Cinequest 17
The first film festival I ever went to was Cinequest, the San Jose film festival, in 2001. It opened my eyes to how many good films are made that do not come to a theater near you, even if you live near a good theater that shows art and international films. I have been every year since, always with a pass so I can see lots of films.
This year, the 17th iteration of the festival opened on February 28th with The Namesake, and then continues through March 11th.
I will post my planned schedule as I work it out. As one step in preparing to do that, I went through all of the feature length films playing and attempted to find them on the Internet Movie Database, so that I could get some data on the films that is less biased than the Cinequest program. This is not a criticism of Cinequest—if they didn’t like a film, they wouldn’t have included it. The resulting IMDb list can be found here. Note that IMDb generally lists films with the title in the original language, whereas the Cinequest program is alphabetized by the English titles.
Here’s a tentative schedule for what I’m planning to see:
- 2/28 7:00pm The Namesake
- 3/1 1:45pm The Prince of Soap (Finnish comedy; North American premiere)
- 3/1 4:45pm Act Normal (documentary from Iceland, though in English; North American premiere)
- 3/2 1:30pm Just Sex and Nothing Else (Hungarian comedy)
- 3/2 4:30pm Fresh Air (another Hungarian film, this time a drama)
- 3/2 7:00pm The General (a classic silent film directed by and starring Buster Keaton)
- 3/3 7:00pm All the Days Before Tomorrow (comedy/drama/romance; showing the day before was the North American premiere)
- 3/3 9:30pm Who Loves the Sun (drama) with the short Dorme
- 3/4 6:30pm Outsourced (comedy)
- 3/5 6:45pm Border Post (Serbo-Croatian comedy/etc.)
- 3/6 Nothing
- 3/7 2:30pm Out of Balance (documentary which attacks ExxonMobil) with the short The Sparky Book
- 3/7 4:30pm Slumming (Austrian drama)
- 3/8 2:30pm Pure Hearts (Danish drama; U.S. premiere)
- 3/8 4:30pm Pingpong (German drama)
- 3/8 7:00pm Maria’s Men (Norwegian comedy/drama; North American premiere)
- 3/9 Nothing (I decided not to see Pandora’s Box)
- 3/10 10:00am You Are Here (comedy)
- 3/10 1:30pm The Bothersome Man (Norwegian comedy/drama/horror)
- 3/10 4:00pm Prague (Danish drama)
- 3/10 7:00pm We Shall Overcome (Danish drama)
- 3/11 6:30pm Owl and the Sparrow (Vietnamese drama; closing night film)
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