IDFA special (3): Dutch winner A Strange Love Affair With Ego is intimate and groundbreaking
A Strange Love Affair With Ego by Ester Gould was awarded best Dutch documentary at IDFA. An intimate and groundbreaking reflection on our need to be seen.
FILM
Moving image. To be seen on TV, in a museum, in a cinema. On an iphone.
IDFA viewing tip 26 November - A Poem is a Naked person
American filmmaker Les Blank stole my heart a long time ago with the short docu he made about Werner Herzog: Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. And that is exactly what happened in that film. Herzog lost a bet to Errol Morris: he never thought the latter would finish his Gates of Heaven. And so...
IDFA viewing tip Wednesday 25 November: deadly drug gangs
Today's IDFA viewing tip is directly opposite yesterday's. Yesterday was uplifting and heartwarming. Cartel Land, on the other hand, is hard, raw, unpleasant and brutal. It could hardly be otherwise, as Matthew Heineman's film is about the war on drugs in Mexico and Arizona, which is just north of it. At the risk of...
IDFA viewing tip 24 November: Tablas take over New York
Today's IDFA viewing tip is the kind of film I normally stay away from: a feel-good film that is stylistically neat, but nowhere innovative. And yet I went flat and with me the whole audience. Why? For the same reason that a group of men with tablas and sitar gets the Jazz at Lincoln Center flat. The combination of western...
European Film Academy asks director Nikita Mikhalkov to advocate for jailed Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov
Today, the appeal against the conviction of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov to 20 years in prison is due to be heard. European Film Academy appeals for help from director Nikita Makhalkov.
IDFA viewing tip for Monday 23 November
Today's IDFA viewing tip is for a special film about a special man, Sun Mu. That's not his real name, it means 'without borders'. And that is very appropriate for this artist. For years, he was a successful propaganda artist for the regime in North Korea. Until he ventured the great crossing. He swam (literally!) to freedom and has lived since the...
IDFA viewing tip for Saturday 21 November
I didn't have to think long about today's tip. Chantal Akerman's latest film runs this afternoon at 13:15. No Home Movie is about her mother, who survived Auschwitz, and her final days. And about the difficult relationship Akerman had with her mother. She tells in an interview that they were in Mexico together once
IDFA viewing tip for Friday 20 November
For 500 years, Hieronymus Bosch has captured the imagination. His paintings remain enormously expressive, even though we may now have lost sight of the ecclesiastical context. In the run-up to the major retrospective that the North Brabant Museum is organising next year, a selection of Dutch art historians and curators will set out to examine Bosch's paintings. What...
IDFA special (2): The last 4 minutes of JFK and 3 more ways to step into another world
In the IDFA-themed programme Seamless Reality, artists explore the boundary between documentary and virtual reality. Experience the audio scent sensation or take a selfie in words.
IDFA viewing tip for Thursday 19 November
Can there be beauty in an atomic bomb? Or in the explosion of a nuclear reactor? I don't think so, but I'm going to find out tonight. In Atomic Living, filmmaker/writer/presenter/producer Mark Cousins explores what that's really like, living in the atomic age. Because in addition to the horrors, we also have X-rays and other extremely useful medical applications. Once again, he uses...
IDFA viewing tip for Wednesday 18 November
The first IDFA tip of the day is immediately a double bill and both films are decades old. They are in the top 10 of Errol Morris, this year's chief guest. Las Hurdes - Tierra sin Pan by Luis Bunuel is a half-hour film that made documentary history. Bunuel was also known then for Un...
IDFA special (1): 28th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam opens with intriguing family history
IDFA 2015 opens strongly with intriguing family history A Family Affair, but the main programme feature is Benjamin Barber: Jihad vs. McWorld.
Najaarsoverleg 2015 over de artistieke filmopstopping – hamvragen en vicieuze cirkels
Het jaarlijkse Najaarsoverleg over brandende kwesties in de filmsector was geheel gewijd aan de benarde positie van de kleine artistieke film. Worden er te veel titels uitgebracht?
