For the first time I'm attending the Berlin Film Festival not as a journalist but as a guest of honour, having won the Berlinale Camera lifetime achievement award. This year I therefore want to open my letter from Berlin with an expression of (...)
The English director Ken Loach, who turns 80 this Saturday (17 June), is perhaps Britain's best-known auteur. Loach studied law at Oxford University before directing 28 films of various lengths for the BBC, both fictional and documentarym starting (...)
On Friday at the Cannes Film Festival I saw two of the year's most important long documentaries: Pheshmerga by Bernard-Henri Lévy, which was scheduled to be screened outside the competition but in a rare move was added to the official festival (...)
Opening the Un Certain Regard programme at the Cannes Festival this year was Eshtebak (Clash), by Mohamed Diab – who cowrote the script with his brother Khaled – which heralds the birth of a great Egyptian director. Born in 1977, Diab made his first (...)
For the first time in the history of the Berlinale, which closed this week, the Golden Bear at the 66th round (11-21 February) was awarded to a documentary, the Italian director Gianfranco Rosi's Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea). Rosi had also received the (...)
Man does not live by bread alone. Nor do film festivals live solely by money. No doubt the larger the budget the better, but the point of a festival is its concept, the question of why it is held in the first place. And that is why the 56th (...)
While the 72nd Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion went to Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas's debut From Afar, two major films equally deserved it: Francofonia(winner of the Mimmo Rotella Award), a French-German-Dutch production by Aleksandr (...)
The Palestinian film Dégradé, screened at the 54th Critics Week at Cannes, is the feature-length debut of the twin brothers Tarzan and Arab Abunasser. Born in Gaza in 1988, the two filmmakers are both fine art graduates of Al-Aqsa University. Since (...)
The Palme d'Or winner at this year's Cannes Festival is Jacques Audiard's Dheepan, marking one of those rare occasions when a French film wins the prize. It is not a masterpiece although it is a good film whether from a artistic or an intellectual (...)
This year the official competition of the Cannes Festival screened Tale of Tales, the eighth feature and English-language debut by Matteo Garrone. Garrone is one of Italy's most important filmmakers of the first decade of the 21st century, and this (...)
One of the greater aesthetic questions in cinema since its emergence as an art form is philosophical expression, for how can you express abstract ideas in an essentially photographic medium? Answers have been provided by a whole clan of film (...)
Between the end of the year and the opening of the 64th Berlinale (6-16 February 2014), the world of film lost three greats: the Hungarian director Miklos Jancso, the American actor Philip Seymour Hoffman and the Austrian-Swiss actor Maximillian (...)
The 64th Berlinale screens films in many sections, with some having their own juries: the Berlinale Shorts, Generation, Out of the Competition, the Berlinale Special, Panorama, Forum, Perspektive Deutsches Kino, Retrospective, Homage, Culinary (...)
Algerian filmmaker Merzak Allouache's Les Terasses was screened at the end of the 70th Venice Film Festival, a strategic choice for what was undoubtedly one of the events of this round. The film is timely, what is more, since the whole world is (...)
The only moving moment in the closing ceremony of the 70th Venice Film Festival (28 August-7 September) was when the great cinema artist Bernardo Bertolucci entered on a wheelchair, having lost the ability to walk due to illness. He was greeted with (...)
This year the official competition at Cannes opened with Amat Escalante's Heli, the only film from Latin America in the official competition. Perhaps the fact that it complements the competition's otherwise wholly Western fare was part of the reason (...)
The 63rd Berlinale (7-17 February) saw, in its official competition, the world premiere of the French filmmaker Bruno Dumont's Camille Claudel 1915 -- the seventh full-length fiction film by Dumont, who was born in 1958. Since his first film, La vie (...)
Among the political films screened in the course of the Berlin Film Festival, which closed last week, was the Israeli documentary filmmaker Dan Setton's State 194, on Palestine, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival last September. This is (...)
Last Thursday saw the opening of the 63th Berlinale. The awards will be announced at the closing ceremony on 16 February, with screenings of the Golden Bear winners in the short and full-length categories on the same day and screenings of all the (...)
Samir Farid reports from the centre of the world
The 69th round of the Venice Film Festival (29 Augest-8 September) �ê" the most prestigious in the world, and the third to take place annually after Berlin in February and Cannes in May �ê" is this (...)
Samir Farid packs his bags in anger
Only two out of six winners at the Cannes Film Festival deserved it: Michael Haneke's second Palme d'Or for the French film Amour (Haneke won the 2009 Palme d'Or for The White Ribbon); and the Danish filmmaker (...)
Reporting from Cannes, as he has done every year since 1967, Samir Farid basks in an unprecedented Arab presence at Cannes
This year the main poster of the Cannes Film Festival (16-27 May) features Marilyn Monroe blowing out the candle on her 30th (...)
Writing from Berlin, Samir Farid reviews two of the Berlinale's more striking features
The 62nd round of the Berlinale (9-19 Feb) opened last week a year before the end of the contract of its current director, Dieter Kosslick, whose contract has (...)
Delighted, Samir Farid writes from Thessaloniki
Despite the crisis now suffocating Greece, unprecedented since the coup d'etat of the 1960s, the 52nd Thessaloniki International Film Festival (4-13 Nov) was held as scheduled. In this way Greece (...)
Writing from the Lido, Samir Farid covers some of the Venice Festival's highlights
The 68th Venice Film Festival competition began for real with the screening of the French film Carnage, the latest by the world-renowned Polish filmmaker Roman (...)