“Who is this film made for, in what way is power present, how does the film understand its relationship to its subjects, and who benefits from the film being made?” That’s Samara Chadwick, Senior Programmer at the Camden International Film Festival, on this 2019 edition’s theme of “Story and Power.” But if you’re attending the festival, don’t look for this theme to be a didactic one, she says. “It’s less a series of affirmations and arrival points and more about the process of questioning — opening up a space where the questioning of power is normalized instead of invisibilized.” The […]

Ava DuVernay will receive the Director Tribute and Sam Rockwell the Actor Tribute at the 2019 IFP Gotham Awards, IFP (Filmmaker‘s publisher) announced today. DuVernay, whose feature credits include Selma (2014), The 13th (2016) and A Wrinkle in Time (2018), will receive the award following the acclaim given to this year’s When They See Us. A four-part series released by Netflix in May, When They See Us dramatized the injustice faced by the so-called Central Park Five, who were wrongfully convicted of the rape of a jogger in Central Park. DuVernay also created and executive produces the series Queen Sugar, […]

Flies Collective, the Brooklyn-based production company and micro-budget funding body led by principals Daniel Patrick Carbone, Matthew Petock and Zach Shedd, announced today the four films that will receive a total of nearly $20,000 in fiscal support via the group’s annual film grant. The films are Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, Max Walker-Silverman’s Chuj Boys of Summer, Brittany Shyne’s Seeds, and Sophia Feuer’s Space Lady. Said the Flies Collective team in a joint statement, “The whole idea behind the grant was that we wanted to offer no-strings-attached support to projects that don’t typically fall within the parameters of traditional grants. This […]

Dramatic feature films like Bennett Miller’s Capote have dramatized the life of the late Southern author by focusing on the time surrounding the writing and release of his classic piece of non-fiction storytelling In Cold Blood — a work that’s had astounding influence on today’s true-crime landscape. Now, another chapter of Truman Capote’s life is analyzed and evoked in the documentary debut of Ebs Burnough, The Capote Tapes. Although it covers Capote’s whole life, the doc, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival yesterday, focuses heavily on Capote’s final years and the writing of his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers, […]

The Toronto International Film Festival gets underway today and with it a rush of premiering Oscar-preening specialty titles as well as festival favorites traveling from Cannes, Venice and Telluride. And, yes, anyone attending TIFF this year should have films like Trey Shults’s Waves,  Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems, Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Kasi Lemmons’s Harriet and Rian Johnson’s Knives Out on their must-see list. But at Filmmaker our recommendations stray from the Galas and Special Presentations to the other sections, where films that might not be hitting the multiplex in just a few months are […]

Having already revealed the Foucauldian dynamic that will run through this year’s Camden International Film Festival — a focus on “story and power” — the festival’s parent organization Points North Institute unveiled today the forum and artist programs that will take place over the event’s mid-September weekend. The annual Points North Forum will ask “critical questions about how the documentary film and media community reflects existing power structures, including questions of racial equity, access, funding, and which stories are being told, how, for whom, and by whom,” according to the press release. Other highlights and programs include masterclasses by Apollo […]

The following interview with Jim Jarmusch was originally published as our Spring, 2004 cover story, and it is appearing here online for the first time. — Editor “Why do people go to the cinema?” Andrei Tarkovsky writes in a book of essays, Sculpting in Time. “I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for,” he goes on, “is time: time lost or spent or not yet had.”  Time lost, spent or not yet had is the stuff of Jim Jarmusch’s new feature, his ninth, Coffee and Cigarettes. Consisting of 11 short vignettes, all featuring two or three people […]

The following interview of Jim Jarmusch about Dead Man was published originally in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 1996 issue. It is appearing online for the first time. Dead Man was reissued last year by and is now available from Criterion. In Jim Jarmusch’s new Dead Man, Johnny Depp plays William Blake, a mild-mannered accountant who travels by train across the frontier West to work in a bookkeeping firm run by a crazed, gun-toting Robert Mitchum. When, as in a Kafka novel, the job vanishes before it’s even begun, Blake finds himself a hunted man, pursued for a murder he didn’t commit while […]

The Camden International Film Festival (CIFF) announced today the 38 features, 51 short films, and 17 virtual reality and immersive experiences that comprise its 15th edition, taking place September 12-15, 2019 throughout Camden, Rockport and Rockland, Maine. “Story and Power” is the theme of sorts for this year’s festival, which aims to prompt industry-wide conversations that examine “the ways in which power structures deeply embedded in society have continued to shape the documentary field, including which stories are told, by whom and for whom.” “Our 2019 slate celebrates documentary as a reimagining of the ways we engage with stories from […]