The New York Film Festival opens tonight with Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite and, over its three weeks, presents its usual assuredly-curated selection of highlights from the current festival season as well as number of strong filmmaker conversations, new media pieces and experimental films. Sidestepping most of obvious titles, here are twelve picks to dig-out from the current lineup. Ray & Liz. Richard Billingham’s directorial debut Ray & Liz expands on photographs he took of his alcoholic parents. Movies about alcoholics aren’t hard to come by; shot in elegant academy-ratio 16mm, Billingham’s contribution is notable for possibly being the quietest, least […]

With Reed Morano’s I Think We’re Alone Now in theaters, we’re running this short interview with its editor, Madeleine Gavin, conducted earlier this year before the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. For more on the film, see Meredith Alloway’s interview with Morano. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Gavin: I worked with Reed Morano on her feature directorial debut, Meadowland, and when I Think We’re Alone Now was getting set up, Reed sent me the […]

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the IFP and its Film Week, filmmaker Maxi Cohen contributes the following guest essay on that moment of inception. — Editor Sandra Schulberg and I were in the train station after the 1978 Rotterdam Film Festival. I had presented Joe and Maxi, a film about my relationship with my father1, and Sandra had presented two movies produced for the PBS Visions series, The Gardener’s Son by Richard Pearce and Over-Under-Sideways-Down by the Cine Manifest collective. Marc Weiss had helped to arrange U.S. Indie Films in Rotterdam which they dubbed “Hollywood without Make-Up.” […]

Photography was all over the New York City art world of the late 1980s. There was the Pictures Generation—artists like Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Laurie Simmons, who began in the mid ’70s and whose conceptual use of appropriated or staged photographs cast a critical and sometimes seductive eye at the way mass media imagery shaped consciousness. Jeff Wall, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and, later, Gregory Crewdson were bringing the staging techniques of film and theater to photographs charged with emotional and narrative possibility. And the work of photographers of an earlier generation, like Diane Arbus and Robert Frank, was still highly […]

Commencing while the Toronto International Film Festival is underway and overlapping with the first weekend of IFP Week, the Camden International Film Festival is an intimate documentary festival that, this year, is building upon the strengths of its 2017 edition with a line-up that includes a number of North American premieres as well as gender-parity across all sections. The team at the festival also stresses synergy between CIFF’s various sections as well as the intermingling of public and industry programming. Comments Executive Director Ben Fowlie, “As Camden grows into a festival that has more and more major films making their […]

The 40th anniversary edition of IFP Week is coming up, and we have 10 free tickets to give away to the opening day of Screen Forward Talks, which include luminaries like Boots Riley and Nina Yang Bongiovi (Sorry to Bother You), Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), Terence Nance (Random Acts of Flyness), Cathy Yan (Dead Pigs, upcoming Birds of Prey), Lauren Wolkstein (The Strange Ones), Julie Cohen & Betsy West (RBG), Nicholas Ma (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?). (Oh, and I’ll be moderating a panel on producing that includes some luminaries as well: Josh Braun, Julie Goldman, Riva Marker, […]

With the Toronto International Film Festival beginning today, Vadim Rizov — who is on the ground and filing his Critics Notebooks — and I offer you this humble list of films that we are more than reasonably sure are worth your viewing time. The Grand Bizarre. In her previous Dusty Stacks of Mom, animator and experimental filmmaker Jodie Mack turned a familial tale of Pink Floyd merch into a formal treatise on the demise of physical media. Mack’s focus in this new short feature (61 minutes) is similarly material: she looks at the semiotic uses of fabric and textiles as […]

Joana Vicente, a producer and currently the executive director of IFP, Filmmaker‘s parent organization and publisher, has been named the new Executive Director and Co-Head of TIFF, the presenter of the annual Toronto International Film Festival. She’ll join Artistic Director and Co-Head Cameron Bailey in the position beginning October 1. From the press release: “After an extensive search for a Co-Head we are thrilled to welcome Joana to the new role and to the TIFF family,” said Jennifer Tory. “The hiring committee was deeply impressed with Joana’s combined history as a producer, a champion of independent filmmakers, and with her […]

The Camden International Film Festival announced today its 2018 lineup, which includes 37 features, 43 short films, one episodic series and 20 virtual reality and immersive experiences from over 30 countries. Included among the features are three world premieres: Young Men and Fire, by Kahil Hudson and Alex Jablonski (a latter one of our 25 New Faces); Lana Wilson’s series, The Cure for Fear; and Jane Gillooly’s Where the Pavement Ends. The Opening Night film is Morgan Neville’s Orson Welles doc, They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. Significantly, the festival is reporting that there’s gender parity across all sections, with […]