The world-renown International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam officially kicks off its 10 day program today, permeating itself across theaters around the city . Perhaps less known but more exciting for the ‘new media crowd’ is IDFA DocLab, a unique division and platform dedicated to showcasing innovation in digital documentary storytelling.
Whether termed ‘new media film projects’,…
This month 27th Warsaw Film Festival took place. It’s organised since 1985 which makes it the second oldest film festival in Poland after Gdynia Polish Film Festival. This year 370 movies were displayed, 152 filmmakers from 39 countries presented their projects in person and the festival audience amounted to 111 000 people.
WFF is an A category festival which…
The market for music has been collapsing since the up rise of high speed Internet access. Music is an elastic product that suffers under the effect of price and competition. The opportunities for users have changed and lean towards downloading. It’s easier, faster and less expensive then buying it at a store in the centre of most cities. It isn’t…
Write what you know, it is often said. And love, is what I’d like to add. In embarking on the Wikipedia adventure this past week, the saying has certainly proven to be a very helpful starting point for me. Whereas I expected finding a suitable topic would be the main challenge, I knew what to write about within ten minutes.…
A couple of weeks ago, during my routine deletion of facebook notices and invitations (“fpam”?), I fortunately bothered to open one headlined, “The Groundbreaking Last Movie from Eugene Kotlyarenko.” Okay, I thought, a movie-release by an acquaintance is special enough to warrant more than a cursory look, so although I’m in Amsterdam, quite far away from Los Angeles or New York (where most of the events I’m still invited to take place), it wouldn’t hurt to be in the know. Fortunately (again), it turned out that the movie was being released on the internet, and not as a full-length feature, but in ten easy-to-digest-in-our-attention-deficit-internet-culture episodes — perfectly matching my spacetime needs.
Filmmakers are in general quite conservative. Their love for high quality image, 16 mm, 35 mm, big screenings and Hollywood attraction is usually overshadowing the curiosity for developments in the area of new media. This is a shame, especially because new media techniques involve a whole new way of filmmaking, avoiding top-down approach of production and enhances freedom of…