Hailey Gates’s war-training satire Atropia won today the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Brittany Shyne’s Seeds, about Black farmers in Georgia and their relationship to both the land and U.S. agricultural policy, won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary. In the international categories, the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic went to Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s UK/India/Canada production about a Western India urbanite grieving the loss of his father. Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears). Cutting Through Rocks (اوزاک یوللار), Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s documentary about the feminist teachings of a councilwoman in a small Iranian […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 31, 2025Among the features premiering this year at the Sundance Film Festival, there are none — on paper — simpler than Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day. Arriving just two years after he premiered his Passages at the festival, Sachs reunites with actor Ben Whishaw for a picture that’s one 76-minute dialogue between two friends in a New York apartment in 1974. What’s more, that dialogue is not some dramatically sculptured theatrical two-hander building to third act epiphanies but, rather, a transcription of an actual conversation between art photographer Hujar and artist Linda Rosenkrantz, who was conducting interviews for a book in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 30, 2025Rashad Frett arrives at Sundance with his debut feature, Ricky, following work as a combat medic, a stint in business school, and directing an independent TV pilot he called “a Connecticut version of The Wire.” Along the way, he heard the stories of peers who cycled in and out of the criminal justice system system. So, when enrolled at NYU Tisch Graduate Film School, he used those stories as inspiration for his thesis short, Ricky. “We had ex-offenders, police officers, parole officers, judges and family members of the incarcerated all involved and consulting on the script,” Frett told Filmmaker when […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2025The penultimate edition in its long-running Park City location, the Sundance Film Festival began today, and, as I note every year, the event is a bellwether when it comes to an assessment of the American independent film scene. The acquisitions scorecard will influence the decisions of future film investors, the films premiering here will be eagerly and instantly viewed by festival programmers the world over, and, we hope, promising new directorial careers will be launched. And that’s in addition to perhaps the largest goal, which is for films here to make bracing, uplifting, healing, disturbing, entertaining, provocative and necessary statements […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 23, 2025Updating the themes of The Conversation and Blow Out for the pandemic era, 2022’s Kimi, Steven Soderbergh’s thriller about the panoptic world of voice assistants, marked the director’s first realized collaboration with veteran screenwriter David Koepp, whose filmography is noteworthy for his many scripts written for legendary auteur directors, including Brian DePalma (Carlito’s Way, Snake Eyes, Mission Impossible), Steven Spielberg (Jurassic Park, The Paper), and David Fincher (Panic Room). And that’s in addition to his direction of his own scripts, including Stir of Echoes and Ghost Town. Now, with another fleet, multi-layered thriller, Presence, Koepp continues his collaboration with Soderbergh, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 22, 2025There’s a pivotal dramatic beat that occurs about 40 minutes into Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada, out for rental and purchase on digital platforms today, that’s been less remarked upon in many of the reviews and interviews. In the film, Richard Gere plays terminally-ill documentary filmmaker Leo Fife as he gives a final interview for what will be a documentary about his life. Fife’s documentarian, former student Malcolm, is played by Michael Imperioli, who uses for the interview an Interrotron, a device invented by filmmaker Errol Morris that allows a subject to look down the barrel of the camera lens while […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 21, 2025Director David Lynch, whose works plumbed the dream life of the American unconscious, revealing both joy and the deepest of horrors within, died today at the age of 78. “It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch. We would appreciate some privacy at this time,” his family posted on Facebook. “There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, ‘Keep your eye on the donut and not on the hole.’ It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 16, 2025Two new documentaries — The Alabama Solution from Andrew Jarecki and The Stringer from Bao Nguyen – have been added to the Premieres category of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, the Sundance Institute announced today. Both directors have histories with the festival. Each of the projects are directed by filmmakers who have presented their works at previous editions of the Sundance Film Festival. Nguyen premiered Be Water in 2020 and The Greatest Night in Pop in 2024, while The Alabama Solution director Andrew Jarecki’s previous Sundance titles are Capturing the Friedmans (2003), Just a Clown (2004), and The Jinx: The […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 7, 2025Josh Welsh, Film Independent’s President, died December 31, 2024 at home following a five-year battle with colon cancer. He was 62. Welsh began his association with the non-profit nearly 30 years ago, volunteering at its annual Spirit Awards in 1996 while working in L.A. as an actor. After joining the staff, Welsh worked his way up through various positions: Filmmaker Labs Coordinator, Filmmaker Labs Manager and Director of Talent Development. In the latter position, he oversaw and helped create all the organization’s talent development programs, including the Labs, Project:Involve and the Fast Track Film Financing Market. He also administered Film […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 3, 2025Welcome to the winter 2025 edition of Filmmaker. This quarter, we’re honored to have on our cover, photographed by Misan Harriman, RaMell Ross—an extraordinary director, photographer and artist who first graced these pages when we highlighted him on our 25 New Faces list in summer 2015. At the time, he was at work on his debut documentary, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, which we were fortunate to screen early footage of. In my interview with RaMell, he said about his work: “I enter filmmaking as an artist who is wild about poetics and its emotional influence. The film […] uses […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 16, 2024