While the Polish public certainly is aware of the latest Hollywood films, and with current American television series also freely available here, it is a little surprising that some  of the American indie world's most celebrated auteurs are virtually unknown. That is one of the goals of the inaugural American Film Festival, the first film event in Eastern Europe solely devoted to contemporary and classic American cinema. And if the size of the audiences at the screenings is any indica...

I’ve been doing a bit of phd work this morning and one of the areas I’ve been researching is on film authorship and I appear to have fallen in love with that word ‘auteur’ its such a rich, fresh word and very French (when you say it you kind of feel as if you live there). When I first started researching this area, I used to think that the word applied only exclusively to film directors, but - to varying degrees – I’d argue that we are all actually authors whether we ar...

A note from the President Politics, allegedly, is the art of answering questions you haven’t been asked. I won’t be doing that today. People often ask: where will the Festival de Cannes be in five years time? The only question that I find important is that of the future of independent, auteur cinema, and thus the future of film festivals, as they are basically the same thing. For a long time I believed that cinema was a kind of royal processional road along which one went from Lu...

Cannes Classics, the Festival program of landmark films of the past, will be closing today with the 3pm screening of a print of the spaghetti western Once Upon a Time... The Revolution (1971), by Sergio Leone. The Cineteca di Bologna and the lab Immagine Ritrovata can take credit for the restoration. At 7pm, festivalgoers are invited to discover Two of the New Wave, to be presented by the director of the documentary, Emmanuel Laurent. Celebrating the fifty-year anniver...

The 56th TrentoFilmfestival will begin on the 22nd of April under the artistic direction of Maurizio Nichetti and until the 4th of May will present a large selection of fiction and documentary films.The program promises a wide choice of narrative and documentary auteur films presenting exciting stories of man’s association with nature, mountains and adventure. 2008 guests: Joe Simpson, Pierre Mazeaud, Charly Russel, Silvia Vidal Hansjörg Auer, Russian mountaineering team, Simone Moro, ...

 Friday, August 10-------For the fifth year, Anthology Film Archives invites amateurs and professionals alike to share their 8-millimeter, Super 8 or 16-millimeter home movies for its annual Home Movie Day. Decaying images from family vacations, bar mitzvah celebrations, long forgotten family members and other ephemera are the order of the day, with the prevailing ethos that one man's trash is another man's treasure. The only rule is that the home movies must be that, movies, not vide...

LOCARNO -- AUTHORS AND PERSONALITIESLocarno is above all a festival of "Auteur” Cinema, a term for which there is no neat equivalent in English other than to say ”authors” (i.e., directors) of personal films not dictated to by the demands of the market place, or of producers, nor made to please anybody but the author of the film himself -- a bit long winded, but the French always seem to have a word for it, especially when it comes to cinema. This being said the name of the game in Loc...