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Film Festivals
MoCCA Fest 2019: Indie Comics & Zines in NYC
- Details
- Category: Film Festivals
- Published on Thursday, 14 March 2019 20:58
- Written by Renzo Adler
MoCCA Fest returns to NYC April 6 to 7th. Held at Metropolitan West (639 W 46th St.), MoCCA Fest is one of New York’s largest events for indie comics, zines, and animation with comics veterans and up-and-comers alike attending. Organized by the Society of Illustrators, this year’s guests of honor include Eisner-winning, Emmy-nominated artist Bill Sienkiewicz (Elektra: Assassin), cartoonist Liana Finck (A Bintel Brief), Edie Fake (Gaylord Phoenix, Little Stranger), and cartoonist Keith Knight (The Knight Life, (th)ink, K Chronicles).
Drawing Across Borders: The Artists of Cartooning for Peace, is an exhibition of art and cartoons from the humanitarian and human rights focused cartooning collective. Displayed artists include Ares, Cristina Sampaio, Jean Plantu, Michel Kichka, Ann Telnaes, Patrick Chappette, Firoozeh Mozaffari, Emad Hajjaj, Damien Glez, Jeff Danziger, and Elena Ospina. The festival also includes industry panels, a RisoLab from SVA for those of you that want to dabble in Risograph printing, as well as after parties, and more.
To learn more, go to: https://www.societyillustrators.org/mocca-arts-festival
MoCCA Fest
April 6 - 7, 2019
Metropolitan West
639 W 46th St.
New York, NY 10036
Film Series Review—Open Roads: New Italian Cinema
- Details
- Category: Film Festivals
- Published on Saturday, 02 June 2018 03:54
- Written by Kevin Filipski
Open Roads: New Italian Cinema 2018
Series runs through June 6, 2018
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The Tavianis' Rainbow: A Private Affair |
With the recent death of Ermanno Olmi, Italian cinema lost one of its true masters. As part of the 17th annual Open Roads: New Italian Cinema, another recent casualty, Vittorio Taviani, is represented by his and his brother Paolo’s last collaboration, Rainbow: A Private Affair, an intimate chronicle of love and politics amid Turin anti-fascists in 1944. Bolstered by the appealing Valentina Belle—who plays the woman both protagonists want—it’s not the final masterpiece its directors’ fans hoped for, but has the Tavianis’ characteristic humanity in abundance. (The brothers’ 1982 WWII classic, The Night of the Shooting Stars, is also showing during the series.)
Valentina Cortese—a luminous actress in films by Fellini, Antonioni and Truffaut (for whose Day for Night she got a Best Supporting Actress Oscar)—is remembered in Diva!, Francesco Patierno’s hodgepodge of a valentine that cheekily has several actresses playing her at different times in her career as well as film clips and actual archival footage. Another noted director is feted in Marco Ferreri: Dangerous but Necessary, Anselma Dell’Olio’s sympathetic portrait of Italy’s enfant terrible who paraded crudely vicious satires like The Grand Bouffe, The Last Woman and The Ape Woman (the latter of which is showing during this series) during the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.
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Sergio Castellitto's Fortunata |
Sergio Castellitto—a sensitive actor from noteworthy films by Marco Bellocchio, among others—returns with his latest directorial project, Fortunata. Again written by his wife Margaret Mazzantini and centering on Fortunata, a single mother dealing with her rambunctious young daughter, overbearing ex-husband and her kid’s therapist whom she falls for. Castellitto and Mazzantini take their ironically-named heroine’s woes and shove them down our throats, but Jasmine Trinca’s full-throttle performance in the title role makes this rather diffuse melodrama more than a bumpy ride.
In Boys Cry, another brother directing team, Damiano and Favio D’Innocenzo, presents a compelling if familiar look at Rome’s lower-class denizens and organized crime as a couple of friends who begin to relish their new assignment as mob hit men. The Place, Paolo Genovese’s stylish-looking but irredeemably shallow Twilight Zone-ish drama about a stranger who sits in a restaurant day after day and the desperate people who come looking for a way out of their miserable lives, starts out divertingly, then falls prey to a claustrophobic, mind-numbing sameness.
As a priest who dangerously butts heads with local criminals in his hometown, Mimmo Borelli gives a forceful but restrained performance that centers Vincenzo Marra’s insightful character study Equilibrium. Similarly, in Francesca Comencini’s soggy romantic dramedy Stories of Love That Cannot Belong to This World—in which Lucia Mascino and Thomas Trabacci play mismatched lovers who meet cute, fight cute and break up not-so-cute—Valentina Belle, as in Rainbow, captivates as the new (younger) woman in the man’s life.
