Month: March 2009

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 …

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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 …

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Days in Guadalajara: Photo Diary

Film festival

By ROBERT KOEHLER


Guadalajara’s festival sign tells visitors that they’ve arrived….at the festival hotel, Fiesta Americana.


Guadalajara’s Market space before the crowds hit, when I was the only journalist roaming around.


The festival banner, but does anyone really see it? Note the “HD” logo at the bottom…this is the festival hotel for visiting journalists, the Hotel Diana, five blocks from the cinemas.


Critics rarely get to sleep in festival hotel beds like this….


Guadalajara considers itself a better city for contemporary art than Mexico City, and here’s evidence…note the large banner to the left, on the side of one of …

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Days in Guadalajara: Day 4

Film festival, Film review


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 …

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Days in Guadalajara: Day 3

Film festival, Film review

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 …

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AFI Fest Taps Robert Koehler

Commentary, Film festival

Robert Koehler has been a longtime supporter of–and occasional contributor to–Film Journey, and I have written many times of my respect and admiration for Rose Kuo, who has transformed AFI FEST in Los Angeles the past couple of years into a major festival for world cinema, so I’m delighted to quote Variety‘s announcement yesterday:

“Robert Koehler, longtime film critic and freelance writer for Variety and other publications, has been tapped director of programming for this year’s edition of AFI Fest.

Due to assume his duties in May, Koehler will work as the fest’s No. 2 under artistic

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