The 40th anniversary edition of IFP Week is coming up, and we have 10 free tickets to give away to the opening day of Screen Forward Talks, which include luminaries like Boots Riley and Nina Yang Bongiovi (Sorry to Bother You), Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Terence Nance (Random Acts of Flyness), Cathy Yan (Dead Pigs, upcoming Birds of Prey), Lauren Wolkstein (The Strange Ones), Julie Cohen & Betsy West (RBG), Nicholas Ma (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?). (Oh, and I’ll be moderating a panel on producing that includes some luminaries as well: Josh Braun, Julie Goldman, Riva Marker, […]

With the Toronto International Film Festival beginning today, Vadim Rizov — who is on the ground and filing his Critics Notebooks — and I offer you this humble list of films that we are more than reasonably sure are worth your viewing time. The Grand Bizarre. In her previous Dusty Stacks of Mom, animator and experimental filmmaker Jodie Mack turned a familial tale of Pink Floyd merch into a formal treatise on the demise of physical media. Mack’s focus in this new short feature (61 minutes) is similarly material: she looks at the semiotic uses of fabric and textiles as […]

Joana Vicente, a producer and currently the executive director of IFP, Filmmaker‘s parent organization and publisher, has been named the new Executive Director and Co-Head of TIFF, the presenter of the annual Toronto International Film Festival. She’ll join Artistic Director and Co-Head Cameron Bailey in the position beginning October 1. From the press release: “After an extensive search for a Co-Head we are thrilled to welcome Joana to the new role and to the TIFF family,” said Jennifer Tory. “The hiring committee was deeply impressed with Joana’s combined history as a producer, a champion of independent filmmakers, and with her […]

The Camden International Film Festival announced today its 2018 lineup, which includes 37 features, 43 short films, one episodic series and 20 virtual reality and immersive experiences from over 30 countries. Included among the features are three world premieres: Young Men and Fire, by Kahil Hudson and Alex Jablonski (a latter one of our 25 New Faces); Lana Wilson’s series, The Cure for Fear; and Jane Gillooly’s Where the Pavement Ends. The Opening Night film is Morgan Neville’s Orson Welles doc, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. Significantly, the festival is reporting that there’s gender parity across all sections, with […]

Opening in theaters today is the debut feature from actress and short-film director Jordana Spiro, whose Night Comes On subversively wraps both a coming-of-age tale and story of sister bonding within a work of hardboiled revenge. Dominique Fishback, the breakout star of HBO’s The Deuce, plays Angel, a teen who, after being sprung from juvenile detention, trades sex for a handgun and hits the road, traveling towards the man who murdered her mother years ago. She picks up her younger sister, Abby, from her foster home, and as their relationship is teased out, the film’s rhythms shift, with the hours […]

What a beautiful trailer! Filmmaker‘s #1 most anticipated movie of the year — Barry Jenkins’s follow-up to his his Oscar-winning Moonlight — has just dropped its first, a few weeks before the picture’s Venice premiere. The intimacy, the focus on faces, the dance of eyelines, the lovely burnished period mise en scene — I love this trailer’s whole style and vibe. Check out above the first images from Jenkins’s adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk.

The following article appears in Filmmaker’s Summer, 2018 print edition and is being posted today to mark the premiere, this Friday, of Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness on HBO. When Brooklyn-based filmmaker and musician Terence Nance last appeared in this magazine’s print pages, it was in our 25 New Faces section — in 2012 — and he had been working on his debut feature, An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, since 2006. A loose-limbed autobiographical drama detailing Nance’s own near-romantic relationship with an attractive friend (Namik Minter, who played herself in the film), the film unspools, I wrote, “like some […]

IFP, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the 150 films, series, digital and audio projects to be showcased at the Project Forum during 40th anniversary of IFP Film Week this September. The Project Forum, says IFP, is the “United States’ only international co-production market featuring stories for all platforms.” Indeed, in addition to writers and directors, the event now specifically highlights the role of showrunners and audio storytellers in its various projects. “We’re thrilled to celebrate IFP Week’s 40th edition this year,” said IFP Executive Director Joana Vicente in the press release. “This highly anticipated event has, continued to evolve over the […]

Director and film critic Neville Pierce, who we interviewed several months ago around the online premiere of his shorts, has a new film, Promise, up on the interwebs, and it’s tied to the announcement of an unusual short film contest that offers filmmakers $40,000 in production funds for their winning pitch. From the press release: The Pitch is an annual online pitching competition which invites filmmakers to submit a two-minute video pitching their idea for a short film inspired by The Bible. It can be in any genre, can emerge from any perspective, and can draw on any story, passage, […]

As with life, beginnings are easy but endings are hard. At least, that’s what one might take away from the two very different running times of videos screenwriter Michael Arndt (Toy Story, Little Miss Sunshine) has posted about these crucial elements of any movie. His “beginnings video” runs eight minutes while his video on endings has a whopping feature-length running time! Using three films as his examples — Star Wars, The Graduate and Little Miss Sunshine — Arndt talks about internal and external conflict, philosophical resolutions and much, much more. As the screengrab above illustrates, Arndt is heavy into structure, […]