Zachary Heinzerling’s debut film, Cutie and the Boxer, has been one of the documentary hits of the festival circuit this year following its world premiere at Sundance, where Heinzerling won a directing award. A narrative study of the relationship between famed boxing painter Ushio Shinohara and his artist wife, Noriko, the film explores their creatively exorbitant marriage and all of the intimacies therein – from their quirky flirtations to the darkness of Ushio’s alcoholic past. Heinzerling’s background in philosophy and his five years working on documentaries for HBO have made the director equally focused on honesty and quiet questioning as photographic beauty, attributes …

In Daniel Patrick Carbone’s Hide Your Smiling Faces, two young brothers wrestle with the meaning of mortality following the mysterious death of a friend. Paying little mind to the root of the accident, Carbone readily positions the death as a catalyst, allowing its existential domino effect to reverberate across the conscience of Eric, Tommy, and their equally curious cohorts. The lush and expansive woodland landscape where most of the narrative unfolds belies the intimacy of the film, as the viewer is able to peer inside a series of identity shaping interactions that function more like memories than plot points. In …

The heroine of director Matt Creed’s Lily – premiering today at the Tribeca Film Festival — is the in last throes of successful breast cancer treatment, and finding that life after illness is supposed to pick back up right where it left off. We follow her as she grapples with life’s minutiae, sometimes victorious and sometimes not, in a bravely authentic portrait of an aspect of cancer survivor’s lives seldom portrayed on screen. Filmmaker asked Creed about tackling such a personal subject in his first feature film. Filmmaker: The film is semi-autobiographical, based on your co-writer Amy Grantham’s experience with breast …

The Kill Team is a new blistering offering in the ever increasing pantheon of indictments of military conduct unbecoming. It follows the trial of specialist Adam Winfield, whose platoon in Afghanistan started intentionally murdering civilians, branding themselves The Kill Team. In an ironic twist of fate, though a horrified Winfield sought to alert the military via his family and found his exhortations fell on deaf ears, Winfield was immediately indicted with premeditated murder upon his return to the U.S., along with four others in his platoon. Director Dan Krauss’s film, which premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival today, documents the …

Between 2008 and 2011, Brooklyn-based documentary filmmaker Sean Dunne built a burgeoning reputation for himself with a series of short films that demonstrated both his strong visual sense and his ability to skilfully capture the world of his subjects. The standout films from this period were The Archive, a portrait of the largest collection of vinyl records in the U.S. and its owner, and American Juggalo, which featured devoted Insane Clown Posse fans at the annual Gathering of the Juggalos. Now Dunne has broadened his focus and made his debut feature, Oxyana, which zeroes in on the town of Oceana, …

Founded in 1972, the Philadelphia-founded black liberation group MOVE Organization (the capitals break down into an acronym) preached a return to nature, annoying their neighbors by having bullhorns broadcast their beliefs all night and letting garbage fester in their yard. On May 13, 1985, Wilson Goode — the city’s first black mayor — approved dropping a bomb on their house as part of an eviction effort. 11 MOVE members died, including 5 children, and destroyed 61 houses. Jason Osder’s documentary feature debut Let The Fire Burn resurrects the incident almost exclusively through archival footage of TV broadcasts, home movies and …

When François Ozon first started making features some 15 years ago, with films like Sitcom, Criminal Lovers and the Fassbinder adaptation Water Drops on Burning Rocks, he showed himself to be a raw, edgy and insistent talent. His ambition and style were at the fore in those early efforts, but over the years as he has continued to make movies — at the breakneck pace of almost one per year — he has visibly matured as a filmmaker. During his career he has done everything from colorful, large-scale retro musicals (8 Women) to bleak, formally rigorous relationship dramas (5×2) to lavish …

Banker White’s first feature, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, followed the titular group of musicians from a refugee camp in Guinea to their home and back again; his second feature, The Genius of Marian, is much closer to home. After his mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, White came back home to help with caretaking. In 2009 he began shooting conversations with his mother for therapeutic purposes, eventually realizing he was working on his next project. Shot over three years, the resulting film was co-directed by White’s wife (then-girlfriend) Anna Fitch. Arriving in New York in advance of the …

Oil. We can’t live with it. We can’t live without it. For some, this is the major environmental predicament of our times.  For a few countries in Africa, it’s an unexpected windfall, the consequences of which are still not entirely known. While researching what was to become her second feature Big Men, Rachel Boynton traveled to Nigeria to find out what exactly was going on in the oil fields there, only to discover that the story was much bigger than just one country or even one continent. It was a story that would take her to nearby Ghana all the …

“You must tell him about the greeting cards,” Deepa Mehta said to Salman Rushdie the other day. The director and the writer were sitting next to one another in a book-lined room in a midtown Manhattan hotel, and as they prepared to field a few of my questions about their new film, she urged Rushdie to share an anecdote about the movie’s source material, his famed novel Midnight’s Children. Rushdie complied. “It’s sold millions of copies,” he said, sounding less like a boastful author than a man stating a simple fact. “And in India it’s sold zillions extra because there …