Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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TIFF 2025: Mare’s Nest, Blue Moon (Songs about Decline and Obsolescence)
Narratives of decline and obsolescence, frequently as a consequence of unforced errors made by the wealthy and unaccountable (the latter adjective redundant when paired with the former), are going to be a big theme this fall. The global political situation is self-evident; zooming down to the media tier, rumors of imminent firings and general bloodletting are swirling. (Wait for those quarterly reports to come in at the top of October and let the pain begin.) Zooming way down to the relatively parochial level of “one specific film festival,” TIFF was once a global powerhouse and automatic stop for the year’s […]
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13 Films to Look Out for at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival
The Toronto International Film Festival begins today, with many of this awards season’s festival heavy-hitters (Hamnet, The Smashing Machine, Sentimental Value, Train Dreams) screening for North American audiences. As usual, though, we focus our preview on newer titles as well as a few sleepers that have premiered earlier this year. Below, find 13 films we strongly believe are worth your time at Toronto. Maddie’s Secret The opening night selection for TIFF’s Discovery program is the directorial debut from NYC comedian John Early, wherein he stars as Maddie Ralph, a dishwasher working at a trendy food content company who struggles with […]
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“The Question of Whether Ukraine Will Exist at All”: Valentyn Vasyanovych on TIFF 2025 Premiere To the Victory!
When Valentyn Vasyanovych shot The Tribe (2014) by Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi, he was a cinematographer and emerging director. Shortly after, he developed an impressive oeuvre of his own beginning with Black Level (2017), a dialogue-free film about a wedding photographer in a midlife crisis. Similarly to The Tribe, Vasyanovych was exploring a novel cinematic language within a new wartime reality, establishing a formal strategy consisting of a strictly static camera and deep focus, extended mise-en-scène and minimal editing through which his films can be recognized. Two subsequent fiction features brought him international acclaim, whose frighteningly prescient narratives helped him attain the […]
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“A Desperate Search For a Reason to Wake Up”: Alexandre Koberidze on Dry Leaf
Georgian director Alexandre Koberidze’s second feature, What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021), was a sprawling city symphony-like romantic fantasy; at 186 minutes, his third feature Dry Leaf runs a half-hour longer, but doesn’t extended the labyrinthine storytelling techniques of his breakthrough film so much as consolidate its strengths and streamline its magical-realist sensibility. Employing a hybrid approach familiar to his award-winning, similarly lengthy debut, Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), Koberdize brings the more meditative and conversational qualities of that film to bear on a strikingly straightforward road trip tale that, rather than traffic […]
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From Twin Peaks to Monument Valley: Duwayne Dunham on Legend of the Happy Worker
It’s well known that George Lucas approached David Lynch to direct Return of the Jedi (1983), and that Lynch (thankfully) demurred, instead pursuing Blue Velvet (1985). Less well-known is the fact that the two films share an editor—Duwayne Dunham, an unlikely hyperspace lane between two otherwise distant cinematic galaxies. As a director himself, Dunham has a body of work that poses yet another wrinkle in space-time: since making his feature debut with Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993), he has specialized in tales of misfit youngsters, predominantly for the Disney Channel. The announcement that his new film, the long-gestating Legend […]
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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. […]
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Locarno 2025: A Cinema of Risks
A few black-and-white photos of Locarno’s first editions hung from the walls of the hotel that hosted me there for five days this month. Long before it began to stretch across several venues around town—none more iconic than the Piazza Grande, which every night turns into an 8,000-seat open air theater—the fest originally took place in the garden of Locarno’s Grand Hotel. This is where those pictures were taken. It is August 22, 1946, and they’re watching Giacomo Gentilomo’s My Sun—a crowd-pleaser with which the festival, just relocated from Lugano, opened the first edition in the city it’d be renamed […]
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From Elitist to Egalitarian: Julian Radlmaier on Phantoms of July
The films of Julian Radlmaier have all been infused with a specific kind of longing for a better future in the sense of Marxist utopias. From his early films—A Spectre is Haunting Europe (2013) and A Proletarian Winter’s Tale (2014)—to the snappy meta-commentary Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog in 2017 and 2021’s Bloodsuckers, aptly sub-titled “A Marxist Vampire Comedy,” Radlmaier has perfected the political allegory for our day and age. Static tableaux paired with outrageously funny one-liners (“Germany is sinking like the Titanic and we’re Leonardo DiCaprio”) make the films meme-friendly without compromising their devotion to labor politics and community. […]
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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 […]
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“What Was I Going to Do, Edit Don DeLillo?”: Ben Rivers on Locarno 2025 Premiere Mare’s Nest
For a film about the end of the world, Mare’s Nest is hardly lugubrious. Then again, you could say the same about Ben Rivers’s entire oeuvre. Few directors who’ve kicked off their careers after the proverbial “end of history” have so assiduously used their cameras to imagine what that might look like; fewer still have pictured the Armageddon as existing somewhere between dystopia and utopia. It can be difficult to tell whether Rivers’s films are post- or pre-apocalyptic, if the solitary figures they often center on—like the old hermit riffing on Darwin’s theories from his dilapidated forest hovel in The […]
