As the 2017 Sundance Film Festival wraps up another edition of high-profile features with notable stars, secret screenings and exorbitant sales, attention must be paid to the less-covered but no less worthy shorts that premiered in Park City last week. Brought together in eight blocks (Animation, Documentary, Midnight, and Shorts Programs 1-5), these films represent an equal mix of prolonged, thought-out narratives and fleeting moments of inspiration discovered on the fly. For better or worse, shorts are often seen as a director’s calling card for upcoming feature work. While that’s all well and good (and I hope further success comes their way!), […]

Placed deep in the secluded landscape of the Mojave Desert, Black Rock High School isn’t your typical institution for American teenagers. A continuation school designed specifically for trouble students for whom Black Rock is their last chance at academic redemption, the men and women frequenting these halls face a daily struggle of balancing their studies with often toxic home lives (and fearing that the destructive family cycle could repeat itself over the next generation). As society appears ready to deem them unworthy of fitting in, the title characters in the documentary The Bad Kids work increasingly hard to fight against their stereotypical image. As the […]

In the summer of ’64, after President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act which enabled African-Americans to vote for their government, many young men and women (primarily white) took to Mississippi to join the Mississippi Summer Project, a season long initiative that would register African-Americans to vote in an increasingly dangerous, highly segregated and hate-filled state. At the same time — and as politically removed from the tense, racist climate as could be — two groups of white, male country blues fans (unbeknownst to each other) from the “big cities”also headed to Mississippi to search for the whereabouts of two […]

Sonia Kennebeck’s National Bird is a humanistic look at those responsible for and affected by America’s divisive drone war program. Those working in drone warfare are thousands of miles removed from the destination of their attack, so National Bird is primarily placed in suburban America, away from the crimes at the film’s core. Through three former air force workers turned whistleblowers (and their victims), Kennebeck’s film is equally about an emotional and spatial disconnect. We do not interact with those we are affecting most – please feel free to draw your own parallels to current American politics here – and therefore the country can […]

Racking up three prizes upon its premiere at SXSW 2016 (Best Documentary Feature, the Louis Black “Lone Star” Award, and an audience award), Keith Maitland’s Tower debuted on home turf — which doesn’t mean that audiences knew the tragic details. A breathtaking retelling of the horrific 1966 University of Texas campus shooting that left 16 dead, Tower tirelessly recreates, through modern day interviews, archival footage, and meticulously crafted rotoscope animation, the life-or-death situation many found themselves unexpectedly thrust into. By having the viewer live through the experience while simultaneously listening to the stories of those affected by it, Maitland’s film emphasizes memory and shared experience. Impressively incorporating animation, Tower is […]

An ethnographic and sociological nonfiction horror film, Theo Anthony’s Rat Film is a free-form experience with topical relevance. Long burdened by a documented history of residential segregation, Baltimore, Maryland —  Anthony’s current place of residence — has served as a recent political hotbed due to the unjustified death of African-American resident Freddie Gray while in police custody. Less than a month after a court ruling declared (in the midst of the strengthening Black Lives Matter movement) all tried police officers not guilty of any wrongdoing in the Gray homicide, Anthony’s challenging film debuted in Switzerland at the Locarno Film Festival to much […]

Independent of the intent of hardworking programmers and staff, a film festival can occur at an unexpectedly opportune time. That I attended the 20th edition of the Montreal-based Fantasia International Film Festival as many New York colleagues spent their evenings watching the genre-defying, quasi-patriotic spectacle known as the Republican National Convention only made my politically-removed self more grateful. Creating and celebrating horror within the confines of narrative and nonfiction cinema proved to be a more peaceful environment than gawking at the horrific notions of those in power. At the festival’s midway point, the Frontières International Co-Production Market — a four-day event where […]

As haunting and macabre as when it was first released in the spring of 1989, Mary Lambert’s Pet Sematary is fondly remembered for being one of the more faithful and rich screen adaptations of a Stephen King novel. (A documentary on the film’s production, Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary, is to be released later this year.) The story of a nuclear family who move to small-town Maine and, through a series of unfortunate events (i.e. the death of a beloved feline), discover an ancient Indian burial ground that brings the dead back to life, Pet Sematary’s playfully dark twist stems from reincarnation […]

Although this may not sound as remarkable as it is, the Maryland Film Festival (MFF) thrives on being filmmaker-friendly. Encouraging attending filmmakers to participate in a closed-door, multi-hour group conference designed to serve as a safe space to voice their career concerns and hosting a rocking evening of karaoke performed on a stage at The Windup Space (which uncannily resembles the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks), MFF works hard to keep participating artists in dialogue with one another. In screening spaces as the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), the Walters Art Museum, and the intimate black-box Single Carrot Theater, it’s not uncommon […]

A role reversal so outrageous it could only be a work of nonfiction, the story of Csanad Szegedi, an infamous member of Hungary’s conservative Jobbik party, is as preposterously true as they come. A former Holocaust denier and anti-Semite, Szegedi now lives as a practicing Orthodox Jew determined to honor his familial past (his grandparents were Jewish). Fascinated by this turnaround, filmmakers Joseph Martin and Sam Blair created Keep Quiet, an in-depth study of the new life of Szegedi and co-lead Rabbi Boruch Oberlande, as a portrait of internal religious tension and the endless trying struggle to right one’s wrongs. As Keep […]