International Film Guide 2009
472 pages. Full of illustrations – still from films, photos from award ceremonies at festivals all over the world, the 45th edition of the International Film Guide is available. With ”Directors of the Year”, a ”World Survey”, info/reports/highlights country by country from Afghanistan to Vietnam, a festival focus (this year on Sundance), statistics, the best dvd-publishers and the best new boxes, a festival calendar – and advertisements all over that are full of info on how to get more information. And of course the Guide is now also online, see below.
I have followed this publication from way back, when the founding editor Peter Cowie travelled around and was a regular visitor to Denmark, where he was so kind to ask me to write a small text about Danish shorts and documentaries. I did and Statens Filmcentral (National Film Board of Denmark), where I worked for 20 years, bought an advertisement in the book! Fair enough and this is still how this yearbook is financed, I guess. It makes the texts very different depending on who is writing. Some texts are pure promotion, others are fine reporting and some analytical. For me the mix is actually quite charming and wonderfully entertaining to sit with as a book.
Talking about documentaries, which we primarily do on filmkommentaren.dk, it is significant to see how much space this genre gets in the book. Another indirect evidence that it is the Golden Age of the creative documentary. Therefore, let me end by referring to a fine article by British Chris Darke on a FILMmaker of all genres: Agnès Varda.