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Ferzan Ozpetek's Naples in Veils |
Finally, Naples in Veils is another of Ferzan Ozpetek’s elegant but empty dramas, as mysterious Naples co-stars in this weird tale of a medical examiner—after an amazing one-night stand with a young stud—discovers that not only might he be the corpse she’s conducting an autopsy on, but that he may have a twin brother, whom she (naturally) begins to fall for. As always, Giovanna Mezzogiorno invests the heroine with as much humanity, honesty and charm as she can, but Ozpetek’s too busy being cutesy and slippery to allow anything original to seep through.
Open Roads: New Italian Cinema 2018
Film Society of Lincoln Center, New York, NY
filmlinc.org
High Falls Film Festival Spotlights Rochester Talent
- Details
- Category: Film Festivals
- Published on Tuesday, 07 October 2014 23:30
- Written by Jessica Beard
If films focused on women and their experiences are rare, women in roles behind the camera are rarer still. Shorter still is the list of film festivals with a mission to represent female perspectives. The 12th annual High Falls Film Festival — held in Rochester, New York, from October 23 - 26, 2014 — carries on its tradition of honoring independent films by female storytellers who work on both sides of the camera.
The opening film I Know a Woman Like That was produced by mother-daughter team Elaine and Virginia Madsen. Virginia, best known for Sideways (2004), produced the film that her mother — poet, producer and playwright Elaine — directed. The director will be on hand to discuss the movie. With Q&As following most films, festival goers get an ample opportunity to interact with filmmakers.
The festival will debut three world and two U.S. premieres among its 19 screenings of over 35 international and U.S. films, documentaries and shorts. Paula Hernandez's U.S. romantic drama Un Amor Argentina — about adolescent infatuation that unfolds over time into an enduring love triangle — premieres on October 23. Alexis Krasilovsky's U.S. documentary Let Them Eat Cake premieres October 24 and looks at pastries through a scope both sensual and socioeconomic.
Also debuting October 24 is Courtney Cobb's world-premiere documentary Crafting a Nation about the breweries behind the craft beer craze. A second world-premiere documentary is Caroline Krugmann's We Weren't Given Anything for Free, about 22-year-old Annita Malavasi becoming one of the Italian resistance's few female commanders in German-occupied Italy. Lastly, Ann LeSchander's romantic comedy The Park Bench uses both live action and animation to tell the story of a graduate student and her American Literature tutor falling in love over their park bench talks.
There will be three separate short programs: Short Cuts, the Women of SoFA Short Program put on by RIT's School of Film and Animation, and a free program of 14 Children's Shorts from five countries. One of these films has special Rochester interest, as it was made in the local Public School 8 after-school program.
Another feature of particular interest for Rochester-area film enthusiasts is the educational panel Lights, Camera Action: Tips for local Filmmakers. More than just adding local interest, these regional features foreground HFFF's affiliation with Rochester as the birthplace of motion picture film: George Eastman founded the Eastman Kodak Company in 1888 and invented motion picture film there, according to the HFFF website.
To learn more, go to: http://highfallsfilmfestival.com/
High Falls Film Festival
October 23 - 26, 2014
Dryden Theatre
900 East Ave
Rochester, NY 14604
Little 5
240 East Ave
Rochester, NY 14604
Getting Real With "Red Hollywood" At The Film Society
- Details
- Category: Film Festivals
- Published on Monday, 24 March 2014 16:35
- Written by Jack Angstreich
The Film Society of Lincoln Center is screening Noël Burch and Thom Andersen’s not uninteresting essay-film, Red Hollywood, which explores the contribution of screenwriters who were Communists or fellow travelers, in its documentary series, The Art of the Real, which runs from April 11th to April 26th, 2014.
The outcome of this collaboration is a work devoid of any aesthetic dimension but not without some intellectual rewards. It is a remarkable fact that of the many clips of old films employed in Red Hollywood, so few invite an artistic appreciation of the contributions of these victims of the McCarthyite blacklist. (That so many of the clips are from poor copies only enhances this impression.) One interesting exception is an extraordinary scene between Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Genevieve Tobin from the 1934 Success at Any Price, scripted by John Howard Lawson. At least as a piece of writing — and superb acting by Fairbanks — this is exceedingly impressive. Interviews with blacklistees such as Paul Jarrico, Alfred Levitt and Ring Lardner Jr are illuminating, but the real highlight among these is the brilliant commentary by Abraham Polonsky, probably the greatest writer and director among those expelled from Hollywood in the wake of the “Red Scare”. 70 Lincoln Center Plaza
New York, NY 10023
212 875 5601
212 875 5601
