Festivals

No crowds in front of the Egyptian Theatre, no snowboot-clad film fans drudging through the wintery town of Park City and no bustling Main Street. But also, no traffic jams on the first weekend and no waiting in long lines in front of the Eccles, Marc, or other screening locations, freezing and shivering in the hopes of getting in.

With 125 credits in film and television at just 50 years old, it's clear that Clifton Collins Jr, who started his career in 1990 as Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez, has been really busy. Even if he has been featured in series such as Westworld, Veronica Mars and Ballers, and studio titles as The Mule, Trascendence, Pacific Rim and Star Trek (plus the upcoming Nightmare Alley, his second time for director Guillermo del Toro), the best roles in his career came from independent cinema, such as the condemned killer in Capote or the prisoner in The Last Castle.

We are happy that Sundance is putting on the show this year, in the face of so many challenges brought about by the unrelenting coronavirus. In honor of so many years of support, encouragement, and new frontiers for independent cinema we look back at the good times when everything was presential and good times were had by all.

It may be difficult, from the United States, to fully appreciate the stature of Diego Armando Maradona as an athlete and a world figure. The Argentine footballer who died suddenly aged 60 in Buenos Aires was, simply put, the biggest superstar to ever grace a soccer pitch.

Tickets or credentials to a festival these days are mostly virtual. Organizers all over the world have had to adapt to the rules of 2020.

Vanessa Kirby has a one-two-punch in Venice. She is the only actress who, in a toned-down year, has two films here.

Tilda Swinton did not just come to the Lido to collect an award – the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement no less – and wear a great mask, she also starred in and introduced The Human Voice, a short film by Pedro Almodóvar, a man she has admired greatly for many years. Wearing a yellow Haider Ackerman blazer and her newly red hair, she paid tribute to the Spanish master:  “My relationship with Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema started with the cinema of William Wyler and George Cukor, Billy Wilder, and then Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was the first time I saw his spirit and I’ve been entirely besotted by his cinema ever since.

During this time of the coronavirus pandemic and death, it seems frivolous to focus on fashion. However, because of the dire world state, it is good to find something beautiful, creative, and artistic to remind us that despite the dire months, optimism and a new normal may rise again.

“A shop window for the best cinema production in the world”, festival director Alberto Barbera said today as he announced the line-up for the upcoming 77th Mostra Internazionale del Cinema in Venice, the very first major film festival taking place what for many is still the midst of a pandemic. And maybe the analogy is not that far off: in the new age of virtual screenings, Zoom, and other technologies now widely used, at least the Americans will have to go window-shopping for festival films unless they are willing to quarantine themselves for 14 days prior to their attendance.

David Bowie passed away on January 10, 2016, an evening no one attending the 73rd Golden Globes will likely forget. That night, after the ceremony, revelers crowded the dance floors of the after-parties, when one DJ after the next started playing Bowie songs while fans shed tears for their fallen idol.