Volume 10, Issue 11 / November 2006

Festival Round-Up

For this penultimate issue of 2006 Offscreen places its focus on three major festivals at the tail end of the 2006 year: The Festival of New Cinema (Montreal), The Thessaloniki International Film Festival (Greece) and the Leeds International Film Festival (England). The first three articles feature the Festival of New Cinema (FNC). Jordan’s opening piece begins with a brief detour on cinema going etiquette. In today’s multiplex environment, where spectators think nothing of talking to each other, eating noisily, or talking on their cell phones, are there still people who hold the theatre space as a revered part of the film experience? Jordan gets his personalized response at the festival, before moving on to talk about the age old art fulcrum of the ugly made beautiful. I have always wanted to write about two little known, intriguing films by director Hakan Sahin which I had seen on DVD, Mirror (same title as the Tarkovsky film) and Snow. When Snow screened at the FNC I took this as an opportunity to finally write about both films. One of the most talked about films at the FNC this year was Day Night Day Night, a stylistically rich film about a suicide bomber which does not offer the usual scenarios associated with such post 9/11 films. The third FCN piece is Ryan Diduck’s interesting interview with its director, Russian-born Julia Loktev. Up next is Betty Kaklamanidou’s report on the 46th Thessaloniki Festival, which seems to be getting both bigger and better (Day Night Day Night also impressed Kaklamanidou, who saw it at Thessaloniki). The final piece is Philip Gillet’s survey of the evolving Leeds International Festival. A report has also been prepared on another important festival that took place around the same time as the above, The Vancouver International Film Festival, but could not be squeezed into this issue. The report, which is accompanied by an interview with its important programmer Tony Ryans, will be forthcoming.