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

The Los Angeles Film Festival announced its line-up today, and any fears that its new director might steer the festival–with its solid line-up several years running–in an untoward direction have been put to rest. Some of the highlights follow.
The latest edition of the always excellent “The Films That Got Away” series programmed by the [...]

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Drag Me to Hell (left); Enter the Void (top right); Thirst (bottom right)
By Robert Koehler
Lost amid the general, conventional sense of the Cannes competition lineup (see here) as a colloquium of auteurs–from Haneke to Campion, Audiard to Tsai, To to Resnais–is the fact that, for better or worse, the Palais will be the site of [...]

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By Robert Koehler
Was this the single most memorable image of the entire BAFICI? Perhaps. Just as Godard’s festival trailer for last year’s Viennale, Une Catastrophe, stamped the entire festival with the filmmaker’s own form of visual-audio music and sense of the Zeitgeist, so Lisandro Alonso’s BAFICI trailer, mysteriously titled S/T, seemed to stamp this edition [...]

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Robert Koehler has sent in a few final updates from his recent trip to BAFICI; next stop: Cannes. -Doug

Miguel Gomes, writer-director of Our Beloved Month of August, is seen here answering audience questions after a screening of his brilliant, Lewis Carroll-like first feature, The Face You Deserve–which he thinks is better than August. (I would [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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