Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Sundance Announces Feature, Indie Episodic and New Frontier Categories for Its In-Person and Virtual 2022 Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Institute announced today the full Feature Film, Indie Episodic, and New Frontier categories for the upcoming 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Returning from last year’s purely virtual festival, this year’s Sundance will be a hybrid edition, with in-person events at Park City, Salt Lake City and the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah as well as on an enhanced online platform for remote attendees. Additionally there will be The Spaceship, a “bespoke immersive platform.” Continuing from last year’s experimentation, in-person screenings at seven Satellite Screens venues will occur across the country during the Festival’s second weekend. Films this year — […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 9, 2021 -
Slamdance Announces Its Full 2022 Lineup
The Slamdance Film Festival — this year a hybrid festival — announced today its full lineup of features and shorts that will comprise its 2022 edition. The festival will run live in Park City Utah, January 20 -23 and virtually January 20 – 30. The selection contains 13 world premieres, six North American and four U.S. reviews. All competition films are feature-length with budgets under $1 million and without U.S. distribution. “We are anti-algorithm,” said Slamdance President and co-founder Peter Baxter in a press release. “That’s always been true, but it’s more urgent than ever as we continue to celebrate […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 8, 2021 -
Southern Documentary Fund Announces 2021 Production Grants, Including New Feature from Julie Dash
The Southern Documentary Fund has just announced ten projects that will receive $10,000 production grants, unrestricted funds supporting projects in varying stages of productions. Half the grants go with aspiring and emerging makers, while non-first-time filmmakers include Julie Dash, whose highly influential Daughters of the Dust was the first feature directed by an African American woman to receive general theatrical release in the U.S. Says Southern Documentary Fund Executive Director Kristy Garcia Breneman in a press release, “This year’s applicant pool was rich with Southern talent, telling a vast range of powerful stories from across our region – we were […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 7, 2021 -
“It Was an Easy Pitch Reference — Love, Actually Meets Melancholia“: Camille Griffin On Her Apocalyptic Christmas Movie, Silent Night
Just in time for the holidays, during which the question of what makes a Christmas movie appears across film social media feeds, arrives Camille Griffin’s Silent Night. From its title down to its Christmas setting, in which family and friends congregate for the kind of boozy reunion that segues from holiday cheer to emotional warfare, Griffin’s directorial debut sits squarely within the sub-genre and, due to one cross-genre addition, feels particularly of the moment. In Griffin’s film, the Yuletide gathering is to be a final one as a poisonous gas cloud is poised to envelope the earth, killing all living […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 3, 2021 -
The Lost Daughter Scores Four Wins at the 2021 Gotham Awards, Including Best Feature
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, The Lost Daughter, adapted from the Elena Ferrante novel, was the big winner at the 2021 Gotham Awards, presented Monday, November 29 at Cipriani Wall Street. The Netflix production, which stars Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Dakota Johnson, Dagmara Domińczyk and Peter Saarsgard, was awarded Best Feature, and Gyllenhaal won Best Screenplay as well as the Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director award. Colman shared the Outstanding Lead Performance Award with The Killing of Kenneth Chamberlain‘s Frankie Faison. Colman and Faison’s wasn’t the only split decision; the Gotham jury also split the Outstanding Performance in a New Series award, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 29, 2021 -
On Screwball Comedy, Making it Work in the Master and Queer Love Stories: Writer/Director Maria Maggenti on The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love
With Maria Maggenti’s 1995 picture The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love now in rerelease from Strand Releasing, we’re reprinting our 1995 print issue interview with Maggenti, who has gone on to write and direct Puccini for Beginners, write Before I Fall, and write and write and produce for series such as Motherland: Fort Salem and Supergirl. The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love is currently screening at New York’s Metrograph, where Filmmaker‘s Scott Macaulay will be moderating a conversation with Maggenti and Hall on November 24. The below interview has been lightly reedited to add […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 24, 2021 -
“It Always Seems That the Film Comes Together When You Just Go About Doing It”: Abel Ferrara on the Ethan Hawke-Starring Zeros and Ones
“Jesus was just another soldier, another war casualty — but on who’s side?” That’s military man JJ, played by Ethan Hawke, in voiceover as he walks the COVID-deserted streets of Rome in Abel Ferrara’s new Zeros and Ones. There’s a terrorist plot to blow up the Vatican but JJ’s got a more personal (and possibly intertwined) mission as well: his twin revolutionary brother, Justin (also Hawke), has been captured, and JJ’s nocturnal journey is an attempt to rescue him and possibly find some sort of spiritual salvation along the way. But the above is just the most reductive parsing of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 19, 2021 -
“It’s Really the Act of Saying the Words Out Loud, Bringing Darkness into Light, Negotiating the Past for Yourself”: Matthew Fifer on His Autobiographical NYC Drama, Cicada
Writer, director and actor Matthew Fifer makes his feature debut with Cicada, a very personal urban romance that’s also a perceptive and searching drama about the legacy of childhood abuse. Films that revolve around buried trauma can be overly melodramatic affairs, but Fifer’s Cicada balances painful backstory revelation with the sensuous pulse of the present. His depiction of early-aughts twentysomething Brooklyn romance is alive to the rhythms of the city and understanding of how place as well as economic circumstance frame the ways we connect with one another. Fifer plays Ben, a bisexual who we meet as he’s engaging in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 5, 2021 -
“Let’s Look at the Color of Your Emotional Journey…” Director Frida Kempff on Her Immersive Psychological Thriller, Knocking
Swedish director Frida Kempff makes an astonishing and bold debut with Knocking, her Sundance-premiering psychological thriller now out in the U.S. on digital platforms. Molly (Cecilia Milocco) has been released from a mental hospital into everyday life, moving into a spartan apartment in an impersonal urban apartment building. But at night, as images of her past trauma flicker through her recovering brain, there’s a knocking sound. What begins as an irritant turns to destabilizing obsession as Molly begins to believe that the sounds originate from a woman help captive and in danger. In an incredible performance, Milocco keeps us both […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 29, 2021 -
“I Started to Think of the Film as a Kind of Ethnography of Fear and Violence In and Around Schools in America”: Todd Chandler on His Gun Violence Doc Bulletproof
There’s a truly startling sequence beginning about a half hour into Todd Chandler’s unsettling, formally assured documentary on school violence, Bulletproof. Until this point Chandler, with cool, distanced precision, depicts the “capitalist spectacle” that has grown around the issue of violence in schools. Active shooter drills, teachers given firearms training, a first-generation immigrant starting a business producing Kevlar hoodies, and a Las Vegas trade show where high-tech surveillance equipment and classroom accessories like bulletproof whiteboards are hawked to school board purchasers — the parallels between this education/security industrial complex and our post 9/11 security state, where weaponry and advanced surveillance co-mingle, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 29, 2021
