One of the great independent film discoveries of SXSW 2019 is a picture that is also one of the boldest artistic statements of year, Grace Glowicki’s Tito. The Canadian actor and director is known to Filmmaker readers as the female lead of 2016 25 New Face Ben Petrie’s Her Friend Adam, which I dubbed in these pages “a squirmy treatise on sexual insecurity and relationship oneupmanship.” Glowicki’s character’s response to her partner’s icky jealousy, I wrote, is one of “unrivaled power and blistering sexual humiliation, capped off by a loudly feigned orgasm that will erase in viewers any memory of […]

“There’s a great infrastructure, and the credit is solid,” said Entertainment Partners (EP) executive vice president, John Hadity, in these pages one year ago about the New York State Film Production Tax Credit Program. Governor Andrew Cuomo had just extended its sunset date until 2022, with $420 million in annual funds appropriated. “That means television series that do their planning 18 to 24 months in advance have certainty that the program is going to be around for another few years,” he said. But just a year later, Hadity cites the New York program as one of his worries when surveying […]

A welcome sight on the SXSW feature list is a new film from Hilary Brougher, who has been making inventive, emotionally acute independent film across three decades now, always working in some degree of low to ultra-low budget. Her debut, Sticky Fingers of Time, was lo-fi sci-fi with a time-travel hook that might remind you of Looper but with a feminist slant. Stephanie Daley, starring Tilda Swinton and Amber Tamblyn, followed in 2006, a mystery both legal and existential about an unwanted pregnancy. And now there’s South Mountain, which finds Brougher working with her smallest budget yet but with a […]