Minari, Lee Isaac-Chung’s fourth feature, an autobiographical portrait of his Korean-American family’s life in the 1980s as he was growing up in a small Arkansas town, won two top prizes — the U.S. Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and U.S. Dramatic Audience Award — tonight at 2020 Sundance Film Festival Awards Ceremony. Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s Boys State, a documentary about a contentious kind of civic summer camp for Texas teens, won the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize. A24 will release both films, the latter in partnership with Apple TV+. The World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize was awarded to […]

During the festival’s 2020 awards ceremony tonight, the Sundance Institute announced Tabitha Jackson, the Director since 2013 of the Institute’s Documentary Film Program, to be the new Director of the Sundance Film Festival. Jackson will succeed John Cooper, who, after 11 years as Director of the Festival, will move into a newly created Emeritus Director role. Said the Sundance Institute’s Executive Director, Keri Putnam, in a press release, “Tabitha is fiercely devoted to independent artists, has been a visionary member of the Sundance Institute’s leadership team for the last six years. Her authenticity, experience and perspective will serve her well […]

Before there was the no-budget Best Buy scam (scoring equipment by cycling through 30-day return policies) there was the Crazy Eddy scam — same deal, except that instead of the corporate anonymity of Best Buy’s Death Star big box there was a scrappy local circuit embodied by a screaming man feigning mental illness on late-night television. (“These prices are insane!!!!”) And before there was Eater, Grub Street and Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown there was Eat to Win, a kind of punk foodie travelogue in which friends David Shapiro and Leeds Atkinson tooled around New York City with their Crazy Eddie […]

Always a bellweather for the health — artistic as well as business — of the American independent film scene, the Sundance Film Festival began yesterday in Park City, Utah, preceded by more than the usual amount of pre-fest news and drama. On the positive front, Sundance 2020 is something of a launch party for a new documentary financing and production company, Concordia, formed by filmmaker Davis Guggenheim and former Participant Media production president Jonathan King, in partnership with Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective. One quarter of the Documentary Competition slate boasts the Concordia logo. And then distressingly there’s Oprah Winfrey’s withdrawal as […]

Each year Filmmaker asks all the incoming feature directors at Sundance one question. (To see past years’ questions and responses, click here.) This year’s question: Whether capturing or creating a world, the objects onscreen tell as much of a story as the people within it. Whether sourced or accidental, insert shot or background detail, what prop or piece of set decoration do you find particularly integral to your film? What story does it tell? (Check back daily during the festival — new answers are uploaded each day throughout the festival.) “It is An Object That Should Not Belong to That World”: Maite […]

Anne Lai, who is currently the Director of Creative Producing and Artist Support at the Sundance Institute, has been named the new Executive Director of SFFILM. “The board, the staff, and I are very pleased to announce the appointment of Anne Lai to the role of Executive Director of SFFILM,” said Nion McEvoy, President of SFFILM’s Board of Directors, in a press release. “We are thrilled that the search has yielded such an excellent match for our organization and for the Bay Area arts community. We are excited to have Anne, with her incredible vision, exceptional leadership and management skills, […]

SXSW announced today the 102 features and episodic shows that from the first wave of films comprising the 2020 SXSW Film Festival. Judd Apatow’s Pete Davidson-starring The King of Staten Island will be the Opening Night feature. Other highlights include Frank Oz’s film based on magician and artist Derek DelGaudio’s acclaimed theater work, In & Of Itself; actor and director Amy Seimetz’s follow-up to Sun Don’t Shine, She Dies Tomorrow; features from directors on this magazine’s 25 New Faces list, including Nicole Riegel (Holler), Celine Held and Logan George (Topside), Tod Chandler (Bulletproof), Marnie Ellen Hertzler (Crestone), and Kitao Sakurai […]

2019 will soon be the past, but once it was the future — a subject explored by Joanne McNeil in her Filmmaker print and online column, Speculations. She revisited films (The Running Man, Akira, Blade Runner) specifically set in 2019, assessing not just the accuracy of their future-dreaming but also the fantasies of progress their own eras entertained. McNeil listed various aspects of the present, including policy denial around climate change, that the films missed. But considering the last quarter century, who could have predicted that filmmaking — and film culture — would have landed where it is? While there’s […]

Filmmaker‘s Winter 2020 issue — our most beautiful issue yet — is now on newsstands (and selling out, we hear), as well as arriving in mailboxes. What’s in it? Our cover is Uncut Gems, with me interviewing Josh and Benny Safdie about their adrenaline-fueled Adam Sandler-starring film — an interview that goes into the details of shooting the fountain scene with Sander that we have used as our cover image. Director Anna Rose Holmer interviews Greta Gerwig about her Little Women; Aaron Hunt talks with Pedro Costa about 2020 release Vitalena Varela; Paul Dallas interviews Mati Diop about Atlantics, currently […]

Premiering today from Focus Features is the trailer for writer/director highly anticipated Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Produced by Adele Romanski, Sara Murphy and Rose Garnett, shot by Hittman’s Beach Rats DP Hélène Louvart, and edited by Scott Cummings, the film is described as “an intimate portrayal of two teenage girls in rural Pennsylvania. Faced with an unintended pregnancy and a lack of local support, Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) and her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) embark across state lines to New York City on a fraught journey of friendship, bravery and compassion.” The trailer is set to a track by […]