Volume 23, Issue 3 / March 2019

Festivals From Greece to Canada

This issue offers a series festival reports and festival interviews that covers the UK, Canada and Greece. Offscreen regular festival correspondent Philip Gillett starts the issue off with his report on the 32nd Leeds International Festival. Gillett’s overview reveals that the Leeds Festival has always placed a premium on societal issues in film, which accounts for the importance of documentary, historical subjects and might be a factor in the controversial decision to cancel a screening of Polanski’s A Knife in the Water. The next two reports focus on Canadian film festivals, the star-studded TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival), and one which has seen its profile increase over the years, Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal, or Montreal International Documentary Festival. In the first Michael Sooriyakumaran returns again with his usual penchant for the experimental side of things, including a focus on the “Wavelengths” programme, and in the second report Frédéric St-Hilaire interviews Japanese documentarist Kazuhiro Soda. First-time writer Ana Grgic also features a festival interview, with Turkish director Tolga Karaçelik, who was an invited guest of the 59th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, with his third feature film, Butterflies (which was preceded by Toll Booth, 2010 and Ivy, 2015). The issue ends with Gönül Dönmez-Colin’s coverage of the 67th International Film Festival of Mannheim-Heidelberg, which had a healthy contingent of four films from Canada, three from Quebec. (Donato Totaro, ed.)

Featured Image from la disparition des lucioles /The Fireflies are Gone