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 [...]
Categories: Film festival
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 [...]
Categories: Film festival
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 [...]
Categories: Film festival
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. [...]
Categories: Film festival · Film review
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 [...]
Categories: Film festival · Film review
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, [...]
Categories: Commentary · Film festival
By ROBERT KOEHLER
With the happy sights today of one of my favorite comrades in cinephilia, critic-programmer Roger Koza (see his Spanish-language site, ojosabiertos.wordpress.com); the always convivial Screen International critic from Tel Aviv (via Paris) Dan Fainaru; veteran Latin American cinema programmer Denis De La Roca; Gerald Peary, Boston Phoenix critic (and maker of the new [...]
Categories: Film festival · Film review
By ROBERT KOEHLER
Being told that you’re the first member of the press to check in at a film festival and get a badge produces strange feelings. Beyond the automatic response—“Where is everyone else?”—is the lurking sense that you’re the only one of your kind within earshot or cell phone signal. And in a city [...]
Categories: Film festival · Film review