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

Nicolas Pereda’s Perpetuum Mobile
By Robert Koehler
The juries have spoken, and—what else is new with festival juries?–I’m trying to wrap my head around some of the results. First, a big day for directors Maria Novaro for The Good Herbs and Nicolas Pereda for Perpetuum Mobile. The Mexican results went almost exactly as I predicted: Perpetuum Mobile [...]

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By Robert Koehler
We’re an hour away from the awards announcement in Guadalajara, so rumors are flying. In the Ibero-American competition, will it be Colombian veteran Victor Gaviria for his Berlin-debuting Portraits in a Sea of Lies, or Javier Rebollo for his masterfully witty Woman Without Piano? Or perhaps a wild card like Esmir Filho and [...]

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By Robert Koehler
From the traces of suicidal young in Listorti’s debut to the presence of suicidal young who won’t go away in Esmir Filho’s The Famous and the Dead/Os Famosos e os Duendes da Morte (another debut, in the Ibero American competition)—death is in the air in Guadalajara. Slippery as a fish and defying any [...]

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By Robert Koehler
 
It’s a bit surprising that the Guadalajara International Film Festival isn’t screening the competing non-fiction films for the press, especially at a time when non-fiction programming is proving to be the life blood of many festivals, and when festivals devoted to non-fiction—from IDFA to True-False—are on the rise. So, naturally, on the first [...]

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By Robert Koehler
Forum is looking shaky. At least, that’s the impression from the third day, with a bunch of films that are either slight or bad or unwatchable. The slight is, at least, modestly entertaining: USC grad Arvin Chen’s Au revoir Taipei (above) takes a penniless young man, determined to leave his native Taipei and [...]

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By Robert Koehler
As a member of the Berlinale FIPRESCI jury—concentrated on Forum–my first week in Berlinale is almost entirely devoted to Forum films. That was by choice: Forum is, in the roughest terms, Berlin’s Quinzaine, created 40 years ago out of the same impulse that created the Quinzaine, as a revolutionary-minded alternative to the stodgy [...]

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James Benning’s Ruhr
By Robert Koehler
Last things first: Having arrived here in Berlin from the Rotterdam film festival, I wanted to let any readers tracking Filmjourney that my in-depth comments on IFFR will be posted following Berlin. That’s because Rotterdam had too many worthy films to merely mention in passing, and because the programming raised ideas [...]

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I’ve championed AFI FEST the previous two years since Artistic Director Rose Kuo came on board and pushed the festival into becoming Los Angeles’ best survey of world cinema. And I’ve been even more excited this year due to the programming involvement of Robert Koehler, a bona fide cinephile, critic, and festival hound (and [...]

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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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