Current issues
Report by Juha Rajamäki
The Tampere Film Festival (March 8-13) was organized for the 53rd in 2023. It is one of the three largest short film festivals in Europe, alongside Clermont-Ferrand (France) and Oberhausen (Germany).
How do they manage it? The Warsaw International Film Festival had seven competitions: in addition to the International Competition, there is the "Crème de la Crème", the "1-2 Competition", the "Free Spirit Competition" as well as a documentary and a short film competition. Dirk von Jutrczenka, member of the Ecumenical Jury, reports about the festival.
On 8 October 2022, the INTERFILM General Assembly took place as an online meeting. After reports by President Julia Helmke, Jury Coordinator Dietmar Adler and Executive Director Karsten Visarius, the members elected the new INTERFILM Board and Presidency for the years 2022-2025.
Even before this year’s cinematic line-up was revealed, it was clear that the 79th Venice International Film Festival was going to be special given the news that auteur Paul Schrader would receive a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. Schrader is perhaps best known for his psychological portrayals of troubled and lonely people in his own films and screenplays. Alina Birzache, member of the INTERFILM Jury in Venice 2022, reports about the festival.
Every September, the CineFest Miskolc International Film Festival opens its cinemas to professionals and audiences to show the most significant and critically acclaimed films. It seems like a small, family film festival, but CineFest has become the most important international film festival in Hungary.
The awards ceremony of the 79th Venice Festival ended with a surprise. The Golden Lion went to the documentary "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed" by Laura Poitras.
What was striking this year in Venice was the abundance of family stories telling of separated and remarried couples, of the relationship between parents and children, of tragic strokes of fate, of loss and grief.
Political films are not an easy genre. They run the risk of falling into clichés, dividing their characters into heroes and villains, and reducing complex political contexts to simple formulas.
Peter Paul Huth reports on the films of Luca Guadagnino, Frederic Wiseman and Paul Schrader
For this year the director of the Mostra d'Arte Cinematografica in Venice, Alberto Barbera, had announced a selection of attractive but also controversial films that do not turn a blind eye to a world full of conflicts. In the competition there are a number of features that take up political themes, but also films that deal with family constellations.
At the film festival World Cinema Amsterdam 2022, a jury of INTERFILM's institutional member Het Filmgesprek has awarded its Prize, the World cinema Exchange Award, to "My Small Land", directed by Emma Kawawada.
