collective by Alexander Nanau
BUCHAREST: Romania has been seriously affected by the Coronavirus pandemic, which shut down film production and cinemas for several months. The closing of cinemas and the decrease of TV advertisement resulted in a significant decrease of the amount of money for the national Film Fund and, as a consequence, no production grants were allotted for 2020 and most likely won t be allotted for 2021 as well.
Although officially re-launched in January 2020, when it was taken over by the Ministry of Economy, the cash rebate scheme didn t function in 2020, and at the end of 2020 most of the projects already shot since the scheme opened in 2018 were waiting for the rebate.
MLK/FBI (2020)
Another record-breaking, history-making week in America has managed to squeeze in a bit of movie news as well. Specifically, festival news. Bong Joon Ho, whose
Parasite won the Palme d’Or in 2019 and four Oscars last year, will preside over the jury in Venice. The seventy-eighth edition is set to run from September 1 through 11.
Sundance, whose hybrid 2021 edition opens on January 28, has added two films to its lineup. Shaka King’s
Judas and the Black Messiah stars Daniel Kaluuya as Black Panther party leader Fred Hampton and Lakeith Stanfield as the man the FBI has sent in to track his every move. And Ali El Arabi’s documentary
The Year of Great Reckoning
A round-up of cinema s trials and tribulations, and some small victories, in 2020
published : 16 Dec 2020 at 04:00
12 The Scala theatre − Bangkok s last standalone cinema − held a three-day Final Touch Of Memory event to bid farewell to film lovers. Photo: Pattarapong chatpattarasill
For filmgoers, it was a year of mortal dread. The screen went dark, like a coffin nailed shut, and is still like that in many places. Faith in cinema as we ve known it was rattled, challenged, and endangered with a Biblical overtone; it s a plague we re dealing with, after all. It was a year unlike any other we had seen before in the 125 years since cinema was invented. And while that sounds dispiriting, 2020 has also been a Year of Great Reckoning during which the equilibrium was recalibrated and the idea of moving images continues, as it should, to evolve.