Welcome to the Jungle: a catastrophic clusterfuck at the Channel Tunnel
Maaike Engels (video artist and filmmaker) and Teun Voeten (war photographer and cultural anthropologist) made Welcome to the Jungle. A documentary about the utter chaos in the makeshift migrant camp near the canal tunnel in Calais, where some 6,000 people are now waiting in harsh misery for their chance to travel clandestinely to England. Welcome to the Jungle is a painful and bij...
Rotterdam under the sign of Arab film
Arab Camera film festival in Rotterdam opens on a light-hearted note from an unknown film country. In From A to B, three rich kids from the Emirates learn to stand on their own two feet.
It doesn't have to be a movie. 5 first impressions of the new thing called VR
Virtual reality will be the new hype next year, we are promised. A sneak preview could already be enjoyed at an Amsterdam pop-up cinema.
Producer Pixar hit Inside Out: 'An overly protective upbringing is not good'
Inside Out. Almost six months after its Cannes premiere, we talk to producer Jonas Rivera about the reactions. Does the Pixar hit help parents understand their children better?
KLIK! Amsterdam Animation Festival 2015 - From Dutch Oscar entry to committed work from the Arab world
KLIK Amsterdam Animation Festival 2015 at EYE aims to introduce a wide audience to the international vanguard of animation film.
Watch tip: We Are Jung, We Are Stark
It is not often that a film about an event in 1992 is so poignantly topical. That was when a group of some 300 right-wing radicals set fire to an asylum seekers' centre in Rostock. Miraculously, no one died then. But it did scar many for life. Among them was the director of Wir Sind Jung, Wir Sind Stark. Filmmaker and son of...
The Netherlands' most intimate film festival can be found in Leiden: #LIFF15
10 years ago, it all started. A group of recent graduates of Leiden University found that their dear Alma Mater [hints]Latin for nurturing or caring mother. Alma mater refers to the university or sometimes the school where someone received their education. In ancient Rome, the term Alma Mater was used for the mother goddess; in the Middle Ages, Alma Mater referred to...
Le Nouveau winner Cinekid: real-life French teen film
Het Cinekid kinderfilmfestival maakte donderdag de winnaars bekend. De levensechte Franse tienerfilm Le Nouveau werd dubbel bekroond.
Peppie ate Michael Rockefeller, but no one will ever tell
Op 20 november 1961 werd Michael Rockefeller opgegeten door Peppie de kannibaal. Het gebeurde op een modderige rivierbank in de Asmat, een moerasgebied aan de zuidkust van het huidige Papoea Nieuw Guinea. Schokkend genoeg, dat feit. Schokkend is ook dat niemand er officieel van op de hoogte is. Er zijn nooit daders aangewezen, niemand heeft bekend, maar er zijn wel…
Figure sawing, virtual reality and more in 29th Cinekid Festival
29th Cinekid children's film festival opens with new television drama for youngsters. In the Medialab, children can make their own VR glasses and do virtual bungy jumping.
Berlin plays Tagfish, poetic documentary theatre about emptiness, and more emptiness
From today, the documentary performance Tagfish tours the Netherlands. The Belgian theatre collective Berlin has been making finely crafted theatre installations since 2004, playing on the border of documentary and fiction, television and theatre, current affairs and eternity. Tagfish is ostensibly about the perils surrounding the redevelopment of a piece of wasteland near Essen. Die Zeche Zollverein already had a monumental...
Architecture Film Festival: Raw concrete on the big screen
From confrontational brutalism to the flowing lines of Frank Gehry and from timeless London to the Paris of Eric Rohmer. Some of the selections from the Architecture film festival that starts on 8 October in Rotterdam. We take a dive into the programme in advance. In its existence, the AFFR has managed to hold its own against other thematic...
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