Almost 10,000 shorts — 9,443, to be exact, broken down into 4,720 from the U.S. and 4,723 from the rest of the world — were submitted to the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, yielding today’s announced program of 73 works from 33 countries. (For those doing the math, that’s an acceptance rate of just over three quarters of one percent.) According to the festival, “53% were directed or created by one or more women, 51% were directed or created by one or more filmmaker of color, and 26% by one or more people who identify as LGBTQIA. Twelve were supported by […]

Indiewire Senior Film Critic David Ehrlich’s “best movies of the year” supercut is always an amazing watch, a video in which individual cuts, sequences, and music intros generate dopamine hits as you silently, or while singing along, endorse and possibly decry some of the individual selections. This year’s edition, at 13 minutes-plus, is no exception. I was happy to see here a number of personal favorites here alongside Ehrlich recommendations that I haven’t seen yet (Paddington 2!) as well an opening section that draws from the trippy ending of Alex Garland’s underrated Annihilation.

Among the 33 non-fiction works comprising the recently announced Sundance Institute Documentary Fund and Stories of Change Grantees is a particularly noteworthy project that’s both the debut documentary by a major international auteur as well as a first-time collaboration between the Sundance Institute and the U.K.’s Institute for Contemporary Art. Chocobar (working title), currently in development, is the first non-fiction film from Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, whose Zama is bound to top many U.S. critic ten-best lists later this year. It tells the story of murdered photographer and land rights activist Javier Chocobar, slain while fighting the removal of his […]

We are something of David Lynch completists here at Filmmaker, hence this posting of Ant Head, a music video (of sorts) combining two tracks — “Frank 2000” and “Woodcutters From Fiery Ships” — from Thought Gang, the just-released collaboration between Lynch and his longtime composer, Angelo Badalamenti. Lynch describes the work as “…a short video featuring my friends the ants along with cheese, etc.” As the press release notes, the material from this album hails from the early ’90s but has made its way into almost all of Lynch’s subsequent productions, including Twin Peaks: The Return. From the press release: […]

A world premiere at this year’s Camden International Film Festival, Khalil Hudson and Alex Jablonski’s Wildland (formerly titled Young Men and Fire) is a movie for this moment. As wildfires race with wearying regularity through our nation’s wooded areas, and as climate change exacerbates the triggering factors for these fires, Khalil Hudson and Alex Jablonski take us to the frontlines of the current battle. Following one particular squad over two years, the two directors, who previously collaborated on Hudson’s Low & Clear, manage to tell a story that’s both expansive in subject matter while being intimate in focus, finding in […]

The Sundance Institute today announced the four filmmakers and six grantees who comprise the 2018 Art of Nonfiction program. Launched in 2018, Art of Nonfiction is the Institutes’s program “working at the vanguard of inventive artistic practice in story, craft and form.” This year’s Art of Nonfiction Fellows are Deborah Stratman, Natalia Almada, Sam Green and Sky Hopinka. Grantees are Jem Cohen, Kevin Jerome Everson, Kevin B. Lee and ​Chloé Galibert-Laîné, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Leilah Weinraub. “This year’s cohort reflects our continuing desire to explore the space in between,” said ​Tabitha Jackson​​, Director of the Documentary Film Program, in […]

IFP, Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced the nominations for its 2018 IFP Gotham Awards this morning. The two top films, receiving three nominations each, were something of a surprise: Yorgos Lanthimos’s period Fox Searchlight drama, The Favourite, and Paul Schrader’s anthropocene-set drama of faith, First Reformed. Both films compete for Best Picture and Best Screenplay. Other best picture nominees include Barry Jenkins’s If Beale St. Could Talk, Chloe Zhao’s The Rider and Josephine Decker’s Madeline’s Madeline. Best Documentary nods went to Robert Greene’s Bisbee ’17, RaMell Ross’s Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, Bing Liu’s Minding the Gap, Sandi Tan’s Shirkers […]

With the East Oregon Film Festival underway this weekend in La Grande, Oregon, Filmmaker is happy to once again host the festival’s online selections. Starting now until October 21, you can stream a very strong and diverse selection of works exclusively at Filmmaker. Check out the rest of the lineup at Eastern Oregon Film Festival, and keep up via social @eofilmfest and #EOFF2018. Brazuca (dir. Faidon Gkretsikos) 2017, Greece, 19:07, Fiction During the summer World Cup, 11-year old Boyko will do anything to obtain ‘Brazuca’—the Official World Cup ball, in order to prevent his friends from using him only as […]

Director Chantal Akerman died three years ago today, and I wrote the following remembrance in the Filmmaker newsletter just a few days later but never posted it online. I wrote it from the Venice Biennale College Cinema, where I arrive again today. So, it seems fitting to remember Akerman once again by finally posting it here. (Photo above, taken on an 1MP digital camera at the Rotterdam Film Festival, 2001.) Here in Venice, on the small island of San Servolo, we were talking about Jeanne Dielman. Tom Quinn, one of the filmmakers attending the Biennale College Cinema, had included a […]

Erin Sanger’s excellent SXSW-premiering short, Mutt, is online, and it’s this week’s Short of the Week. The site’s Jason Sondhi gets at what’s great about this film in his write-up, particularly citing its original way of exploring what can often seem like familiar territory — the family addiction drama: The more times I watch Mutt, the more I’m convinced that it is one of the best short film scripts I’ve ever encountered. Even as I first formulated this impression however I remember finding it odd—the dialogue in the film isn’t especially sparkling, nor is the plot overly intricate. There are […]