Author: Robert Koehler

Juntos

By ROBERT KOEHLER

I’m not going to devote any more moments than they deserve to Guadalajara’s Mexican competition. It was universally deemed bad (by everyone, critics, programmers, sales company reps alike), much worse than last year’s crop, which at least yielded Fernando Eimbcke’s Lake Tahoe and, in its modest way, Rodrigo Pla’s The Desert Within. Pla’s film, in this current group, would look like a high masterpiece. Only one competition film (we’re not including Gerardo Naranjo’s AFI-screened I’m Gonna Explode, since it’s quite old—from last fall—and immeasurably better than anything else) ranked, and that was Carlos Serrano’s …

By ROBERT KOEHLER

In the last post, I had promised some thoughts on Philippe Grandrieux, the director of Sombre, Un vie nouvelle and his newest, Un lac. Well, more precisely, I noted that I hoped to discover Grandrieux. On my third day in Guadalajara, I was able to see the first screening of Un lac, but not until my seventh full day did I see Un vie nouvelle—a mere seven years late, after its 2002 festival tour—and screenings of Sombre, his first film from 1999, wouldn’t happen until I left Guadalajara. So without a complete …

By ROBERT KOEHLER

With the happy sights today of one of my favorite comrades in cinephilia, critic-programmer Roger Koza (see his Spanish-language site, ojosabiertos.wordpress.com); the always convivial Screen International critic from Tel Aviv (via Paris) Dan Fainaru; veteran Latin American cinema programmer Denis De La Roca; Gerald Peary, Boston Phoenix critic (and maker of the new doc about American critics, For the Love of Movies, screening here fresh off its South by Southwest premiere); and Holland Film’s best ambassador, Claudia Landsberger, I knew Guadalajara had begun in earnest. After breakfast with the Hollywood Reporter’s man in Mexico …

By ROBERT KOEHLER

Being told that you’re the first member of the press to check in at a film festival and get a badge produces strange feelings. Beyond the automatic response—“Where is everyone else?”—is the lurking sense that you’re the only one of your kind within earshot or cell phone signal. And in a city the size of Guadalajara, Mexico’s second largest, that sense is stranger, though only really an illusion. I merely showed up early to the party. Most arrive Wednesday (when I’m writing this, in the lobby of the Cine Foro, the University of Guadalajara’s downtown cinematheque, whose …