Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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“One Battle After Another,” “My Father’s Shadow,” Jafar Panahi Win at 2025 Gotham Awards
International titles dominated at last night’s Gotham Awards, with films from Iran, France, the UK and Ireland, including one that was entirely Lagos-shot, winning seven of ten competitive categories. It Was Just an Accident‘s Jafar Panahi, who, it was revealed by his lawyer shortly before the event, has been sentenced in absentia to one year in prison and a two-year travel ban for engaging in “propaganda activities” against the state, was on hand to accept awards for Best Director, Best International Feature and Best Original Screenplay. Akinola Davies Jr.’s My Father’s Shadow, a 2025 Cannes selection and MUBI release that […]
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Maryland Film Festival 2025: Cinema Saturation in Baltimore
If last year’s Maryland Film Festival felt like a trial run for a new era of Baltimore’s cornerstone film event, the 26th Maryland Film Festival solidified its direction. Bouncing back from the low point of 2023, when the event was postponed for a year due to financial constraints, MdFF looks to continue growing its reach—a herculean effort in 2025 as arts institutions across the country are under attack by crackdowns in free speech and having their federal funding gutted. “We were awarded [an NEA] grant, then it was taken away,” Nancy Proctor, the new executive director of the Parkway tells […]
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Metrograph To Screen Filmmaker 25 New Faces Shorts on December 6
Filmmaker is very happy to be partnering on December 6, 2025 with New York’s Metrograph for an evening of shorts drawn from the magazine’s 2025 25 New Faces list. I wrote for the Metrograph’s calendar: Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces list has annually curated a cross-section of emerging and impressive new independent film talent. Directors, writers, actors, below-the-line—these are filmmakers who have made indelible work in the past year and will go on to shape tomorrow’s film culture. With the magazine’s 29th edition of the list in its current edition, the editors have curated from their work an excitingly diverse selection […]
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Tokyo 2025: Mario Patrocínio on “Maria Vitória”
Mario Patrocínio’s Maria Vitória is the writer-director’s first narrative feature, but it brings the chops of his documentary background to ground the story of the titular young woman (Mariana Cardoso). Under the relentless eye of her controlling father Nacho (Miguel Borges), Maria is subjected to a rigorous soccer training regimen that makes having a social life nearly impossible. When her estranged brother Bruno (Miguel Nunes) unexpectedly returns to their small Portuguese village, the film expands from a father-daughter duo to a fraught triangle. Bruno’s queerness challenges his father’s stereotypical machismo; her brother’s former absence and her father’s constant presence are […]
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Sundance Redford Founder Tribute to Honor Ed Harris, Gyula Gazdag at 2026 Festival
The nonprofit Sundance Institute today announced in a press release details for the 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s annual fundraiser, Celebrating Sundance Institute: A Tribute to Founder Robert Redford, taking place on Friday, January 23, 2026, at the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley in Utah. From the press release: The evening will honor Sundance Institute’s Founder, Robert Redford — his legacy, vision, and enduring mission to support independent storytellers. In paying tribute this year, the inaugural Robert Redford Luminary Award will be established and presented to Ed Harris and Gyula Gazdag, two artists deeply dedicated to the Sundance Institute labs and committed […]
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Tokyo International Film Festival 2025: Echoes and Sermons
In 2021, the Tokyo International Film Festival decided to leap out of mediocrity. It was, acquaintances told me, previously the kind of place where they’d show Princess Diaries 2 for red-carpet celebrity purposes, and in terms of its relationship to local fare, The Hollywood Reporter’s Gavin J. Blair wrote that the other TIFF “faced criticism in the past that it was run mostly by, and for the benefit of, the ‘big four’ Japanese studios” (Toho, Toei, Shochiku, Kadagawa). With the 2021 appointment of programming director Ichiyama Shozo, Tokyo—like the Busan International Film Festival—is now designed to be a launching pad for […]
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“I Just Need More Money To Make the Longer Version of It”: On the Proof-of-Concept PROOF Film Festival
From Half Nelson to Whiplash, Bottle Rocket to Short Term 12, making a short film as a feature proof-of-concept has been a time-tested independent film strategy to generate screenplay interest and secure feature financing. But, in the past, the “proof-of-concept” part of a short’s identity is usually hidden to audiences, revealed only by the filmmakers as they then circulate their screenplays and pitch decks. More recently, though, the proof-of-concept short has come into its own as a sub-genre worthy of its own consideration and showcase. Currently in the middle of its three-day third edition is the American Cinematheque’s PROOF Film […]
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“A Community Campfire”: The 2025 Camden International Film Festival
On the cusp of every autumn for the last 21 years, the Camden International Film Festival becomes the center of the nonfiction world, offering a kind of community campfire in the midst of the seasonal showcase sprawl (Telluride, Toronto, New York), its focus on a more intimate, artist-led level of engagement in the crisp air of coastal Maine, far from the madding crowds (and industry noise). This year’s festival, situated in Camden and Rockland, felt securely grounded after several years shadowed by various uncertainties: COVID, a hurricane, and the departure of founder and former executive and artistic director Ben Fowlie […]
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The Gotham Announces the 2025 Gotham Award Nominees; “One Battle After Another” Tops with Six Noms
One Battle After Another, Familiar Touch and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You are among the multiple nominees for the 2025 35th edition of the Gotham Awards, announced today by The Gotham Film & Media Institute, Filmmaker‘s publisher. Among its six nominations, the Paul Thomas Anderson picture received nominations for Best Feature, Best Adapted Screenplay (from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland), and Outstanding Supporting Performance (for both Benicio Del Toro and Teyana Taylor). Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Filmmaker‘s current cover story, received nominations for Best Feature, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Outstanding Lead Performance (Rose Byrne). Sarah […]
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“Collapsing the Past Into the Present”: Connor Sen Warnick on “Characters Disappearing”
A half-hour into Connor Sen Warnick’s Characters Disappearing, left-wing revolutionary Mei (Yuka Murakami) hangs up a poster declaring “The East is Red.” Until that point, the film seems to take place in the strict past-tense, moving through the domestic spaces of Asian Americans in New York’s Chinatown in the early 1970s. But when Mei crosses the street, a woman moves through the frame in front of her in a mask and puffy jacket clearly out of our current decade—Mei, and her radical moment, exist in a past which haunts our present. Warnick’s film doesn’t hide the reality of how and […]
