film festival
Moonfaze Feminist Film Festival takes place on December 1 in LA . We caught up with Premstar Santana, founder and director of the festival.
The 60th annual London Film Festival has just drawn to a close, having shown 245 feature films from a number of different countries covering a plethora of genres. Not only that, but it has been a groundbreaking year with the British Film Institute (BFI) hosting a number of talks concerning diversity in the British film industry, while using the festival to announce the launch of its Black Star programme. It’s designed to celebrate and showcase the work of black film and television-makers in a series of talks, screenings and exhibitions running until the end of the year through a variety of theatrical and online platforms.
The last weekend of TIFF is always bittersweet. On one hand, you’re so sleep-deprived from all the morning/early afternoon screenings that it’s a relief to have your regular schedule back in order. And yet, on the other, you feel a pang in your gut as you realize that the end is nigh – no more friendly crowds, no more of those endearingly irritating commercials, no more Q&As and no more beautiful venues to ogle over as you wait for the programmer to introduce the film (and TIFF has some cool programmers, too).
As readers may or may not know, I took a break from writing these past few months as I was running my first ever film festival. The Drunken Film Fest (DFF) had its inaugural year in Bradford, England this past summer and it was pretty successful for a first year free film festival, if I do say so myself. However, my background when it comes to festivals is not in running them, but rather in trying to get accepted to them.
Another day of school on Wednesday (September 14th) allowed me to take a break from my TIFFing, which was welcome. However, I was back on the town the next day, my sixth of what would be nine days in total. After the first weekend, TIFF starts to wind down:
Hundreds of thousands of moviegoers, press, and industry players descend on Canada every year for the Toronto International Film Festival. Eleven days of red carpets, screenings, junkets, and presentations cause a gluttonous amount of content to stream out of the city, covering everything from awards season contenders to fashion faux pas. It’s difficult to imagine anything getting missed by the avalanche, but those who attend know just how immense the festival is.
With easily accessible streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime, it’s easy to understand how independent short films go overlooked. However, the short film is a unique medium that provides avenues of expression to the super-indie filmmaker whose voice might otherwise be quelled in the big, bad world of explosions and monetization. Short films are the food trucks of the cinematic universe:
When I go to TIFF, I like to mix it up: if I get a ticket to a hot title, I’ll also check out something lesser known (or without a distributor). Most times, my screening schedule alternates so that buzzy films and unknown quantities are spaced out fairly evenly.
Family. It is something we cherish, and for those unfortunate few who don’t have one, it is something to seek. We are nurtured by familial ties; without them we would be stranded and alone.
Ah, TIFF. A film lover’s delight, and for a little ol’ Canuck like me, the perfect time to indulge in all the fun and excitement of a festival without having to travel thousands of miles. Ever since I attended my first festival in 2011, I’ve found no reason to stop coming back.
This year saw the very first Wales International Documentary Festival, which ran from 12th-14th May in the valleys of South Wales. Blackwood, to be more specific, north of Cardiff, and the home of the band Manic Street Preachers, the boxer Joe Calzaghe and the Dream Alliance race horse syndicate. They are, in fact, the very reason why the WIDF has found its home here.
Elliot Grove’s life should be made into a film, virtual reality’s going to be the next big thing and Sacha Baron Cohen hasn’t always been funny. Those are just three of the things I discovered when I went along to interview Grove, founder of the Raindance Film Festival and the British Independent Film Awards. Discovering Raindance I grabbed the chance to ask Grove for an interview at a recent Raindance Open House event, held to introduce filmmakers to Raindance and what it can do for them.
Chicagoland Shorts is a new series of films curated by Eugene Sun Park and Kayla Ginsburg (with the aid of Beckie Stocchetti). The series pulls together an eclectic mix of shorts all made by Chicago-based filmmakers. The films range from original narratives to real stories, from animations to found footage pieces (those made using pre-existing film or photographs).
Independent filmmakers spend a lot of time and money applying to film festivals. With each passing year, the number of competitive film festivals seems to grow almost exponentially. And with submission platforms like Withoutabox.
We don’t hear about the Tunisian cinema as often as we hear about the Moroccan or Iranian ones. We don’t have a major film festival like the Cairo International Film Festival or the Beirut International Film Festival, but we do have one important, symbolic one: the Carthage Film Festival.