A besotted cinematic sub-genre consists of films about drinking — liquor, bars and the imbiber’s life. Whether the lives portrayed are rowdy and boisterous ones, or, as is often the case, destructively out-of-control, these films — ranging from Days of Wine and Roses and The Lost Weekend to Leaving Las Vegas — usually map their character arcs alongside their characters’ physical and social deterioration; they wind up as cautionary tales. A recent film that took a different approach is the Ross Brothers’s hybrid documentary, Bloody Noses Empty Pockets, which captured the woozy exuberance of one intoxicated day/night while not eliding […]

Moara Passoni’s astonishing hybrid work of documentary, memoir and fiction, Êxtase, which has been making the festival rounds following a CPH:DOX premiere, arrives in the U.S. at MoMA’s Doc Fortnight. The film will be viewable online from March 28 until April 2 and is a feature debut for the director, who splits her time between her native Brazil and New York. From my 25 New Face profile of Passoni last summer: The hybrid work pulls from the director’s own diaries and interviews with other anorexics to capture the lived experience of anorexia, its social underpinnings and its use as an […]

SXSW boasts the unenviable distinction of being the first major festival on the ’21 calendar to have its typical live edition disrupted for the second time by the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year the teeming Austin event, which encompasses not just film but music and interactive, was cancelled by the City of Austin as the pandemic spread. “The cancellation itself, it felt like a tsunami,” SXSW Film Festival Director Janet Pierson told The Texas Standard. “Waves coming at you, the ground underneath you. I mean, it was just so intense and the repercussions were so devastating for so many people and […]

Drawing from the world of gaming, writer/director Pete Ohs is embarking on a post-production experiment for his pandemic-shot film, Jethica: live-streaming his edit. “I know that YouTube is overflowing with editing and software tutorials but I’ve never heard of anyone actually editing a movie live,” he writes in an email, and I can’t think of anyone who has done this either. Beginning this week, Ohs is using Twitch to transmit his editing screen as well as webcam footage of himself behind the console, allowing viewers to track his process cut-by-cut. “I imagine the audience for this stream is going to […]

SFFILM in partnership with Dolby Institute announced today the two films and filmmakers who will receive 2021 Dolby Institute Fellowships. Kobi Libii, known for his work on Comedy Central’s The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, and Beth de Araújo, a 2017 Filmmaker 25 New Face, will receive creative and industry guidance as well as a cash grant enabling them to work with a sound designer at the screenwriting stage — something that’s near unheard of in independent film. “Fellows also gain post-production support, with comprehensive sound design, a Dolby Atmos mix, and Dolby Vision color correction and mastering support,” reports SFFILM […]

Set in and around New York’s meatpacking district in the mid-aughts, Tom DiCillo‘s 2006 drama/comedy Delirious is a film about mercenary paparazzi, venal agents and managers, and the commercial manufacture of fame. That said, the picture, available now on Blu-ray and digital platforms in an official directors cut 15 years after its release, is surprisingly sweet. Set well before Instagram and TikTok created new categories of celebrity, Delirious depicts a world where genuine human emotion can co-exist amidst planted Page Six items and staged photo calls. In a rich performance snapping from broad comedy to lacerating self-pity Steve Buscemi plays Les […]

The Sundance Institute announced today the 11 screenwriters who will participate in the Institute’s ninth annual Screenwriters Intensive, which will take place digitally this year on March 4-5, 2021. Writes Ilyse McKimmie, Deputy Director, Sundance Institute Feature Film Program in a press release, “the Intensive is a two-day workshop for emerging independent writers and writer/directors developing their first fiction features. This cohort of artists from traditionally underrepresented communities will have the opportunity to interrogate their stories and refine their artistic practice, all under the guidance of established writers and the Institute’s Feature Film Program, led by me and the program’s Founding […]

Inspired, he says, by Walter Hill and, as obvious from the title treatment, The Warriors title designer Dan Perri, Sean Baker (The Florida Project, Tangerine) has directed a blast of a fashion short for Khaite, a girl-gang fantasia evoking the cinema as well as streets of ’70s and ’80s New York. Shot by Sean Price Williams, the short compresses the attitude, abandon and confrontations of some imagined and long-lost work of downtown cinema (you’ll pull your own set of references — mine included Ms. 45, Liquid Sky, Paris is Burning and Wild Style) into a brisk four-minutes scored to Ace Frehley’s New […]

A spectral and hypnotic entry in this year’s Slamdance Film Festival is Chris Peters’s “film experiment,” 24,483 Dreams of Death, which uses a Mario Bava film (Mask of the Demon) as the sole source material for an A.I.’s imagination of our visual world. Over six days, Peters — a filmmaker, painter as well as software engineer — fed the frames of the film into the computer, producing images that represent, he writes, “… the machine’s neural network forming in real time, not footage in the traditional sense of photographed scenes, but footage of the internal experience of a new intelligence […]

The transportation of an object from point A to point B — it’s one of the most basic of human endeavors, and one that provides both story and a bit of mystery to Adinah Dancyger’s rich and elegant short, Moving. Starring Hannah Gross (Mindhunter, I Used To Be Darker) and winner of the Grand Jury Award for Narrative Short at the Slamdance 2020 festival, Moving, with much physical action and minimal dialogue, focuses on a young woman moving a mattress across town and up a flight of stairs to an empty apartment. Moving in New York City is a nightmare […]