Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Steve McQueen, Chloe Zhao, Garrett Bradley, Azazel Jacobs and More: The New York Film Festival Announces its 2020 Main Slate
The New York Film Festival announced today the 25 films from 19 countries that comprise its 2020 Main Slate. “The disorientation and uncertainty of this tough year had the effect of returning us to core principles,” said Dennis Lim, Director of Programming for NYFF, in a press release. “To put it simply, the Main Slate is our collective response to one central question: which films matter to us right now? Movies are neither made nor experienced in a vacuum, and while the works in our program predate the current moment of crisis, it’s striking to me just how many of them […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 13, 2020 -
U.S. Genre Film Festivals Collaborate on Nightstream, a Collective Virtual Event
Five U.S. film festivals — Boston Underground Film Festival, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, North Bend Festival, Overlook Film Festival and Popcorn Frights Film Festival — are responding to the coronavirus pandemic’s challenges to the festival and exhibition landscape by creating a new virtual festival, Nightstream, that will run October 8 – 11. Programmers from all five festivals will curate the event, which will contain, according to a press release, “a mix of international horror, fantasy, sci-fi, vanguard, and underground films that capture the distinct curatorial spirit of each festival.” In addition, “Proceeds from the event will be shared with all participating filmmakers […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 13, 2020 -
Sundance Announces 39 International Arts Organizations Receiving Pandemic Relief Funds
Sundance Institute announced today the 39 international media and arts organizations that will receive a total of $405,500 from its Respond and Reimagine Plan. Launched in April, the $1 million fund redistributes funds, according to a press release, to “directly support the urgent needs of artists, as well as organizations from around the world leading the field in support of artists from historically marginalized communities disproportionately impacted by the pandemic.” The grants are non-recoupable and are flexible in intent; they may be used to support individual artists or to “strengthen the organizations themselves in their ongoing work.” Earlier this summer […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 13, 2020 -
Watch: Lydia Cambron’s One-Woman 2001 Homage, 2020: an isolation odyssey
Brooklyn-based designer Lydia Cambron — whose commercial work focuses on retail environments and who is fascinated, according to her website, “in the narrative ability of products and objects” — has used her quarantine days to make a witty and poignant one-woman/one-apartment homage to the final sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. From Cambron: 2020: an isolation odyssey is a reenactment of the iconic finale of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Restaged in the context of home quarantine, the journey through time adapts to the mundane dramas of self-isolation–poking fun at the navel-gazing saga of life alone and indoors. This […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 13, 2020 -
Watch: Kirby Ferguson’s Conspiracy Explainer, Trump, QAnon and the Rise of Magic
Kirby Ferguson, who landed on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2011 following this Everything is a Remix web series, is back with a new work that explains the QAnon phenomenon and places it in larger political context. For anyone who found themselves Googling “Marjorie Taylor Greene” this morning (Or was perhaps mystified by a colleague’s late-night email screed), the video offers a bit of a primer on the internet phenomenon as well as analysis. As Jason Kottke summarizes at Kottke.org, Ferguson sees QAnon as a form of magical thinking, breaking down six specific characteristics: 1. Obsession with symbols and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 12, 2020 -
Watch: Michel and Oliver Gondry’s Music Video for “Model Village,” by IDLES
Director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and brother Olivier, who previously worked together on music videos like the Chemical Brothers’s “Star Guitar,” have just released a new quarantine-made clip for the Bristol band IDLES. Using a blend of lo-fi animation (Michel’s cardboard cutouts shot by a suspended-overhead iPhone) and CGI (Olivier’s desktop wizardry), the clip, which suggests a Richard Scarry adaptation of Animal Farm, moves from a racist village to the moon. From an article on the video at WePresent: The song is really about the dangerous small-mindedness born out of villages which can sometimes act as […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 12, 2020 -
Making a Pandemic Horror/Thriller During a Pandemic: The Quarantine-and-Bubble Strategy of Banishment
As studio and television filmmaking creaks back into production, a first wave of microbudget films made amidst the coronavirus-related shutdowns enters post. One such film is the horror-thriller drama Banishment, which launches today an Indiegogo campaign for its post-production costs. Shot in and around a secluded cabin in Lake Placid, New York for just $5,000, the film fashioned its own safe production protocols before official industry guidances, like the recent “Safe Way Forward” plan, were issued. Nonetheless, the basic tenets of today’s safe production — quarantining, social distancing, mask-wearing on set — were all adhered to. But one other element […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 10, 2020 -
Trailer Watch: Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things
A long, progressively disorienting drive across a snow-battered landscape leads to a relationship milestone — meeting the parents — in the latest from writer/director Charlie Kaufman. For Jessie Buckley’s unnamed girlfriend character, Jake (Jesse Plemmons) is someone promising even as the film’s serenely despondent title functions as her mantra-like internal dialogue. Awaiting in a house that seems unmoored by time are Jake’s mom and dad, played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis. Said Kaufman to Entertainment Weekly, “The house represents the imagined interaction between someone you bring home to your parents — that panic that is twoheaded at that point. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 6, 2020 -
TIFF Announces Its 50-Film 2020 Lineup, with Pictures from Chloé Zhao, Spike Lee and More
TIFF co-heads Cameron Bailey and Joana Vicente have announced the 50 films that will comprise the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival. Necessarily due to the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s TIFF is very different edition — the film count is down from 2019’s 300+, and most press and industry will attend virtually — but there are still many anticipated world premieres and diverse international offerings. “We began this year planning for a 45th Festival much like our previous editions,” said Bailey, Artistic Director and Co-Head of TIFF, in a press release, “but along the way we had to rethink just about […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 2, 2020 -
FFA + iGEMStv, + Sub-Genre Launch Industry-Wide Survey: The New Era of Film Exhibition
From Brian Newman, whose Sub-Genre newsletter I highly recommend subscribing to, comes this set of three surveys about the independent film and festival worlds in the age of COVID-19. The three organizing parties — Sub-Genre, Film Festival Alliance and iGEMStv, a movie and TV curation/recommendation platform — promise to aggregate the results with an eye towards helping the industry figure out a way forward amidst the current pandemic. From the organizers: One way to solve the problems… is by collecting data and using it to build better systems. To that end: With COVID having such a major impact on the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 1, 2020
