Category Archives: Film Festivals

Edinburgh International Film Festival 2011

Film Festivals

by Gareth Negus and Matthew Turner

Gareth Negus

This year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival has taken a battering  from some quarters, and a fair bit of that is justified.  But to write the whole festival off as a spent force, as some have done, is premature. Yes, there were things wrong with the festival this year. Yes, it lacked a clear direction and artistic vision.  But it deserves a chance to learn its lessons and start to rebuild.

Matthew Turner

What I found very frustrating is that the reports of “The Death of Edinburgh” in the press didn’t bear any resemblance to the behind-the-scenes stories I heard from almost everyone connected to the Festival. The comments under the Guardian article linked to above are very illuminating. Certainly everyone I spoke to put the blame squarely at the feet of “CEO” Gavin Miller (whose resemblance to Tom Hollander is highly amusing), though one of those same comments also points out that there’s actually a shadowy Edinburgh committee above Miller and they’re just as much to blame. Who’s on that committee? Why aren’t they taking some accountability? It’s very easy to say “learn its lessons and start to rebuild” but it sounds like there are some severe structural problems and the foundations need dynamiting first.

But let’s get to the important stuff. What about the films this year?

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Sydney Film Festival 2011 – Memoirs of a Subscriber

Film Festivals

by Preposition Joe

One of these cinemas is the spiritual home of the SFF...

It’s ten a.m. on a cold, wet Sunday, and indie film director Miranda July has stepped onto the stage of Sydney’s State Theatre to talk to us about her film The Future. But first, she gushes … I can’t believe, she says, so many people have come out in the cold and the rain on a Sunday morning! Thank you so much!

And I think, Miranda, have you met these people?

  • Number of films seen: 23 (of a possible 34)
  • Total hours of cinema: 40.383

There are really two festivals. In the evenings, Jack Black may be mugging his way down a red carpet premiering Kung Fu Panda 2, or Cate Blanchett in an Armani suit launching Hanna to a constellation of flashbulbs. At this festival, which starts as the sun sets, Bright Young Things talk knowingly about Murakami and Malick, relentlessly perky publicists herd gloomy Russian directors in and out of limousines, and serious academics chat about how the New Egyptian Cinema goes hand in hand with the Facebook Revolution.

But by day, a hardier, less glamorous breed of filmgoer is keeping the festival alive with their subscription tickets. Every April the call goes out, and every April we sign up, not just for a few films here and there, but for the duration. We see the films afforded to us, nine days of movie-going, from ten a.m. to five p.m.  every day, thirty or forty films in all. We get the same seat we had last year, and we know our neighbours.

Of course we’re here at ten a.m. on a bank holiday in the pouring rain, Miranda. It’s our job.

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Cannes Film Festival 2011

Film Festivals

by Ron Swanson

‘Cannes. Shit. Still in Cannes.’

After a few days with minimal sleep, spending hours on end queuing in the blazing sun, eating and drinking more unhealthily than usual, that was my first thought upon waking up most mornings. I had planned to adhere to two rules when writing this column, the first of which was ‘no complaining’. Thankfully, the second was not to state my admiration for Hitler at all, and I feel like that’s been achieved.

When the Festival starts, Cannes is a place unlike anywhere else in the world. It’s a mixture of the glamorous and the trashy, a place without much class, and a place that I love, almost unreservedly. If only there were nobody else here – as it is the festival-goers are rude, entitled and snobby, a combination of industry insiders, journalists and wealthy, elderly local residents for the most part – it would be just about perfect.

The sedate world of the London Film Festival, which I’d been frequenting for years before I first came to Cannes, doesn’t prepare you for this. Fighting broke out this year as people jostled for position for the first screening of Terrence Malick’s wonderful The Tree of Life. While Leicester Square is no stranger to a brawl, it isn’t usually over who will get an opportunity to see the new work from auteur X first. As I queued, unsuccessfully, to see Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia, a woman two or three places behind me launched into an astonishing tirade against the security guard who had just announced that the screening was full. She did accuse him of impinging her human rights. She did not, unfortunately, compare him to Hitler.

Any self-respecting article about the 64th Cannes Film Festival has to address the Von Trier issue head on. I would have liked to have been able to say that, maybe, Von Trier’s lack of self restraint was as evident in his two and a half hour opus as it was in his press conference, but unfortunately, I didn’t get in to see it. What I will say is that this year Cannes has welcomed Mel Gibson, whose anti-semitic rants are on public record, and, in previous years, convicted criminals like Mike Tyson. Choosing to ban a director for saying something stupid is hypocritical and naive at best. Interestingly, considering Von Trier’s film split critical opinion, Kirsten Dunst won the award for Best Actress. But enough about films I didn’t see.

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Terracottadammerung

Film Festivals

by Spank the Monkey

Rina Takeda (left) and Tak Sakaguchi (right) hanging out in between screenings

For those of us who love Asian cinema, the Terracotta Far East Film Festival – which has just completed its third year – is an absolute delight. Its selections aren’t tied by national boundaries or by genre: drama, comedy, martial arts and horror all happily co-exist within its four-day span. And 2011 was the year when I was going to give it the justice it deserved, investing in a festival pass and seeing all fourteen movies in one huge blowout.

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