Glasgow Film Festival Hits Growth Spurt

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Wednesday, 17 February 2010 06:35

Written by Laura Blum

Watch out, Edinburgh: Since debuting in 2005, the Glasgow Film Festival has shot up as the UK's number-three film event, luring 28,000 viewers last year and growing faster than its cinema siblings. 

Glasgow has taken to the Festival like Craig Ferguson has taken to late night.

Year six kicks off on February 18, 2010, with a gala screening of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's MicMacs, and wraps 10 days later with the world premiere of the Glasgow-filmed chiller Legacy. In between, 200 films, tributes, panels and parties will unfold in some two dozen venues around the Scottish city.
 
The brainchild of the Glasgow Film Theatre, GFF was created as a "best of fest," skimming the Cannes, Sundance and other festival cream for this pre-theatrical run — or any run at all. As opposed to the Edinburgh International Film Festival, whose "international" moniker suggests more of a focus on industry and discovery, films and filmmakers come to Glasgow for its cinephilic audiences, per GFF co-director Allison Gardner. 
 
With little more than $300,000 to play with, Glasgow has a fifth of Edinburgh's kitty. And that's not counting EIFF's half-century lead to catch up to. Jigging its way to ticket-holders' hearts, the Glaswegian upstart has swung such buzzy venues as a roving caravan and vintage abattoir.
 
Programming and stars are two other grooves in GFF's repertoire. James Earl Jones is taking out a moment from his London stage performance for a "conversation with," and Emma Thompson joins Richard Jobson in discussing The Journey, a short film about human trafficking he directed and which she executive-produced. From Time to Time summons Oscar laureate Julian Fellows for a Q&A on adapting Lucy M. Boston's family novel for the screen. 
 
Other celebrities in Glasgow include Scotsman Kevin MacDonald, whose Touching the Void and The Last King of Scotland will come under dissection in his "Director's Cut" talk; and the cast and crew of Gregory's Girl. Directed and written by the Oscar-winning Bill Forsyth, Scotland's most successful film is slated for a 30th-anniversary reunion. Though Scottish actor Tilda Swinton won't be in attendance, her star vehicle,  I Am Love, counts among the 50 or so UK premieres on the lineup.
 
Drawn from 800 world submissions, Festival fare cleaves into 15 strands, from youth and music to a retrospective of films starring Cary Grant and a tribute to Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. A favorite strand, "FrightFest," is a weekend of shivers courtesy of England's biggest horror fantasy film festival. Tim Sullivan's 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams is but one of its over-the-top and under-the-radar titles.
 
Scotland's audience-friendliest festival has yet to give Edinburgh cause for concern. Yet, with "ambassador" Gerard Butler now drumming up business for the Glasgow Film Office, and with the GFF on a roll, industry wags are taking new notice of Scotland's capital of commerce, finance — and cinema?
 
Glasgow Film Festival
Feb 18 - 28, 2010
12 Rose Street
Glasgow 
G3 6RB Scotland
+44 (0)141 332 6535
 
www.glasgowfilmfestival.org.uk

The South-by-Southwest Conference and Festival

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

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Published on Tuesday, 16 February 2010 22:49

Written by Eric Lurio

Austin is unlike the rest of Texas. For one thing, one of its mottoes is: "Keep Austin Weird” which is something the rest of the conservative state would never embrace.

Another thing that make it unique for the state, is that it encourages drinking, and the fact that it’s the home of hundreds of bars (The Live Music Capital of the World) is right there on the city’s official stationary. Weird art and weird culture are what make the Texas capitol tick, and one of the ways this is celebrated is the South-by-Southwest Conference and Festival (SxSW), which is held every March.

The concept goes back to 1986, when somebody in the city government noticed that once one of the local bands got the least bit famous, they’d go off to Nashville or Los Angeles and often never come back, so it was decided to have an annual convention for country music and rock musicians. The event was an immediate hit, and the three days of music and debauchery have been become one of the key events of the year -- not just in Austin but worldwide.

Not content with just musicians, the SxSW people decided to add film on the agenda in 1994, and now the SxSW Film Festival is  the biggest film festival in the South. But then again, everything’s supposed to be big in Texas. Last year, they screened 250 films, including 54 world premieres.

In 2007, the SxSW Interactive conference -- which is mostly about videogames and such -- was added to this. Each section is autonomous, and one ticket doesn’t get you into everywhere, that is if you don’t have the bucks.

Platinum (everything) and Gold (two out of three) tickets are expensive, and if you only are participating in one section, you can get tickets for individual performances and films. Plus there is a trade show, which is open to all three groups.

