Category: Film festival

My final wrap-up of the Los Angeles Film Festival:

Daratt (Dry Season)

Continuing my exploration of the excellent New Crowned Hope series, I caught up with Mahamat Saleh Haroun’s entry from Chad, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival last year. The filmmaker builds off the themes of vengeance and forgiveness in Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito by setting his story during the period following the Chadian civil war, when universal amnesty was officially declared. Rejecting that policy, an elderly man whose son was murdered during the conflict asks his grandson to avenge his father, and …

More from the Los Angeles Film Festival:

Copacabana

When Argentine filmmaker Martin Rejtman was asked by a television station to document a large community event, he settled on something he knew little about–a Bolivian music festival in Buenos Aires, and its surrounding immigrant culture. A filmmaker noted for his highly scripted fictional features, Rejtman approached the task with an entirely new conceit: look, listen, learn, record intuitively, and discover a form later.

The resulting film is a wide-eyed exploration of the Bolivian experience that seems like a traditional documentary turned inside out. Beginning with the Nuestra SeÒora de Copacabana festival, …

The Los Angeles Film Festival is well underway, and this the second year the festival has been held in Westwood Village, an outdoor entertainment plaza featuring several movie palaces and a plethora of eateries between UCLA and the largely Persian neighborhood to the south. The location continues to work beautifully–far better than the scattered set-up of previous years. Sunny and breezy, with temperatures hovering between the upper 70s and lower 80s, it has been downright refreshing to stroll (or run, as the case may be) between venues.

The festival’s newest venue is Landmark’s “national flagship” theater at the Westside Pavilions …

Wang Bing’s He Fengming

CANNES 2007óTHE FINAL RANKINGS

By Robert Koehler

Below are my final rankings of the films across all sections that I saw before, during and just after Cannes, from best to worst. Given the importance of Cristian Nemescuís California Dreaminí, which won the top prize in the Un Certain Regard competition, I delayed this final ranking list until being able to see Nemescuís film at its first post-Cannes screening in the Cinevegas film festival. Six of these titles include the short films comprising the omnibus film, The State of the World, whose individual parts varied …

Go Go Tales

By Robert Koehler

So deep–and I mean deep–was the impression left by Abel Ferrara’s fabulous, ecstatic Go Go Tales and Asia Argento in particular, that I would suggest that Cannes introduce a new prize in honor of Asia’s oral hyperactivity, which effectively took over the festival for a few days running. I would suggest a Tongue d’Or. Not even Naomi Kawase’s mad, mad heroes trekking through woods and up a mountain in The Mourning Forest, nor the morally-haunted, white-gloved female executioner in Yinan Diao’s masterpiece, Night Train, nor the slow-motion flight of skateboarders in Gus …

Silent Light

By Robert Koehler

The Palmares were handed out Sunday night, in what was alternately a
respectable and nutty show (with Charlotte Rampling, Carole Bouquet
and Jane Fonda keeping things classy, and The Diving Bell and the
Butterfly director Julian Schnabel blabbering on like a fool). The
results could have been worse, and were in some categories striking
and even brave. Several of the recipients, happily enough, line up
with what I would argue were the few really worthy films in the
competition: A Jury prize for Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light (shared
with Marjane Satrapi’s disappointing Persepolis); the …