Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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NYFF 2025 Announces Currents Lineup
Film at Lincoln Center announced Currents for the 63rd New York Film Festival, taking place from September 26 through October 13 at Lincoln Center and in venues across the city. The Currents slate includes 16 feature films and 24 short films in five programs, representing 28 countries. “In a film landscape that is so often homogeneous by design, this year’s Currents lineup is energizing for being a showcase of the boundless possibilities of cinematic language,” said Dennis Lim, Artistic Director, New York Film Festival, in a press release. “Resurrecting old technologies and subverting new ones, the filmmakers and artists here use an ingenious array of styles and forms to investigate the past and illuminate the present, in […]
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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 […]
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FIDMarseille 2025: Fascist Equestrians and Others
Since changing its official name from Festival International du Documentaire de Marseille to Festival International de Cinéma de Marseille, FIDMarseille has become a significant premiere-driven industry festival dedicated to the expansive genre of “creative nonfiction” to include experimental, hybrid and essayistic works, often with a political ethos. For its 36th edition, FID reaffirmed its rare outspokenness on Palestine by screening To Gaza (2025) and hosting daily morning screenings of the collective work Some Strings. Through retrospectives of Radu Jude and Chilean duo Carolina Adriazola and José Luis Sepúlveda, the festival also seemed intent on signaling that it is not only […]
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Karlovy Vary 2025: Promising Young Men and Women
“There are so many promising debut features, then all those filmmakers go on to be jury members.” A new acquaintance was lamenting the dearth of directors under 40 with distinct styles and durable careers; I laughed, but it was a fair synopsis of a grim landscape. Per Wallace Stevens, the imagination may always be at the end of an era, but at this particular moment imagination and reality seem truly as one. Still, I’m in my unlikely second act as an (aspirational) optimist seeking reasons to be cheerful, and film festivals can help keep me in that headspace—at least we […]
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Cinema without Adjectives: Rita Azevedo Gomes on Fuck the Polis
In Rita Azevedo Gomes’ cinematic universe, a characteristic blend of literary adaptation and cinematic innovation creates simultaneously concrete and oneiric landscapes—places where the wandering subject, camera, plot and spectator become absorbed by the unknown, yet strangely familiar, territory before them. With Fuck the Polis, her most bold and daring film to date, the Portuguese filmmaker continues her cinematographic explorations of word, image, time and human emotions. Making its world premiere at FIDMarseille 2025, Polis follows Irma, who around twenty years ago, believing herself condemned, traveled to Greece. She now retraces that journey, moving from island to island in what becomes […]
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“I Had Never Filmed Near the Front Before”: Dmytro Hreshko on Karlovy Vary-Premiering Ukrainian War Documentary Divia
At a time when observation remains the dominant approach among contemporary Ukrainian documentarians and it feels as though every subject suited to a distanced gaze has already been explored, in Divia Dmytro Hreshko approaches nature during wartime with radical, dialogue-free minimalism. Originally from Uzhhorod, a city on the Slovakian border, Hreshko has celebrated Ukraine’s landscape in previous documentaries such as Snow Leopards of the Carpathians (2019) or Mountains and Heaven in Between (2022). With his signature admiration for picturesque scenery—captured through drone and sustained by extra-long shots with deep focus—Divia is a harmonious continuation of his career as both director […]
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2025 Oxbelly Retreat Screenwriters Fellows & Advisors Announced
Greek nonprofit Oxbelly has announced in a press release the participants of the 2025 Oxbelly Retreat, taking place June 28–July 6 at Costa Navarino in Messinia, Greece. The Oxbelly Retreat is an annual gathering of international storytellers, dedicated to the exchange of ideas, deepening of craft and broadening of artistic horizons through intercultural dialogue. Now in its tenth year, the 2025 Oxbelly Retreat includes programs for writers working in film and literary fiction. The Retreat is founded on the principles of embracing independence and risk-taking, as fellows move from early to mid-career and develop work they seek to bring to […]
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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 […]
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Uniting Home and the World: A Report From the 2025 Play-Doc International Film Festival
Each year, the Play-Doc International Film Festival brings a modest but well-curated selection of classic and contemporary films to Tui, Galicia, a historic border town that sits on the banks of the Miño River separating Spain and Portugal. As its name implies, Play-Doc is ostensibly dedicated to nonfiction cinema, though like other festivals with a similar remit (True/False, Visions du Réel, etc), it takes a liberal approach to what constitutes a documentary. The festival’s 21st edition, which ran from May 7 to 11, went further in this regard than ever before. Alongside two competitive programs, one for new and recent international […]
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DC/DOX 2025: So Many Reality Checks
“Well, we really needed that,” the woman in front of me said to her companion as we all left the opening night screening, Steal This Story, Please! at DC/DOX Film Festival. Co-founders Sky Sitney and Jamie Shor in fact seem to have offered up a timely slate, designed to inspire us in dark times and to provide examples of democratic action. And Washington, D.C. audiences embraced it. Their timing couldn’t have been better—the festival, in downtown D.C., occurred around the “No Kings” demonstrations accompanying Pres. Trump’s military parade. Steal This Story, Please!, by longtime Michael Moore collaborators Tia Lessen and […]
