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

The Pulitzer Prize for criticism was announced this week, and personally, I couldn’t be more delighted that for the first time in its history, it went to a restaurant critic: Jonathan Gold of the LA Weekly, whose “Counter Intelligence” column has served as my homing beacon for food exploration and discovery ever since I moved [...]

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Last night at the REDCAT, Thai filmmaker (and graduate of Chicago’s School of the Art Institute) Apichatpong Weerasethakul opened his first solo exhibition in the US, entitled Unknown Forces (2007). A filmmaker who often blends narrative and experimental techniques (particularly structural innovation) in his feature films, I learned he also produces and distributes avant [...]

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In Between Days
By Robert Koehler
Good, smart festivals–and BAFICI is one of them–can dole out terrible awards. The Saturday awards capping the final days (which I’ll be reflecting upon in postings to come) were no exception. I’ll be breaking down some of the results later, but the happiest result was unquestionably my international jury’s wise selection [...]

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Raya Martin’s Autohystoria
BAFICI, Day 11
By Robert Koehler
What does a film culture look like? Is it even apparent when it materializes in a certain place, a certain country? Even more important, when it disappears in a certain place, a certain country, does anyone notice?
The issues around this circulate in the context of BAFICI in Argentina (which [...]

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BAFICI, Day 10
By Robert Koehler
The public nature of film festivals is getting steadily mitigated by where they’re located. This dawned on me today crossing the extremely busy Avenida Corrientes, one of Buenos Aires’ major boulevards and traditionally the home to the city’s many Broadway-style theaters and cultural institutions, such as the Centro Cultural San Martin [...]

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BAFICI, Day 8
By Robert Koehler
I came to BAFICI with many expectations, including what may be turning out to be a hope-against-hope of seeing at least a handful of good Argentine films. (More on that, most likely, tomorrow.) There was the additional expectation of catching up with some interesting titles from Rotterdam; again, the jury’s out, [...]

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BAFICI, Day 7
By Robert Koehler
Two cool dudes in Buenos Aires….
Reg Harkema, the towering (six-foot-six) Canadian Godardian, has been here with his complete works (A Girl is a Girl, Better Off in Bed, Monkey Warfare), and sounding rather amazed that BAFICI would even consider being the first festival anywhere to screen his complete works. A good [...]

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BAFICI, Day 6
By Robert Koehler
Fernando Solanas has appeared at BAFICI with the optimistic culmination of his trilogy of films examining the state of things past and present in Argentina–Dormant Argentina, in which he makes a lengthy, substantial argument that few countries in the Western Hemisphere are better prepared for a technological explosion. He extends the [...]

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Abasto Shopping Mall in Buenos Aires
BAFICI, Day 5
By Robert Koehler
Some additional thoughts on M˙sica nocturna….The film’s sense of comedy runs to such moments as a droll exchange between two of the characters, perambulating around the streets and finding themselves in a bookstore that’s actually closed but that they have somehow gotten into anyway, about how [...]

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The Island at the End of the World (2005)
BAFICI, Day 4
By Robert Koehler
Of the several “retros & focus” sections that BAFICI has organized this year–organizers swore to me weeks ago that they would trim down from last year’s bulging 15 or so retrospectives, but being true cinephiles, they simply couldn’t help themselves, and have arranged [...]

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