Festivals

The 30th New Orleans Film Festival ended with Kasi Lemmon’s new film Harriet, about Harriet Tubman, the African American Joan of Arc who lead over 700 slaves to safety on the Underground Railroad in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and whose face would be on the 20 dollar bill, if the current President had not nixed this plan as soon as he took office. Tubman is played by British singer/actress Cynthia Erivo and moviegoers will recognize cast members like Vondie Curtis-Hall, Joe Alwyn, Vanessa Bell-Calloway and others.

On this year’s opening night, Vladek Juszkiewicz, founder and director of the Polish Film festival in Los Angeles, announced that this 20th year  of service to the community and to this city will be his last. “Support the festival as much as you can”, he said as he stepped down from the podium.

The Lumière film festival celebrated its 10th birthday in Lyon, France and did so one year ahead of the 125th anniversary of the invention of cinema itself by its namesake brothers in this very town, in 1894. The idea behind the Thierry Frémaux-directed festival is, in fact, to celebrate film in the very birthplace of the medium: the workshop where the two industrialist brothers developed the first camera capable of producing moving images still stands and is now part of the Lumière Institute complex housing screening facilities, an archive, book store and the stately Lumière mansion which today houses the Lumière museum and doubles as festival headquarters (future plans also include a larger, more modern, Renzo Piano-designed cinema museum to be built).

Long lines snaked around the Lumière Institute theater, buzzing with anticipation for the upcoming screening. You would have been hard-pressed to guess that the excitement was for a 1926 silent film – but that is the Lumière Festival in a nutshell.

The 30th edition of the New Orleans Film Festival kicked off Wednesday night with Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story. Sadly, the film’s stars could not make it but that didn’t stop the city from having a party that started out a little differently from the years before: the normally bustling Roosevelt Way in front of the legendary Orpheum Theater, where opening nights are traditionally held, was unusually quiet.

A partnership of the Goethe-Institut, Friends of Goethe in Southern California and the American Cinematheque produced the 13th showcase of new German films in Los Angeles, this past weekend, October 11-14, 2019. Although Germany yields a considerable number of films annually and holds one of the biggest European film festivals, the Los Angeles event seems to be marked by a “less is more” attitude, and has remained unaffected by the ambition to match the surrounding Hollywood flare.

Now in its 10th year, the Oaxaca Film Festival in Mexico has grown into an exciting event for movie lovers and filmmakers. During the opening ceremony, held at the Macedonio Alcalá Theater, filled to the rafters with participant and public, festival director Ramiz Adeeb Azar thanked recently deceased artist Francisco Toledo for hosting the first screenings at his cine club El Pochote (named after the sacred Mayan Tree of Life).

2019 has been a golden year for Arab cinema. A record number of films from Arab countries were premiered in major international film festivals, such as Berlin, Cannes, Venice, and Toronto, and collected an unprecedented number of accolades.

French filmmaker of Greek origin, Constantin Costa-Gavras (Loutra-Iraias,1933)  received the first Donostia Award at the 67th edition of the San Sebastian Festival, which has paid tribute to one of the leading creators of social and political films. The filmmaker picked up the award in a gala at the Victoria Eugenia Theater, before the screening of his latest film, Adults in the Room, an adaptation of the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’s autobiography.

For nine days, every September, San Sebastián becomes the Film Capital of Spain. This year the Donostia-Zinemaldia (its name in the local Basque language) reaches its 67th edition with many surprises and an endless number of familiar faces.