Czech That Film, the annual festival highlighting the best of recent Czech cinema, is now in the midst of its 11th edition. The festival has customarily travelled to over 20 cities, but given the ongoing pandemic, this year’s edition is partially online, with films available to stream on the Artinii platform. From the website: The event was established to accommodate increased interest in Czech cinema and culture in the United States and is dedicated to raising profile of current Czech films at an international level. It provides an opportunity for American enthusiasts of global cinema to experience successful new Czech […]

In my print issue article (now online) on two ultra-low-budget filmmakers, I described Tzvi Friedman’s Man as an “an eerily austere New York-set serial killer drama with a (possible) science-fiction twist and impressive formal control.” As the film finishes post-production and begins submitting to festivals, Friedman, who is making his feature debut with Man, has sent Filmmaker an early teaser from the film that aptly showcases its depiction of dread-filled urban anomie and assured tone. As I write in my piece, “The film was inspired when Friedman was locked out of a Brooklyn apartment where he was sleeping and wound […]

The American Pavilion announced today the 2022 program of its Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at the upcoming 2022 Cannes Film Festival. 33 films comprise this 25th anniversary edition, with the program screening at the American Pavilion along with finalist films from the 2020 and 2021 editions. All screenings with filmmakers in attendance with be accompanied by live Q&As. From the press release: The films in the Emerging Filmmaker Showcase focus on themes as diverse as the meaning of community, gender identity, the COVID-19 epidemic, self-perceptions and representation, the holocaust, the development and evolution cultural identity, family dynamics, the quest for love, […]

BAMcinemaFest, which is returning with an in-person event June 23 – 30 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, announced today the complete 2022 edition slate. The film opens with Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s Aftershock, a documentary about the the ways in which the US maternal health system fails Black women and families, and it closes with Ramin Bahrani’s Sundance premiere, 2nd Chance, a portrait of Richard Davis, who invented the modern bulletproof vest while being something of an independent filmmaker and fabulist. Among the restorations are Ayoka Chenzira’s 1993 first feature film, the coming-of-age dramatic comedy Alma’s Rainbow, about […]

In filmmaker Audrey Ewell’s The Black Seed, a woman wakes up in an anonymous corporate-style apartment with no memory of how she got there. Examining her body, it feels somewhat alien to her, as if she’s still suffering the effects of some night-before dissociative drug. Looking out the window, the city below looks peaceful, serene, but also completely depopulated. Where is she? Who is she? The only clue is a note taped to the refrigerator: “THE WORLD ENDED. IT’S NOT SAFE. EAT TO REMEMBER.” With that launches Ewell’s inventive and surprising “fiction series,” which blends a kind of existentialist mystery […]

Jim Jarmusch has directed a new video for Cat Power’s excellent new album, Covers, a clip for the Pogues-penned “A Pair of Brown Eyes.” “As someone who deeply loves Cat Power’s music, getting to collaborate with Chan on this video was like a dream come true,” said Jarmusch in a press release. “She’s so inspiring to me, of course as an artist, but she’s also just such an extraordinary person.” Check it out above.

While most producers these days are worried about the latest CPI number—that’s the Cinematic Price Index—one group of filmmakers is, somewhat paradoxically, not: those working on the lower end of the microbudget, or “no-budget,” continuum, producing finished features for the very low five figures. For them, production is retrofitted from whatever money can be raised, and if the price of gas goes up, well, the shoot just has to make do with less in another area. Among such filmmakers, there’s perhaps no one whose model is as stripped-down as Pete Ohs, who recently premiered his latest work, the well-received Jethica, […]

In 2012, after months in Buenos Aires helping care for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, Gaspar Noé traveled to Cannes and saw Michael Haneke’s Amour, about a husband dealing with his wife’s stroke. “Oh my god, I cried watching that movie,” he says. “Even if that movie had nothing to do with my personal life, it was about someone who needs to die, and at that time we were considering how my mother could die peacefully.” After the festival, Noé returned to Argentina; his mother died a few weeks later. When the Palme d’Or–winning, and quite brutal, Amour went on to international […]