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FILM FEST KNOX Announces Inaugural American Regional Film Competition Selections
Atibon Nazaire in Mountains
The inaugural edition of FILM FEST KNOX, set to take place in Knoxville this year from November 9 to 12, has announced the six titles that will be featured in its American Regional Film Competition section, designed to highlight work produced outside of New York and Los Angeles, including the sophomore directorial feature by 25 New Face of Film Graham Swon. From the press release: An Evening Song (for three voices) (Dir. Graham Swon) 86 minutes – Drama In the 1930s a former child-prodigy writer moves to the countryside with her pulp-fiction scribe husband where they become entwined in a love triangle with their religious housekeeper. The second narrative feature by Swon, winner of the 2023 Indie Spirit John Cassavetes Award. Shot in Fairfield and… Read more
Trailer Watch: Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers
Paul Mescal in All of Us Strangers
Out December 22 from Searchlight Pictures, All of Us Strangers marks Andrew Haigh's first feature film since 2017's Lean on Pete. Early reviews are strong for this drama, which merges a burgeoning romance between Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Paul Mescal) and the former's return home, where he mysteriously discovers his long-dead parents alive and well. The film screens next at NYFF. Click here to read Peter Bowen's 2011 interview with Haigh for his debut feature, Weekend.
Rathaus Announces Detroit-Focused $10,000 Film Production Grant
Rathaus, the New York and Detroit-based production company behind such films as Tim Sutton's Funny Face, Cedric Cheung-Lau's The Mountains Are a Dream that Call to Me and Diana Peralta's De Lo Mio, has announced a new grant supporting Detroit-based filmmakers. The Rathaus Film Grant will give $10,000 to one moving image artist in support of a short film, feature film, documentary, hybrid piece, or video art. Funds are unrestricted. As the FAQ notes, they "can be used in any way that significantly progresses your project forward. This could be anything from; supporting you to take time off to write your screenplay; to covering production costs for a day of filming; to renting projectors for the installation of your video… Read more
Aidan Gillen is Still “Fishing From The Ether”: Back To One, Episode 266
Aidan Gillen returns to the podcast (first time: Episode 40). You know him from some of the most beloved shows of the century: Game of Thrones, The Wire, Peaky Blinders, to name a few. Now he stars in the Irish neo-noir film Barber, where he plays a private investigator hired by a wealthy widow to find her missing granddaughter. He talks about why he doesn’t look at the lines until the day before shooting, how his latest venture on the stage affected his work, why he still doesn’t like rehearsal for film, what bothers him about an “actor-centric” production, and much more. Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Google Play, and Spotify. And… Read more
TIFF 2023: Wavelengths, Arthur & Diana
Sara Summa, Lupo Summa and Robin Summa in Arthur & Diana
"You're here for an experimental shorts program, so you know," said filmmaker Shambhavi Kaul. "You know." Her latest was premiering as part of the second Wavelengths shorts program of TIFF 2023, the section-within-a-section of the festival I value most—once a rejuvenating four sessions when I started attending TIFF in 2016, subsequently pared down to two in a smaller auditorium and back to three in this year's edition. In his overview of this year's Wavelengths, Michael Sicinski walks through its history and how, over the years, it's enfolded other, more fleeting sections for adventurous work; now, there can only be one, and we need it. In the last few years, the shorts section's slimming down has put greater strain on each work… Read more
TIFF 2023: Flipside, Nowhere Near
Nowhere Near
Introducing his third feature, Nowhere Near, Miko Revereza said that his first, the train travelogue No Data Plan, was shot in three days and edited in about a month, fooling him into thinking every movie would be as easy. Instead, Nowhere Near took seven years and five or six entirely different cuts to compose itself. Similarly contemplating a mountain of longitudinally acquired footage, Chris Wilcha's Flipside is assembled from work shot over nearly three decades. Their approaches and intentions are entirely different, but the two films work well together. Wilcha is the maker of 2000's The Target Shoots First, an immaculate workplace comedy about his mid-'90s time as a would-be rebel within the machine at Columbia House. There, he and self-consciously disaffected colleagues rationalized their salaries and… Read more
Trailer Watch: Pedro Costa’s Viennale Trailer
Pedro Costa has made the latest in a long line of festival trailers commissioned by the Viennale from leading auteurs. This one stars Elizabeth Pinard, star of his newest short, The Daughters of Fire, singing a Brecht song. This year's Viennale runs from October 19 to 30.
