Authors — Scott Macaulay
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The Gotham Announces 2025 Gotham Week Expo Programming
The Gotham Film and Media Institute, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the programming for the 2025 Gotham Week Expo, taking place during Gotham Week Monday, September 29th – Friday, October 3, in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Declares the organization in a press release, “The fourth-annual Expo, featuring enhanced design-thinking sessions, will bring together partners from The Gotham’s Expanding Communities initiative to provide community and thought leadership on topics pertinent to film and media creators as well as resources for nonprofit media organizations. “ After years at the Brooklyn Navy Yards, The Gotham will return to the DUMBO neighborhood for its Brooklyn events. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 27, 2025 -
U.S. in Progress 2025 Submissions Now Open for American Independents Seeking Finishing Funds
U.S. in Progress is now through September 5 accepting submissions from American independent filmmakers with pictures in post-production seeking finishing funds. Accepted filmmakers and projects will attend the in-person event, November 4 – 8, in Warsaw and Wroclaw under the framework of Poland’s American Film Festival, where they will present the rough cuts of their narrative projects to European buyers and Polish post-production companies providing over $100,000 in post services. The program has had a great curatorial run the last few years. Recent projects that are alumni of U.S. in Progress include the recently released Familiar Touch, directed by 2023 […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 18, 2025 -
Grasshopper Film Acquires Non-Theatrical and Digital Rights to Birth Tourism Doc How to Have an American Baby
Grasshopper Film has acquired North American digital and non-theatrical rights to How to Have an American Baby, directed by Chinese-American filmmaker Leslie Tai, the company said in a press release. The company will release the film tomorrow, August 19, on digital platforms. From the press release: A decade in the making, the film is a haunting and intimate portrait of the shadow economy of Chinese birth tourism in the United States. With rare access and remarkable empathy, How to Have an American Baby takes viewers inside a hidden network of maternity hotels, expectant mothers, brokers, and medical providers operating at […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 18, 2025 -
“It Pushed Me to the Limits of My Ability and Experience as a Filmmaker”: Matt Wolf on His Emmy-Nominated Pee-wee As Himself
Throughout his career, documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf has excelled at portraits of complicated artists and individuals whose work is both highly idiosyncratic as well as, at least seen in retrospect, emergent from specific cultural, social and political milieus. Early work include two films — a short, Smalltown Boys, and his feature debut, Wild Combination — about, respectively, two seminal downtown New York figures of the ’70s and ’80s, artist David Wojnarowicz and composer Arthur Russell. The 2017 short Bayard and Me looked at the relationship between civil rights leader Bayard Rustin through the lens of his relationship with boyfriend Walter […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 15, 2025 -
63rd New York Film Festival Announces Main Slate, Including Reichardt, Poitras, Denis, Jarmusch and More
Film at Lincoln Center announced today the 34 films that comprise the Main Slate of the 2025 New York Film Festival. The Opening Night film is Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, and Jim Jarmusch’s latest, Father Mother Sider Brother is the Centerpiece. The Closing Night film, Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On?, is a world premiere, and it joins others including Gavagai by Ulrich Köhler (In My Room, NYFF56), “an astute drama in which a film adaptation of Medea becomes the center of cross-cultural tensions.” From Sundance there is Khalil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, from Venice Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 5, 2025 -
“Fairy Tales Are the Stories We Tell Our Children to Warn Them…”: Writer/Director Kelsey Taylor on Her Suspenseful Debut Feature, To Kill a Wolf
For viewers watching Kelsey Taylor’s terrific debut feature, To Kill a Wolf, it’s easy to miss that its very loose source material is the 17th-century children’s fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood. Yes, there’s a girl lost in the woods, a woodsman, a grandma (arguably), and a wolf, although the latter is hardly an obvious figure. But the relationships between these characters and their backstories are newly invented, mapping onto contemporary anxieties and fears as much an archetypal narrative structures. Consider To Kill a Wolf something of a remix, the kind where the source material haunts rather than dictates, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 29, 2025 -
“The Film Remains a Mystery to Me — Why is That?”: Nicholas Rombes on the Timecodes Series and Walking with Gus Van Sant’s Gerry
As the pandemic rumbled on, in early ’22, and with my annual winter sojourn to the Sundance Film Festival cancelled, I took an online course in boredom. With so many customary diversions having been put on hold, I had reason to be bored, I suppose, but in taking the course I was more interested in boredom as an intellectual topic. You see, I have vivid memories of being bored as a kid — the books at the library I wanted to read were checked out, my elementary school’s summer activities were lame, there was not much on TV — but, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 11, 2025 -
“It’s Really Sharp on the Neurotic Relationships that Americans Have with Money”: Robin Schavoir and Paul Felten Discuss The Jag
The titular sports car of Robin Schavoir’s The Jag is parked in an imaginary space off-stage at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, where the play is currently running in a production directed by Paul Felten. The existence of this symbolic object structures the matrix of resentment, envy and desire searchingly embodied by The Jag‘s on-stage trio: struggling screenwriter Tyler (Gilles Geary), rich guy art collector Brian (Mickey Solis), and nursing student Cori (Giovanna Drummond). (A fourth character, the renter of the Catskills home the three converge at, and voiced by a “downtown icon,” is only heard via recited emails […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 27, 2025 -
“Fire is Like Sex — Neither Good Nor Bad But What You Bring To It”: Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens on Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency
In the first two films in their trilogy of environmental-themed documentaries, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle married — literally — their loving spirit of “ecosexuality” with urgent debates around the preservation of our natural resources. In 2014’s Goodbye Gauley Mountain — An Ecosexual Love Story, Stephens returned to her West Virginia home with Sprinkle only to find the eponymous ridges she remembered from her youth undergoing the environmentally-destructive coal-mining process of mountaintop removal. In the film, as Wren Awry wrote for Filmmaker, Stephens says, “Sometimes I feel like fighting [mountaintop removal] is a losing battle. Then I imagine that some […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 23, 2025 -
Free Webinar: CRISIS/OPPORTUNITY: Four New Innovative Distributors Rethinking the Indie Model
8 Above’s June webinar, co-sponsored by Filmmaker Magazine, profiles four new adventurous and innovative distributors that have emerged on the US independent film scene. Join Scott Macaulay (Filmmaker) and Jon Reiss for a conversation with Elizabeth Woodward (Willa), Munir Atalla (Watermelon Pictures), Elizabeth Purchell (Muscle Distribution), and Theodore Schaefer & James Belfer (Cartuna x Dweck). 🎤 What The Webinar Will Cover How each company approaches curation, audience building, and community engagement What makes these new distribution models unique—and replicable How filmmakers can find the right fit for their work in a shifting ecosystem Whether you’re prepping for a release, scouting […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 21, 2025
