My fifth and last day at the cinematic wonderland that is DIFF consisted of three documentaries. The films are very diverse - two were made by Western filmmakers and the third one is by an Iranian who was stopped from filming his latest film and this doccie was smuggled out of Iran on a flash drive hidden in a cake! I kicked off my day with Semisweet: Life in chocolate that focuses on 4 different stories about chocolate - the top chocolatier in France, a spiritual couple's chocolates fro...

Lars Von Trier       Jafar Panahi  The 64th edition of the Cannes Film Festival is now history, but two standout personalities on opposite poles of the spectrum have defined this year as one of the most unusual in memory. In one corner, we have the Danish filmmaker provocateur Lars Von Trier whose verbal missteps about Nazism at his press conference led...

HAMBURG 13 CLOSES WITH CASH PRIZES AND ELECTRIC SHADOWSThe thirteenth installment of the Hamburg Film Festival came to a close on September 29 with an invitational screening of the Chinese film "Electric Shadows" (Dyan-Ying), which is simply a direct translation of the Chinese word for "movies". The film is basically a declaration of love for the medium itself, and female director Xiao Jiang picked up a nice little purse of 10,000 Euros, the Otto Sprenger Prize for best debut film. Sprenger is ...

Each Labor Day weekend, the tiny mountain village of Telluride, Colorado triples in size. Swells of passionate film enthusiasts flood the town for four days of total cinematic immersion, embarking on a viewing odyssey, blissfully spending entire days in flickering dark rooms. With only an appreciation of celluloid to guide them, these devotees flock to the show, year after year.Before the event unfolds nobody knows what’s playing, or who’s being honored at Telluride, before the event unfolds...