Making its world premiere at the recently concluded Camden International Film Festival was New York-based, Argentinian/South African director Yaara Sumeruk’s short doc, If We Say That We Are Friends, which, in a taut 17 minutes, sits the viewer down into the midst of a warmly unusual conversation on race taking place across dinner tables in the Cape Town South African township Khayelitsha. The organizers of Dine with Khayelitsha arrange for relatively well-off South Afrikaners from the city to hear first-hand about life in the townships by joining residents for dinners of African food in their homes. (Formed in 2015, the […]

Says Graham Swon — a 2016 Filmmaker 25 New Face — about his debut narrative feature, “I’ve always wondered: is it possible to make a film which represents violence – at it’s most brutal and direct – without glorifying the act or exploiting the suffering of the victim? The World is Full of Secrets is an attempt to answer that question, through the pleasures and casual sadism of adolescence. It’s a love letter to that pain you feel when you first realize there’s a difference between fantasy and reality.” Premiering today is the film’s trailer, which, counter to 98% of […]

The 2019 New York Film Festival kicks off tonight with Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman — and do you really need us to recommend it to you? With our editorial staff seeing the film tonight, we’ve been avoiding Film Twitter, where extremely positive reactions have been leaking out from this morning’s press screening. But Scorsese’s long-anticipated, epic, effects-driven film is just one of many highlights we’re certain of as New York brings together some of the best out of Cannes, Venice, Telluride and Toronto along with some fantastic short-film premieres, talks (Lynne Ramsay!, DP Denis Lenoir!, Olivier Assayas!), and new VR […]

Wavelength Productions, the 90% female-helmed production company whose credits include the 2019 Sundance titles Knock the House Down, Where’s My Roy Cohn and Selah and the Spades, announced today the WAVE grant “dedicated to supporting women of color in telling their own ‘great f**king story.’” The grant, which is accompanied by 40 hours of professional mentorship by the Wavelength team, will award $5,000 to a first-time female filmmaker of color to support her very first documentary or narrative film, which should run between six and 20 minutes. “At Wavelength Productions, we know that women have the power to not just […]

Kicking off today in and around DUMBO New York is IFP Week, the yearly annual conference and coproduction market produced by Independent Filmmaker Project. Today’s events include a day of panels and talks at BRIC, with the event then moving to IFP’s home, the Made in New York Media Center, as well as other nearby locations.  In recent years IFP Week has developed an identity far from its origins as a scrappy, sometimes over-the-top market for finished independent films unspooling at the Angelika’s basement theaters. The heart of the event is now the much more sober Project Forum, which connects […]

“Who is this film made for, in what way is power present, how does the film understand its relationship to its subjects, and who benefits from the film being made?” That’s Samara Chadwick, Senior Programmer at the Camden International Film Festival, on this 2019 edition’s theme of “Story and Power.” But if you’re attending the festival, don’t look for this theme to be a didactic one, she says. “It’s less a series of affirmations and arrival points and more about the process of questioning — opening up a space where the questioning of power is normalized instead of invisibilized.” The […]

Ava DuVernay will receive the Director Tribute and Sam Rockwell the Actor Tribute at the 2019 IFP Gotham Awards, IFP (Filmmaker‘s publisher) announced today. DuVernay, whose feature credits include Selma (2014), The 13th (2016) and A Wrinkle in Time (2018), will receive the award following the acclaim given to this year’s When They See Us. A four-part series released by Netflix in May, When They See Us dramatized the injustice faced by the so-called Central Park Five, who were wrongfully convicted of the rape of a jogger in Central Park. DuVernay also created and executive produces the series Queen Sugar, […]

Flies Collective, the Brooklyn-based production company and micro-budget funding body led by principals Daniel Patrick Carbone, Matthew Petock and Zach Shedd, announced today the four films that will receive a total of nearly $20,000 in fiscal support via the group’s annual film grant. The films are Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, Max Walker-Silverman’s Chuj Boys of Summer, Brittany Shyne’s Seeds, and Sophia Feuer’s Space Lady. Said the Flies Collective team in a joint statement, “The whole idea behind the grant was that we wanted to offer no-strings-attached support to projects that don’t typically fall within the parameters of traditional grants. This […]

Dramatic feature films like Bennett Miller’s Capote have dramatized the life of the late Southern author by focusing on the time surrounding the writing and release of his classic piece of non-fiction storytelling In Cold Blood — a work that’s had astounding influence on today’s true-crime landscape. Now, another chapter of Truman Capote’s life is analyzed and evoked in the documentary debut of Ebs Burnough, The Capote Tapes. Although it covers Capote’s whole life, the doc, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival yesterday, focuses heavily on Capote’s final years and the writing of his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, […]

The Toronto International Film Festival gets underway today and with it a rush of premiering Oscar-preening specialty titles as well as festival favorites traveling from Cannes, Venice and Telluride. And, yes, anyone attending TIFF this year should have films like Trey Shults’s Waves,  Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems, Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Kasi Lemmons’s Harriet and Rian Johnson’s Knives Out on their must-see list. But at Filmmaker our recommendations stray from the Galas and Special Presentations to the other sections, where films that might not be hitting the multiplex in just a few months are […]