Fests and events, 2/1.

Will or won't Chinese censors allow Li Yu's Lost in Beijing to screen - and compete - at the Berlinale? According to Jonathan Landreth at the Hollywood Reporter, that remains an open question.

The Austin Chronicle takes a sneak peek at the SXSW Film lineup.

"With one exception, the eight movies in the nifty Cold War Cinema series at the Harvard Film Archive are popular entertainments that treat the politics and sociology of the era in a variety of ways." February 6 through 28. A rundown from Steve Vineberg in the Boston Phoenix.

For the New York Press, Matt Peterson previews The Cinema of Donald Cammell, running tomorrow through February 11 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Also, Armond White: "We are in the dark ages of film culture which means the revival of Jacques Demy's rarely-shown 1971 The Pied Piper at Anthology Film Archives is especially apt."

Max Goldberg at SF360: "[W]hile retrospectives, festivals, and stocked DVD shelves afford non-academics deep looks into certain pockets of film history and culture, there is something about a class which suggests a broader map of the medium. This seems especially true of "Film 50," which, as an intro course taught by Marilyn Fabe (author of Closely Watched Films), emphasizes what film can do as much as where it has been."

Michael Guillén's at Noir City, taking notes galore.

"Next week the 15th annual Pan African Film & Arts Festival gets underway and, with reliable breadth, it features more than 140 films reflecting a wide range of styles, subjects, genres and viewpoints regarding the experience of Africans and the African diaspora," writes Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times, where he also notes a screening of "Adele Horne's eye-and-ear-opening documentary The Tailenders" on Sunday.

Cindy Smith's The Moral Museum: Selections from the Bick Archive (through March 31 at the Ben Maltz Gallery) "collects an array of objects left behind by the fictitious [Violet] Bick [played by Gloria Grahame in It's a Wonderful Life], and traces her life from her birth in 1923 in Seneca Falls (also the starting point of the American women's-rights movement), through the founding of her design company, her writing, activism and eventual death in 1989," writes Holly Willis in the LA Weekly.

Posted by dwhudson at February 1, 2007 12:46 PM