember 2008’s spectacular doc-based-on-a-book Man On Wire? Now it’s fictionalized as The Walk and Kurt Brokaw LOVED it. Find out what else our senior critic adored at this year’s New York Film Festival, running September 25-October 11, 2015.
How did the buying and selling stack up at this year’s TIFF? Courtney Sheehan takes the temp of the ever-feverish world of independent film exhibition and distribution by talking with Adam Birnbaum (Avon Theatre), Julie Anderson Friesen (Cinema Falls), and Andrew Carlin (Oscilloscope Laboratories).
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.
If cinema can function as a vehicle for a nation’s collective memory, Afghanistan only recently began to recollect itself. Pietra Brettkelly’s documentary, A Flickering Truth, mines the Afghan Film Archive for the nation’s cultural history and follows the team of people who are working to protect it and share it with the world.