Abe’s AFI Fest Wrap

By Abe Friedtanzer

This was my first year covering AFI Fest, and also my first time covering a virtual festival during the festival itself. It was a positive experience on both fronts, and the viewing platform I used – the AFI Fest app for Roku – worked pretty well and including plenty of interesting conversations with talent.

AFI announced the following winners:

Audience Award - Narrative Feature WOLFWALKERS (DIR Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart)
Audience Award - Documentary Feature 76 DAYS (DIR Hao Wu, Weixi Chen, Anonymous)
Audience Award - Short Film LONELY BLUE NIGHT (DIR Johnson Cheng)
Grand Jury Prize – Animation TIGER AND OX (호랑이와 소) (DIR Seunghee Kim)
Grand Jury Prize – Live Action PILLARS (DIR Haley Elizabeth Anderson)
Special Mention - BLACK GOAT (DIR Yi Tang)
Special Mention  MAALBEEK (DIR Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis)
Special Mention UMBILICAL (DIR Danski Tang)

I personally had the chance to screen 17 films, which represent a third of the features shown. I also saw 6 of the other films at Sundance, but it hardly seems fair to include some of my favorites, like Nine Days and Farewell Amor, in this piece since I already cited them in my Sundance wrap. Without further ado, I submit my choices for the best of this year’s AFI Fest...

Abe’s 'Jury-of-One' Top Five AFI Fest 2020 Films 

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Chi Film Fest: "Summer of 85"

Coverage from the 56th annual Chicago Film Festival

by Nick Taylor

One fun thing about not really watching trailers anymore is that a movie can surprise me pretty easily. For example, I knew from teasers that François Ozon’s Summer of 85 was pitching itself as the French answer to Call Me By Your Name. The story sees two incredibly handsome teenagers named Alex (Felix Lefebvre) and David (Benjamin Voison) have a life-altering romance during a life-changing special summer. But I completely missed the trailer that revealed a whole second narrative where a zombie-like Alex is being tried for an unspecified crime that sounds a lot like murdering David. 

So, there’s the part of Summer of 85 that’s very much Ozon doing a Call Me By Your Name-style romance and the part that's the melancholic aftermath...

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AFI Fest: Notturno

By Abe Friedtanzer

Italian documentarian Gianfranco Rosi’s last film, Fire at Sea, was released right around the time of the 2016 election. The Oscar-nominated film was a poignant and timely look at the implications of severely restricted immigration worldwide. Unlike popular recent documentaries like American Factory and Free Solo, Rosi’s work didn’t feature much dialogue or even a formed argument of any kind. Instead, plainly documenting what was happening was powerful enough to speak on its own. Rosi’s follow-up, Notturno, has a different focus but is much the same… 

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A Different Take on "The Trial of the Chicago 7"

by Eric Blume

We embrace respectful differences of opinion here at TFE, so with all due respect to my fellow staff writer Tony, who just gave Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 a rave review, I offer a dissenting opinion.  Fortunately thanks to Tony’s great synopsis, I can cut right to the chase.  I love Aaron Sorkin as much as the next guy, thinking his scripts for both The Social Network and Steve Jobs are essentially masterpieces, and even thinking more favorably upon Molly’s Game than most:  it had its own mini-sweep of energy and he tapped into all the things that make Jessica Chastain special. 

But there’s not a frame of Sorkin’s new movie that felt authentic or assured to me...

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New on Netflix: Trial of the Chicago 7

by Tony Ruggio

We weren't arrested. We were chosen.

The older you get, the more you realize how true the adage “history repeats itself” is. You realize it’s no longer just a pithy catchphrase but a reality of life as we know it. Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 was clearly intended, to some extent, to echo the trials and tribulations of the present. Little did Sorkin and co. know just how relevant their 1960’s period drama would turn out to be. Chicago 7 is both a classical Sorkin courtroom drama, focused on the thrilling broad strokes of such a monumental case, and a protest film designed to show us the moving chess pieces of an ongoing, decades-long culture war between the conservative right and two factions of the left: the progressive revolutionaries like Abbey Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), focused on change through disruption, and the pragmatic Democrats like Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), focused on change through winning elections. 

Revolving around a clash between protestors and police that took place outside the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the trial was the result of blatant entrapment by local authorities and represented a circumvention of free speech laws by the newly appointed Nixon administration...

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