In the early 1990s, French director Olivier Assayas was invited to develop a remake of a classic work of French cinema for television. “I hadn’t known where to start until I remembered [Louis] Feuillade’s Vampires,” he remembered in 1996, referring to the 1915 silent serial in which Musidora played the costumed criminal Irma Vep. “I spent a few weeks considering the possibility, then I decided that, attractive as it was, I couldn’t take it any further. Somehow, my heart wasn’t in it.” A few years later, another invitation: this time to join Claire Denis and Atom Egoyan in the sort […]

During the lead-up to the release of Rebeca Huntt’s first feature, BEBA, a raw documentary portrait of the artist as a young Afro-Latina filmmaker on a path towards self-acceptance and discovery, the filmmaker and DP Sophie Stieglitz led a one-day workshop on 16mm production at the cinema arts organization Mono No Aware. Presented by NEON (Beba’s distributor) and Ghetto Film School, six women of color filmmakers were invited to take place and attended “an intimate discussion around personal filmmaking” led by Huntt before being sent outside to the streets of Brooklyn with a roll of film and a Bolex camera. […]

Luke Bracey didn’t dream about being an actor when he was a kid, he didn’t study the craft, and on his first job, which came from his very first audition, he didn’t even really know when he should start saying the lines. But with roles in films like Point Break, Hacksaw Ridge, Holidate and the soon-to-be-released One True Loves, he has built a career with his instinct, experience, and innate talent. Now he plays Jerry Shilling in the Baz Luhrmann blockbuster Elvis. He talks about what stopped him from getting overwhelmed by that “old school” big movie production, the value […]

Color Congress, “the newly formed documentary intermediary organization,” announced today $1.35 million in two-year unrestricted grants to small-budgeted majority people of color and POC-led doc organizations across the U.S. The 17 grantees, selected from a pool of 120 applying organizations, are ones serving historically marginalized communities, have budgets under $300,000 and operate outside national media hubs. The inaugural grants range in amounts from $45,000 to $90,000. “Many of these organizations offer a creative home for documentary filmmakers of color that may not otherwise be served, while others ensure there are viable distribution pathways for the films that are produced,” explains […]

Premiering at Tribeca, Emma Needell’s short film Life Rendered tells the story of a closeted gay Colorado man who lives on a ranch, where he takes care of his aging cowboy father while seeking romance in the virtual world. Set in the near future, the short draws inspiration from the director’s own childhood. “I explored the depths of the internet long before I ever saw a major city,” Needell says. “When I turned seven, my parents built a solar-powered cattle ranch in Colorado. The county was as rural as it gets, where everyone participated in the rodeo on Saturday and […]

In Robert Machoian’s The Integrity of Joseph Chambers, insurance salesman Joe (Clayne Crawford) is a kind of oxymoron: a prepper weekend warrior. If most survivalists are steadfastly in it for the long game, larding their basement bunkers with all sorts of durable foodstuffs, solar panel-driven batteries and cartons of Cipro, Joe jumps into the doomer mindset impulsively early one Saturday morning by deciding to hunt a deer. “We need to know how to do this stuff,” he says to his skeptical wife (Jordana Brewster) in their beautiful range-hooded kitchen, before heading out in his jeep, shotgun by his side. Joe’s […]

The Tribeca Festival kicks off today, remaining in its pandemic-motivated June slot while embracing in-person screenings and events. The Godfather, accompanied by a discussion with Al Pacino, is the big retrospective, and among the celebrity-driven live talks is the sold-out conversation between director Mike Mills and Taylor Swift. As usual, for our recommendation list we at Filmmaker have tried to look past the higher-profile events, focusing on independent work by both promising new and established older creators that we’ve strong reason to believe will be worth your while. God’s Time. The feature debut from 25 New Face Daniel Antebi, God’s Time […]

Tabitha Jackson, Director, Sundance Film Festival and Public Programming, will be stepping down from the role following this month’s Sundance Film Festival London, the Sundance Institute announced today. Jackson ran Sundance’s Documentary Film Program from 2013 until taking over the festival leadership role in 2020. Her two years as Festival Director coincided with the pandemic, during which she led the festival’s pivot to a successful virtual model that saw increased audiences as well as a Satellite Screen program that extended programming to arthouses around the country. In her previous Sundance role as head of the Documentary Film Program, Jackson, a […]

In The Pass, a young man bicycles into a small town looking for a place to go for a swim. Learning of a nearby clearing, he heads over there and takes that swim. That, minus one element, is the plot of Pepi Ginsberg’s Cannes-premiering short film, selected for the La Cinef program, but it’s that missing element — an ambiguously menacing encounter occurring while our protagonist is in the water — that gives the tremendously assured The Pass its cool, unsettling tone. Since 2016, the recent NYU Tisch grad has made a number of shorts, both narrative and documentary, as well as […]

As, just before heading to the airport, I post this brief list of films we at Filmmaker are especially excited to see at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, cinema’s most prestigious annual event is already having something of a bumpy opening, with a new (for those who didn’t experience its debut in last year’s low-key mid-pandemic edition) ticketing system returning all manner of “504 Gateway” errors and obscure messages, some of which contain their own brutal poetry: “Validation of viewstate failed… Purpose, purpose…” (Press has seen some alleviation as those badges are now redirected to a new server, while market […]