Festivals
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Sundance 2013: From the Sea to the Land Beyond review
★★★★☆ Featuring prime cuts from the BFI’s extensive National Archive and a typically soul-stirring soundtrack from acclaimed Brighton collective British Sea Power, director Penny Woolcock’s lyrical visual collage From the Sea to the Land Beyond (2012) gets a live screening at Sundance London this week, having already wowed audiences at last year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest. Effortlessly…
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Sundance 2013: Programme preview
Following the success of last year’s inaugural outing, actor-director Robert Redford’s Sundance London film and music festival returns to the nation’s capital this month for its second incarnation, which takes place at the O2 Arena from 25-28 April. As with 2012, all 19 feature-length films will be UK premières, with programme highlights this time around…
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Special Feature: Between the Lines Festival roundup
DocHouse and The Frontline Club can celebrate this week after the triumph that was last weekend’s tremendously successful Between the Lines Festival (1-3 March), which engagingly approached some of the most pertinent issues facing the changing trends in documentary and journalism today. The mission statement of the festival was to explore the key issues that…
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Special Feature: Between the Lines Festival begins
Housed at the Rich Mix in Shoreditch and presented by DocHouse and Frontline Club, Between the Lines is a newly formed documentary film festival that runs over the weekend 1-3 March in 2013. Aiming to explore the ways in which shifting boundaries have affected today’s new media landscape, the three-day event will bring together champions…
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Glasgow 2013: John Dies at the End review
★★★☆☆ Don Coscarelli’s 2012 adaptation of David Wong’s cult novel John Dies at the End (the sequel to which, This Book is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don’t Touch It, was released last October) appeared at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival having reportedly run into problems with its UK distribution; a sad turn of events,…
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Berlin 2013: ‘Child’s Pose’ wins Golden Bear
The 63rd Berlin Film Festival drew to a close last night with its prestigious annual awards ceremony, rewarding the cream of this year’s crop with the International Jury’s highest accolades. Headed up by The Grandmaster director Wong Kar-wai, and featuring American actor Tim Robbins and acclaimed Danish filmmaker Susanne Bier, the Jury presented the coveted…
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Berlin 2013: ‘Jîn’ review
★★★☆☆ From visionary director Reha Erdem (Times and Winds, Kosmos) comes Jîn (2013), an environmental parable that uses the bitter Turkish-Kurdish conflict as a universal metaphor for the destructive disposition of humanity upon a frail and delicate natural world. Narratively influenced by the tender storytelling of fairy tales, Jîn feels like a contemporary adaptation of…
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Berlin 2013: ‘End of Time’ review
★★☆☆☆ Sebastian Fritzsch’s End of Time (Endzeit, 2013) is a snapshot of a post-apocalyptic world, fashioned against the same deeply meditative backdrop of 1980s Soviet sci-fi. Yet, despite its melancholic methodology, this languid drama lacks the reflective, sociopolitical punch the sub-genre is renowned for embracing. A brief hand-drawn, stop-motion exposition announces the apocalypse that has…
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Berlin 2013: ‘The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas’
★★★★★ Despite the tumultuous Greek economy, the country’s cinema has been going through something of a renaissance of late, with directors Yorgos Lanthimos and Athina Rachel Tsangari fashioning their own surrealist catacomb of absurdity. Elina Psikou’s The Eternal Return of Antonis Paraskevas (I aionia epistrofi tou Antoni Paraskeva, 2013) continues this burgeoning trend to become…
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Berlin 2013: ‘TPB AFK’ review
★★★☆☆ Founded in 2003 by “a couple of guys in a [internet] chatroom,” peer-to-peer file-sharing website The Pirate Bay was responsible for co-ordinating half of the world’s bit-torrent traffic by 2009. With an estimated 22-25 million users downloading from the site at any one time, TPB is clearly a principal player. It’s claimed that major…