When not going to films, playing video games or listening to bands, there are panels and parties, which, unlike everywhere else, are the core of the event, rather than a sideshow. This is especially true of the annual block party, where those with passes can get free food and drink, or at least that’s what I heard.

A number of the films being shown this year have already debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, including the Duplass Bros.' Cyrus and Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways, both of which are quite good, but not great. As to the rest, I haven’t seen them and can’t really comment.

This is going to be my first SxSW, and never having been to Austin, I don’t really know what to expect.

What I do know, is that the Film and Interactive sections of the event take place from March 12th to the 20th this year (2010) and that most of the events for these are at the Convention Center (500 E Cesar Chavez St.). How to get to the movie theaters and whether or not there are press screenings is still a bit of a mystery.

The SxSW website isn’t all that informative on mass transit, and I don’t know when the bus system shuts down for the night. The interactive stuff is mostly during the day the films are mostly at night.

So if the bus system works at night, the whole thing might be as good as advertised.

South-by-Southwest Conference and Festival (SxSW)
March 12 - 20, 2010
The Austin Convention Center
500 E Cesar Chavez St.
Austin, TX

Documentary Fortnight at MoMA

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Published on Tuesday, 16 February 2010 07:29

Written by L E Shannon

Documentary Fortnight, MoMA‘s annual two-week showcase of recent nonfiction film and video takes place February 7 through March 3, 2010 in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters at MoMA. The ninth annual festival includes 20 features and 23 mid-length and short documentaries that represent the wide range of creative categories that extend the idea of the documentary form.

The festival‘s thematic programs focus on community and collaborative film and media initiatives from around the world.

Opening the festival are two U.S. premieres:

Christoph Draeger‘s romantic The End of the Remake trilogy of films about the 1960s, including My Generation (2007), Blow Up, Stroll On (2007), and Hippie Movie (2008).

David Christensen‘s feature The Mirror, which follows the mayor of a tiny Italian village as he attempts to build a gigantic mirror on a nearby mountaintop to reflect sunlight into the town square during the dark winter months.

Other features include:

George Gittoes‘ Miscreants of Taliwood—the third in a trilogy of documentaries that have premiered in this festival over the past several years—in which the director enters the remote and forbidden Tribal Belt of the northwest frontier of Pakistan disguised as an actor in the low-budget Pashto Tali movie industry.

Carol Dysinger‘s work-in-progress Camp Victory Afghanistan is a verite look at the U.S. National Guardsmen stationed in Herat, Afghanistan, and the Afghan officers assigned to them as mentees.

Cathryn Collins‘s Vlast / Power reveals, through brilliantly detailed interviews, the hushed-up story of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia‘s wealthiest man, now imprisoned in Siberia.

The closing night avant-premiere film is Johan Grimonprez‘s stunning Double Take, a hybrid documentary/narrative feature that casts Alfred Hitchcock as a paranoid history professor, unwittingly caught up in the subterfuges of the Cold War era, blackmailing housewives in coffee commercials.

This year‘s shorts include:

Alla Kovgan and David Hinton‘s Nora, based on the true story of dancer Nora Chipaumire, who returned to her native Zimbabwe and brought her history to life through performance.

Closing night selections include:

Diane Nerwen‘s Open House, which documents the recent development spree in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and chronicles how the neighborhood has been affected by the housing market

Heidrun Holzfiend‘s Za Zelazna / Behind the Iron Gate) looks at a modern housing estate built in Warsaw, Poland, in the mid-1960s and how it functions for its residents today.

A spotlight on the International Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam‘s Jan Vrijman Fund, which supports filmmakers in developing countries, features:

Iranian filmmaker Massoud Bakhshi‘s Tehran Has No More Pomegranates!

Chilean-based filmmakers Bettina Perut and Ivan Osnovikoff‘s News

The Afghanistan/UK production of Addicted in Afghanistan by Jawed Taiman.

Three U.S.-based initiatives include:

Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, which began in 1968 as an experiment in community-based filmmaking and economic growth, and supports films that celebrate Appalachian culture and an Indonesian video exchange project

New York City‘s Deep Dish Television, which produces and distributes grass-roots film and television

UnionDocs Collaborative, a program for nonfiction media research and group production, which showcases their most recent innovative projects. A program of films by four directors—Patty Chang, Liza Johnson, Sharon Lockhart, and Jeannie Simms—showcases how artists interact with their subjects in the creation of their films.

Many of the filmmakers will be present throughout the festival to introduce and discuss their films, which are almost all world, U.S., or New York premieres.

Documentary Fortnight, 2010 is organized by Sally Berger, Assistant Curator, with Maria Fosheim Lund, Director Liaison, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

For more information, visit www.moma.org.

Documentary Fortnight
February 7-March 3, 2010

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters
The Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street, New York City