f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, Kevin Nikkel, an independent filmmaker living in Winnipeg, has submitted a festival report for OIAF and some of the best films he saw there. –Doug
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Dial ‘M’ for Monster
By Kevin Nikkel
Film festivals are strange things. I flew to Ottawa for the weekend to attend the [...]

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Mr. Reaper’s Really Bad Morning
The Ottawa International Animation Festival, a very large and impressive event, concluded on Sunday and included several retrospectives (Hayao Miyazaki, Robert Breer, and others) and scores of new works. Two of those works involved Canadian friends of mine, John Torvi’s animation in Mr. Reaper’s Really Bad Morning (2004) and director [...]

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One of the pleasures of doing websites devoted to specific filmmakers is meeting people who come out of the woodwork (or cyberwork or something). Not long after starting Robert-Bresson.com, Trond Trondsen and I were contacted by the UK writer-director Jonathan Hourigan, who had assisted on L’Argent (1983). Jonathan has been a great encouragement [...]

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This weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the Los Angeles Korean International Film Festival at the American Cinematheque. (Why the word “international” was included, since it only featured Korean films, is beyond me.) LAKIFF screened recent films by two of Korea’s most acclaimed filmmakers, Hong Sang-soo’s Woman is the Future of Man [...]

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The Holy Girl
Here’s my latest batch of reviews for the Toronto International Film Festival. Stay tuned for another collection of commentary in the next day or two…

La Noire de… (1966)
81-year-old filmmaker and novelist Ousmane Sembene is known as the “father of African cinema” and is surely one of the most poorly-distributed world masters. [...]

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While I’m finishing my TIFF notes, I thought I’d mention a few unrelated, but exciting tidbits.
ï The films ofCarl Dreyer are currently airing this month on TCM, and it’s always fun to make new converts; on Monday, a coworker came into my office and asked if I’d ever heard of a silent film called The [...]

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L’Intrus
Well, I arrived back in Los Angeles this afternoon, and I’ll be posting comments on all of the films I watched in Toronto in the next couple of days. The festival was a truly whirlwind experience, particularly since I stayed with some friends outside the city in Mississauga, which ensured a nasty combination of [...]

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Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow
One of the pleasures of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival for me personally has been the opportunity to spend time with friends I rarely get the chance to see (J. Robert and Robert Davis as well as folks from Alberta), finally meeting friends I’ve known online for some time (Darren Hughes [...]

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I’m hoping to try something new for Filmjourney’s coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival this year. Last year, my friend J. Robert Parks, film critic for Paste magazine and Chicago’s Hyde Park Herald, sent in ongoing updates. This year, not only am I attending myself, but several more friends will be there [...]

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When I was a kid, I remember on occasion being told–as I protested some punishment or another–that even if I wasn’t guilty of the exact grievance for which I was being disciplined, that my punishment no doubt made up for all those times that I was guilty and wasn’t punished. I remember school teachers [...]

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