This year’s 36th Miami Film Festival brought to us by Miami Dade College will begin on March 1 and end on March 10. Venues primarily include the magnificent Olympia, Coral Gables Art Cinema, MDC’s Tower, the O Cinema Miami Beach, and the newish Silverspot downtown.
This has been one banner year for film. GEMS 2018, Miami Film Festival’s four-day fall film festival, as it often has, hit the bullseye. Cold War begins in 1949 Poland, and chronicles a romance where an ill-fated couple separates and reunites throughout a few decades. It’s in black and white like another favorite Roma. GEMS also showed the brilliant Lebanese film Capernaum which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. After fleeing from his desperate, pathetic parents, killing someone who deserves it, and being sentenced to jail, a tough, streetsmart 12-year-old boy sues his parents to protest the life they have dumped upon him. These are great films. The lengthier festival should be so lucky.
Whether the upcoming festival will be successful remains to be seen. Its parties, affairs, opening night events, red carpet spectacles, closing ceremonies, interviews, and galas are impressive and simultaneously pretentious. Vying for prominence in a film festival obsessed world full of thousands of competing locations can’t be easy. Showing great films like Cold War and Capernaum lend credence, but they are from GEMS. The Miami Film Festival would have been blessed to find such great films for its winter session.
Combing over dozens of films is a labor of agony for writers; I have struggled to select and recommend films from this crop.
Superficial originality being my guide, these interest me: Neto Villalobos’ Helmet Heads, Lex Gillespie’s Mamboniks, Olivier Assayas’ Non-Fiction, Billy Corben’s Magic City Hustle, and José Maria Cabral’s The Projectionist. I cannot define why, but I’m sick of watching trailers and reading reviews.
I have previously praised the Miami Jewish Film Festival and criticized the Miami Film Festival. Perhaps the larger, more ambitious event is simply out of my league. Maybe I am not important enough to receive better treatment. Maybe it’s really just a big mess. I cannot say. However, The Miami Film Festival has become deeply ingrained in local lore. Waiting in the long Olympia line for an opening night film which may or may not be good does not seem to matter to our film-going crowd. Moreover, going to a party and watching our desperate wannabe rich and hungry swoop down on hors d’oeuvres is classic Miami entertainment, which is what I intend to do if I make the cut and get invited.
