Receiving its world premiere tomorrow at DOC NYC is filmmaker Cara Jones’s Blessed Child, a documentary about her own childhood spent in Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. From the press release: More than a decade after leaving the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (the “Moonies”), through a trove of never before seen footage from within the church and extraordinary home videos of her family’s upbringing alongside Reverend Moon and his disciples, filmmaker Cara Jones attempts to finally break free from the religious cult which dominated her childhood. Blessed Child is one daughter’s attempt to unpack the legacy of the […]

Beth B’s Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over, her doc about the provocative and pummeling musician, writer, multi-media artist, social critic, No Wave pioneer and recent podcast host premieres Saturday night at DOC NYC, and the first trailer is online. Writes B about the film: Voicing the unheard and seeing the unseen are themes that have run through my films with an eye to creating dialogue, community, and a place for self-knowledge and acceptance. My documentary films are social, political and personal investigations; home movies focusing on people I know or have come to know. Lydia Lunch was 19 […]

Premiering in New York this Thursday in a one-time event prior to its free streaming launch the next day is Luigi Campi’s coming-of-age thriller My First Kiss and the People Involved. Starring Bobbi Salvör Menuez, it’s the tale of a quiet, recessive young woman (Menuez) living in a group home who goes on the hunt for her missing caregiver. Said Campi in a Filmmaker interview, “The film’s tension arises when violent events that she can’t fully grasp force her to step out of her safe zone. My first connection was to the main character’s unique way of seeing the world, […]

Strand Releasing, the inventive, carefully curated independent distributor known for its release of both American and international arthouse auteurs, turns 30 this year, and to celebrate it has invited its filmmaker friends to create short iPhone films that speak in various ways to Strand’s mission and film culture today. I’m happy to premiere here exclusively at Filmmaker shorts by Ira Sachs, whose Frankie opens this Friday, October 25th; Indignation director, screenwriter and producer James Schamus; and Shulie and A Woman, A Part director Elisabeth Subrin. Previously released have been shorts by Fatih Akin and Karim Ainouz. Comments Strand co-founder Marcus […]

Borne of what the festival cites as its fun and nourishing values, the Nevada City Film Festival Filmmaker Residency honors the region’s Nisenan and Chinese-American communities by hosting diverse storytellers, with a priority on filmmakers of indigenous and Asian descent. The Residency originated from producer Karin Chien, NCFF Director Jesse Locks and NCFF Founder Jeff Clark. Wrapping its second year this past August, the 2019 Nevada City Filmmaker Residency turned a creative spotlight onto independent producers. NCFF hosted prolific independent producer Zhang Xianmin from Beijing for a three-week residency in Grass Valley, CA. NCFF also hosted four US indie producers […]

Making its world premiere at the recently concluded Camden International Film Festival was New York-based, Argentinian/South African director Yaara Sumeruk’s short doc, If We Say That We Are Friends, which, in a taut 17 minutes, sits the viewer down into the midst of a warmly unusual conversation on race taking place across dinner tables in the Cape Town South African township Khayelitsha. The organizers of Dine with Khayelitsha arrange for relatively well-off South Afrikaners from the city to hear first-hand about life in the townships by joining residents for dinners of African food in their homes. (Formed in 2015, the […]

Says Graham Swon — a 2016 Filmmaker 25 New Face — about his debut narrative feature, “I’ve always wondered: is it possible to make a film which represents violence – at it’s most brutal and direct – without glorifying the act or exploiting the suffering of the victim? The World is Full of Secrets is an attempt to answer that question, through the pleasures and casual sadism of adolescence. It’s a love letter to that pain you feel when you first realize there’s a difference between fantasy and reality.” Premiering today is the film’s trailer, which, counter to 98% of […]

The 2019 New York Film Festival kicks off tonight with Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman — and do you really need us to recommend it to you? With our editorial staff seeing the film tonight, we’ve been avoiding Film Twitter, where extremely positive reactions have been leaking out from this morning’s press screening. But Scorsese’s long-anticipated, epic, effects-driven film is just one of many highlights we’re certain of as New York brings together some of the best out of Cannes, Venice, Telluride and Toronto along with some fantastic short-film premieres, talks (Lynne Ramsay!, DP Denis Lenoir!, Olivier Assayas!), and new VR […]

Wavelength Productions, the 90% female-helmed production company whose credits include the 2019 Sundance titles Knock the House Down, Where’s My Roy Cohn and Selah and the Spades, announced today the WAVE grant “dedicated to supporting women of color in telling their own ‘great f**king story.’” The grant, which is accompanied by 40 hours of professional mentorship by the Wavelength team, will award $5,000 to a first-time female filmmaker of color to support her very first documentary or narrative film, which should run between six and 20 minutes. “At Wavelength Productions, we know that women have the power to not just […]

Kicking off today in and around DUMBO New York is IFP Week, the yearly annual conference and coproduction market produced by Independent Filmmaker Project. Today’s events include a day of panels and talks at BRIC, with the event then moving to IFP’s home, the Made in New York Media Center, as well as other nearby locations.  In recent years IFP Week has developed an identity far from its origins as a scrappy, sometimes over-the-top market for finished independent films unspooling at the Angelika’s basement theaters. The heart of the event is now the much more sober Project Forum, which connects […]