The 2016 edition of TIFF is its 15th year, it’s my 10th year of attending, and we’re still both as youthfully exuberant as ever! But what changes there’ve been over those 10 years. In 2006 three cinemas and one outdoor screening space were used. Now the city is teeming with screening and event spaces, and … Continue reading “Transilvania International Film Festival, Cluj, 2016”
Sacha Gervasi (2009) Whether you love or hate heavy metal, or are totally indifferent, you’d have to have a heart of stone not to be beguiled by this charming and funny documentary of the band that never quite made it, but after over 25 years hasn’t stopped trying. Director Gervasi was one of the most … Continue reading “Documentary of the week – Anvil!”
Ben Rivers (2011) Ben Rivers is an experimental artist whose work is more usually seen in galleries than cinemas. This film, winner of a FIPRESCI prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival, (2011) is his first full length feature. It’s a disarming portrait of Jake Williams, subject of a previous short by Rivers, an amiable … Continue reading “Documentary of the week – 2 Years at Sea”
James Benning 2011 Shown as a UK premiere at the Bradford Film Festival in 2012, Small Roads, by renowned, austere American documentarist James Benning continues his love affair with the American landscape and the man-made systems that bisect it. If RR, his 2007 work on railways was, as he says, a collaboration with the trains themselves, here … Continue reading “Documentary of the week – Small Roads”
Grímur Hákonarson Three winter weeks, two films with men in peril and snow on their beards. Rams, set in contemporary Iceland and dealing with the mostly humdrum life of shepherds is a world away from The Revenant’s big-scale, highly charged melodrama, but in the end they’re both about humans in landscapes and family dynamics. Here … Continue reading “Rams (Hrútar)”
A statue of JB Priestley, author and champion of the North, stands on a slope above the centre of Bradford, looking out over his city, coat tails flapping in the brisk Yorkshire wind. At his back is the still impressive purpose-built National Media Museum. Well, purpose-built as the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television, … Continue reading “Requiem for a festival”
A seat in the dark 