I’ve written a festival report for desistfilm focussing on the AV Festival’s ‘Resistance’ strand, which spanned 80 years of British documentary filmmaking. The report is here.
Tag: Festival Report
Festival Report: Asturian shorts
More than 70 shorts were screened in Gijón – films from around the world, in and out of competition. I concentrated on the Spanish ones (for obvious reasons) but even then I didn’t manage to see all of them. In the end I’ve written about some of the ones that were in the Asturian section – I’m not familiar with cinema from the region, so this seemed like a good place to start. If you cast your mind back to my Gijón dispatches, you may remember that I had one evening when I wasn’t well and ended up returning to the hotel rather than going to the final session of the night. That session was for the Asturian films that were in competition, so I’d like to thank Alicia Albares, Roberto F. Canuto, Pablo A. Neila, Kiko and Javier Prada, Pablo Vara, Daniel Vázquez, and Benjamín Villaverde for giving me access to their respective films after the fact. For reasons of space, I could only focus on three of the films in my report, but hopefully I will have the occasion to write about the others in the future. My report can be found over at Eye for Film – here.
Festival Report: Gijón, part 2
The second of two reports I’ve written for desistfilm about films I saw in Gijón is now online. This one focuses on the Convergencias films – in essence, I’ve looked at what the films have in common (interesting use of sound / silence and idiosyncratic visuals).
Links to reviews will continue to appear in the other post(s).
UPDATE (29/12/15): the 1-hour recording of El séptimo vicio that centred on Convergencias is now online (here). I am in the first twenty minute section (specifically 04:20-09:21) alongside Félix Dufour-Laperrière and Víctor Paz. The middle section consists of Martín Cuesta, Pablo González-Taboada, Eduardo Guillot, Carlota Moseguí and David Tejero discussing the state of film criticism in Spain, and then the final section is Martín and Víctor.
Festival Report: Gijón, part 1
Over at desistfilm, the first of two reports I am writing about films I saw in Gijón is now online. This one focuses on the experimental titles in the FICXLab section.
The second report is an overview of Convergencias and it should be online later this week.
Festival Report: Curtocircuíto
As I’ve already said, I didn’t manage to go to Santiago de Compostela for Curtocircuíto but the festival gave me access to most of the films in the competitive categories. Besides the films that I reviewed for Eye for Film (and some films that I saw in Edinburgh earlier this year – Scrapbook (Mike Hoolboom, 2015), I Am a Spy (Sarah Wood, 2015), and Sound of a Million Insects, Light of a Thousand Stars (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2014)), the standouts for me included World of Tomorrow (Don Hertzfeldt, 2015) [which is available to rent on Vimeo], The Liquid Casket / Wilderness of Mirrors (Paul Clipson, 2014), Embargo (Johann Lurf, 2014), Paisaje con perro roto / Landscape With Broken Dog (Orazio Leogrande, 2014), Tehran-Geles (Arash Nassiri, 2014), Descubrimiento de Américo / Discovery of Américo (Miguel Mariño, 2014), and Historia Cerebro / Brain Story (Borja Santomé, 2015).
The latter two films were part of a collection of Galician shorts and given that I’ve been considering the Novo Cinema Galego recently, I decided to focus my festival report on films from that section – my report can be found at Eye for Film. I specifically focussed on Cruz Piñón (Xisela Franco, 2015), Hyohakusha, caminante sin rumbo / Hyohakusha, Aimless Wanderer (Xisela Franco and Anxela Caramés, 2015), and Volontè (Marcos Flórez, Helena Girón, Rafa Mallo, Roberto Mallo, Miguel Prado, Lucas Vázquez de la Rubia, Lucía Vilela, 2015). My choice of films was based on the connections that I could make between them but the collection as a whole illustrated the diversity of cinema being made in Galicia.
Festival Report: Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2015
The ‘media arts’ aspect of Berwick marks it out as a bit different as a film festival (at least in terms of the film festivals I’ve been to so far) and the artists’ installations are placed in buildings / spaces of historical interest throughout the town – it’s a good excuse to explore the area, although I didn’t do as much wandering as last year. I’ve written a festival report for desistfilm focussed on the installations, short films and midlengthers – here. My overall favourite of the festival was Hacked Circuit (Deborah Stratman, 2014) but I’ll also be looking out for future films by Marko Grba Singh (Abdul & Hamza), Daphné Hérétakis (Archipels, granites dénudés), and Anna Sofie Hartmann (Limbo). My preview post on the festival now has the links to the films I reviewed.
Nobody Knows Anybody 