Partycrashers is an on-going series of video dispatches from critics Michael Pattison and Neil Young.
Up the steep track, under the warm dusk, we trudged with no purpose other than to reach our agreed-upon stop: a hillside café halfway between Prizren and the heavens. Below us, behind us, glittery headlights passed through Kosovo’s second city, en route to its capital, Priština. Stop-start progressions. Bad roads. I’d been overseas for eleven days, Neil for thirty. Our time in Prizren, home for fourteen editions now to the dependably curated Dokufest, had helped to barricade a week between the previous film festival and our imminent recording.
From Locarno, Switzerland, news had just arrived to us of the winners awarded during the closing ceremony of that town’s 68th annual film festival. The Locarno Film Festival is never short of talking points: though some of its fare had already retreated into the ether of our minds (good riddance to the lot of it), some had proved to be stubborn—for better or worse. So we began to talk.
In the following video, Neil and I exchange thoughts on new films by Andrzej Żuławski (Cosmos), Alex Van Warmerdam (Schneider vs. Bax), Josh Mond (James White), Travis Wilkerson (Machine Gun or Typewriter?), Lois Patiño (Night Without Distance and Strata of the Image), Chantal Akerman (No Home Movie), José Luis Guerín (The Lesson of the Muses), and some old ones by a man named Sam Peckinpah. —Michael Pattison
Partycrashers is an on-going feature by critics Michael Pattison and Neil Young of video dispatches from various international film festivals.