This, too, is the condition of festival-speak. I pick some films over others because the framework of my experience is not experiential; it is exegetical. I organize myself around opinions I am going to have about things I have not yet seen.
So many of the movies I saw at this year's True/False Film Festival were concerned with human perceptions of time, memory, and legacy. In a world where reality is warped by fascism and generative AI, telling imaginatively true stories about real people seems especially important.
In this month's episode, Veronica sits down with Fran Hoepfner, Frank Falisi, and our producer Eli Sands to postmortem the 63rd New York Film Festival, including looks at Miroirs No. 3, The Mastermind, Late Fame, No Other Choice, With Hasan in Gaza, The Secret Agent, Peter Hujar’s Day, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, A House of Dynamite, Cover-Up, Duse, and How to Bake a Cherry Pie.
Having the privilege of being a local and living a short commute away from Festival Street, year after year, I’m able to focus on what makes TIFF most special for me: its varied Canadian programming.
One could be forgiven for assuming the Nitrate Picture Show proffers sanctuary from the uncertainty reigning outside, but this year’s edition inverted this presumed mandate, with a program of films that presented the past not as a refuge from our present tumult, but as a reflection of it.
Three years into attending the True/False Film Festival and I finally feel as though I’m getting my sea legs. It feels good to consider a problem I’ve never come across before, to encounter the world through another’s eyes. I go to the movies to see something I’d otherwise never get to see, and True/False offers a unique distillation of that ethos.
As 2024’s gauntlet of film festivals comes to an end, as Oscar prognosticators arrange their ballots and starry new releases vie for box office numbers, I hope to sit for a little while longer with this small group of films and the new narratives and images, both sobering and hopeful, that they provide.
Fran Hoepfner reports on her sixth New York Film Festival, with thoughts on Megalopolis, The Shrouds, The Room Next Door, Nickel Boys, Oh, Canada, Queer, Hard Truths, Rumours, A Real Pain, Grand Tour, Caught by the Tides, and more!
If you traveled to Toronto for TIFF 2024 last week, you would have hardly known that the city’s arts institutions—chief among them, film—faced a very challenging year.
I was struck by three common themes braided amongst the 15 feature films I watched at this year's True/False Film Festival: community, a search for moral clarity, and the nature of truth and reality.
The final installment of BWDR at NYFF 61, with thoughts and reflections on Priscilla (Coppola), Last Summer (Breillat), and Ferrari (Mann).
Thank god for the New York Film Festival, where every year I buckle under the pressure of a glut of art and groan to anyone who will listen: “I didn’t see enough!”