Author: Robert Koehler

Days in Berlin 2010

Film festival, Film review


James Benning’s Ruhr

By Robert Koehler

Last things first: Having arrived here in Berlin from the Rotterdam film festival, I wanted to let any readers tracking Filmjourney that my in-depth comments on IFFR will be posted following Berlin. That’s because Rotterdam had too many worthy films to merely mention in passing, and because the programming raised ideas and notions worth mulling at greater length.

For now, let’s say that the Rotterdam Tiger jury (led by Amat Escalante) got things generally right, with Tigers for Paz Fabrega’s Agua fria del mar, Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s Alamar and Anocha Suwichakornpong’s Mundane History…

Read more

Cannes Bloody Cannes

Commentary, Film festival


Drag Me to Hell (left); Enter the Void (top right); Thirst (bottom right)

By Robert Koehler

Lost amid the general, conventional sense of the Cannes competition lineup (see here) as a colloquium of auteurs–from Haneke to Campion, Audiard to Tsai, To to Resnais–is the fact that, for better or worse, the Palais will be the site of a bloodbath this year. There will be a whole lot of killers stalking around the lineup that Thierry Fremaux and Gilles Jacob have constructed. In his good rundown of all the sections announced today, complete with reference links, IFC Daily‘s David …

Read more

Days in Buenos Aires: Lisandro Alonso

Film festival

By Robert Koehler

Was this the single most memorable image of the entire BAFICI? Perhaps. Just as Godard’s festival trailer for last year’s Viennale, Une Catastrophe, stamped the entire festival with the filmmaker’s own form of visual-audio music and sense of the Zeitgeist, so Lisandro Alonso’s BAFICI trailer, mysteriously titled S/T, seemed to stamp this edition of BAFICI. I would say that it’s the single greatest festival trailer I’ve ever seen: A close, static shot trained on an owl, in turn very much trained on the camera, its whole body undulating with the inhaling and exhaling of breath …

Read more

Days in Buenos Aires: Miguel Gomes

Film festival, Film review

Robert Koehler has sent in a few final updates from his recent trip to BAFICI; next stop: Cannes. -Doug

Miguel Gomes, writer-director of Our Beloved Month of August, is seen here answering audience questions after a screening of his brilliant, Lewis Carroll-like first feature, The Face You Deserve–which he thinks is better than August. (I would respectfully disagree.)

After the screening, Miguel with Mark Peranson outside the cinemas in the Abasto shopping mall. Mark thinks enough of August to make it the cover of Cinema Scope‘s Winter ’09 issue (in what is surely one of the …

Read more

Days in Buenos Aires

Film festival

Robert Koehler has gone straight from the Guadalajara International Flim Festival to the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival (BAFICI), and his first photos are coming in… -Doug

By ROBERT KOEHLER


Arrival in BAFICI means finding the Espacio from last year has been spruced up….here, a group lingers after a panel discussion on how to pitch a project….no, BAFICI isn’t entirely about art.


Just about everyone’s arrived at BAFICI, including (lt. to rt.) Cinema Scope publisher and Vancouver programmer and Waiting for Sancho director Mark Peranson, our dear friend and Argentine critic (and fabled former BAFICI artistic director) Quintin, and …

Read more

Days in Guadalajara: Wrap-up

Film festival


El Arbol

By ROBERT KOEHLER

28 awards is obviously way too many to hand out at the end of a festival, but it’s commonplace at Guadalajara. The one good thing about doling out so many is that a few will hit the mark….even while most are frankly ridiculous. Those would be the laurels loaded on worthless dreck like Gerardo Tort’s embarrassing Viaje Redondo and Cronicas Chilangas, another one of those post-Amores Perros multi-character, multi-track scenarios I noted in a previous post on the sorry state of this batch of competing Mexican films. With so many prizes, so many …

Read more