Authors — Filmmaker Staff
-
“Victim Cinema is for People that are Convinced”: Felipe Gálvez on The Settlers
The Settlers simulates several different types of Westerns without committing to one mode. The set-up of Felipe Gálvez’s first feature is classic: Scottish soldier MacLennan (Mark Stanley), American mercenary Bill (Benjamin Westfall) and their Chilean mestizo guide Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), who’s been pressed into service from a chain gang, are sent on a mission by landowner José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro). Making their way on horseback across the Chilean landscape, the three are captured in long zooms and accompanied by the booming tympani of Harry Allouche’s orchestral score. If that music places The Settlers somewhere in the realm of ’50s westerns, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 11, 2024 -
SXSW Announces 2024 Competition Selections, Opening Night 3 Body Problem TV Premiere and More
The SXSW Film Festival has announced its competition selection, opening night TV premiere and other titles for its 2024 edition, which takes place March 8 – 16. From the press release, the titles announced today follow. Opening Night TV Premiere The 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival’s Opening Night TV Premiere is the highly anticipated Netflix series 3 Body Problem created, executive produced and written by Emmy Award winners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss and Emmy Award nominee Alexander Woo. In this must-watch adaptation of the internationally celebrated bestseller, a young woman’s fateful decision in 1960s China reverberates across […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 10, 2024 -
Trailer Watch: The Peasants
DK and Hugh Welchman are the directors of 2017’s Loving Vincent, a Vincent Van Gogh biopic created entirely from individually painted images. Now they return with the similarly ambitious The Peasants, for which you can watch the trailer above. As the filmmakers write in the press kit of the film’s making: While The Peasants incorporates the same painting animation technique made popular with our previous film Loving Vincent, our approach to the painting animation for The Peasants varied significantly from Vincent. […] The over 100 painting animators who worked on the film did so on specially designed PAWS units (Painting Animation […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 4, 2024 -
The Passionate Epicures: The Taste of Things Director Tran Anh Hung Interviewed by Frederick Wiseman
A long-gestating passion project for Tran Anh Hung, The Taste of Things takes as its starting point Marcel Rouff’s eccentric, echt-French novel The Life and Passion of Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet, which follows Dodin-Bouffant in the wake of the death of his longtime cook and occasional sexual companion Eugénie. For his adaptation, Hung retains a few of the book’s incidents but otherwise chooses to tell the story of Dodin-Bouffant and Eugénie’s life before the novel starts. A period romance set in 1889, Taste begins with a lengthy sequence of pure cooking—when I saw the film at Cannes, a woman behind me moaned […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 15, 2023 -
At Home With His Memories
In The Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard writes about a simple psychological test used on children, “the house test.” He quotes the critic Anne Balif: “Asking a child to draw his house is asking him to reveal the deepest dream shelter he has found for his happiness. If he is happy, he will succeed in drawing a snug, protected house, which is well built on deeply-rooted foundations.” If he is sad, however, writes Bachelard, “The house bears traces of his distress.” For Bachelard, the home, and particularly the childhood home, is a place where “a great many […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 15, 2023 -
2024 Sundance Film Festival Announces 53 Short Films Plus 40th Edition Celebration Screenings
The Sundance Institute announced today the 2024 Sundance Film Festival short film lineup and the 40th Edition Celebration Screenings and Events — programming featuring alumni artists looking back on the festival’s four-decade history. The 40th Edition events will take place the second half of the festival (January 23 – 26) and will include brand-new 4K restorations of Napoleon Dynamite (20th anniversary) Go Fish (30th anniversary), Three Seasons (25th anniversary), and an extended version of DIG! (20th anniversary), featuring over 30 minutes of additional footage, titled DIG! XX. Also showing will be The Babadook and Pariah, and restorations of Mississippi Masala […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 12, 2023 -
Oxbelly Announces Open Call for Its June 2024 Oxbelly Retreat in Costa Navarino, Greece
Oxbelly, the Greek non-profit founded by producer and Faliro House founder Christos V. Konstantakopoulos, announced today an open call for the 2024 Oxbelly Retreat, to be held June 22-30 in Costa Navarino, Greece. Screenwriters, episodic writers, and fiction writers will be supported through in-person workshops and/or one-on-one sessions. All expenses for fellows are covered, and there is no application fee. The application deadline is January 19, 2024. From the press release: 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. In 2024, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 8, 2023 -
May December, Past Lives and American Fiction Top 2024 Spirit Award Nominations
Film Independent has announced the nominations for the 2024 Spirit Awards. May December, Past Lives and American Fiction lead the group with five nominations each, while on the television side The Last of Us and I’m a Virgo received four each. Among other independent films receiving nods were Showing Up, We Grown Now, birth/rebirth, Earth Mama and Passages. “This year’s exciting group of Spirit Award nominees reflect the undeniable strength and vitality of independent storytelling – this is the beating heart of film culture today,” said Josh Welsh, President of Film Independent in a press release. “It’s especially thrilling to […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 5, 2023 -
Slamdance 2024 Announces Its Full Lineup
Celebrating its 30th anniversary next month, the Slamdance Film Festival has announced the full lineup for its 2024 edition, unspooling in Park City and Salt Lake Utah from January 19 – 25. The selection consists of 32 features, of which 17 are World Premieres, 75 shorts, and five episodic series. Oscar-winning filmmaker Carol Dysinger’s One Bullet is the opening night film, and the closing is Vanessa Hope’s Invisible Nation. “Our 2024 Slamdance lineup is a testament to filmmakers who dare to push their stories to the very edge of filmmaking, making it deeply personal yet globally resonant,” said Festival Director […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Dec 5, 2023 -
Past Lives, Four Daughters Top 33rd Annual Gotham Awards
Celine Song’s aching tale of ambiguous connection, Past Lives, won Best Feature at last night’s Gotham Awards, held at Cipriani Wall Street. The annual awards, mounted by Filmmaker‘s publisher, The Gotham, bestowed Best Documentary to the hybrid Tunisian picture Four Daughters, directed by Kaouther Ben Hania. Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall won two awards (Best Screenplay and Best International Feature), while A.V. Rockwell won Breakthrough Director for her Sundance Grand Prize winner, A Thousand and One. The complete list of nominees and winners (in bold) is below. Best Feature “Passages” “Past Lives” “Reality” “Showing Up” “A Thousand and One” […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 28, 2023
