Authors — Vadim Rizov
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Sundance Dispatch 1: Trump, Person to Person
For a few weeks now I’ve been preemptively writing bad ledes for Sundance write-ups/reviews in my head. Such as: “In the age of Trump, do independent films matter? Yes — now perhaps more than ever.” “Can independent film lead the resistance? It can, and it must.” “The spectacle of the Sundance Film Festival sits strangely against the much more lavish pageantry of the Trump inauguration, let me frame every single write-up through this lens.” “Can documentaries make an impact in the post-truth era?” And so on and so on, quite satisfactorily, with the illusion of topicality thinly sustained. If you […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 21, 2017 -
The Art of Walking: Eduardo Williams on The Human Surge
In Eduardo Williams’s shorts and, now, his debut feature The Human Surge, packs of young men and women wander without purpose but still with great persistence around the globe. 2012’s The Sound of the Stars Dazes Me and 2011’s Could See a Puma, were shot at home in Buenos Aires, 2013’s That I’m Falling? in Sierra Leone and 2014’s I Forgot! in Vietnam. Logically building on this peripatetic tendency, Surge moves from Argentina to Mozambique to the Philippines in three discrete but linked segments. No matter where the characters are, there’s often a basic MO: young people trekking reluctantly to […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 18, 2017 -
Lab Experiments
When Steve Cossman founded Mono No Aware 10 years ago, he was literally the entire organization. Operating out of his apartment, Cossman — who’d attended Albright College and had just returned from a two-year program at Prague’s FAMU film school — wanted to engage with and assist the expanded cinema community. “Expanded cinema” goes far beyond traditional notions of the avant-garde: Cossman cites a recent piece by Julie Dumas as a good example of the kind of work his organization supports, in which RGB lasers pointed at a single surface created a piercing white light. “There were two buckets with […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 18, 2017 -
Sundance Announces 2017 Premieres, Midnight, Kids, Spotlight and Special Events Slates
Last week Sundance released its competition, NEXT and New Frontier slates; today, we have the premieres, midnight, kids, spotlight and special events slates. Highlights of what’s below include new films from Miguel Arteta, Andrew Dosunmu, Ry Russo-Young, Luca Guadagnino, Michael Almereyda and Dee Rees, as well the directorial debut of Sicario/Hell or High Water screenwriter Taylor Sheridan. PREMIERES Beatriz at Dinner / U.S.A. (Director: Miguel Arteta, Screenwriter: Mike White) — Beatriz, an immigrant from a poor town in Mexico, has drawn on her innate kindness to build a career as a health practitioner. Doug Strutt is a cutthroat, self-satisfied billionaire. When these […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 5, 2016 -
Sundance Film Festival Announces the 2017 New Frontier Slate
On the heels of yesterday’s announcement of the competition and NEXT slates, today Sundance has unveiled its New Frontier slate. Now in its 10th year, the section is devoted primarily to AR, VR and a variety of installations. Highlights from this announcement include new films from Travis Wilkerson and Jem Cohen, a performance by Terence Nash, plus the latest from VR veteran Nonny de la Peña and a new VR project from Rose Troche. FILMS AND PERFORMANCE 18 Black Girls / Boys Ages 1-18 Who Have Arrived at the Singularity and Are Thus Spiritual Machines: $X in an Edition of $97 Quadrillion […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 1, 2016 -
Sundance Film Festival Announces 2017 Competition and NEXT Lineup
Here’s the first lineup for the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, with more to come in the days ahead regarding Special Presentations, Midnight Madness et al. Some highlights from the group below: new films by Alex Ross Perry (Golden Exits), Gillian Robespierre (Landline), and David Lowery’s recently revealed “secret feature” (A Ghost Story). Also: the sophomore feature from Dustin Guy Defa (Person to Person), Dayveon, the first feature by one of our 25 New Faces of Film, Amman Abbasi, and the documentary Casting JonBenet, on which Filmmaker‘s editor Scott Macaulay is a producer. U.S. DRAMATIC COMPETITION Presenting the world premieres of 16 narrative feature films, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 30, 2016 -
“That Feeling Inside You That Never Explodes”: Lucile Hadžihalilović on Evolution
Lucile Hadžihalilović’s Evolution is her long-awaited sophomore feature; her first, Innocence, premiered in 2004. At the time of Evolution‘s premiere, I wrote: Innocence followed a group of young women being schooled in etiquette, beauty et al. at a vaguely sinister private institution, preparing themselves to be sexualized for a lifetime before an implicit male gaze; Evolution gender-switches the sexual fears attendant to puberty. The setting is, again, an isolated incubation facility, this one for the grooming of young boys. Nicolas (Max Brebant) is one of many interchangeable blond youths (the vibe is very Village of the Damned) being raised by an equally interchangeable group of orange-haired mothers (?) in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 21, 2016 -
Dolby Atmos, Dr. Strange, Laser Projectors and True Blacks
I’d seen none of the Marvel movies outside the Iron Man trilogy and wasn’t planning to dive into the MCU with Dr. Strange. But positive early responses piqued my interest, and then I got a curious invitation to a screening preceded by a technical demonstration of the Dolby Atmos sound system. Never having gotten the financial willpower together to shell out the super-premium price to check out what 128 channels of sound (including speakers on the ceiling), it seemed worth a listen. The presentation turned out not to be about just Dolby Atmos but the Dolby Cinema, a package deal theater space you can currently only track down […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 7, 2016 -
Robert Bresson x 2 via NYRB Classics
NYRB Classics is not only reissuing Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematograph but publishing Bresson on Bresson, a freshly translated interview collection. While the imprint’s never published a straight-up film book before, the former isn’t that eyebrow-raising: Bresson’s slender volume of koan-like declarations has been a fetish object outside of Film World since initial publication. Bresson on Bresson, though, is a different proposition. Interview collections (like the Conversations with Filmmakers series published by the University of Mississippi) are both valuable and inherently redundant, as subjects inevitably are forced to give the same answers over and over through the years. The interviews aren’t trimmed down […]
by Vadim Rizov on Nov 4, 2016 -
A Talk with Manchester by the Sea Editor Jennifer Lame
Jennifer Lame is the editor of Manchester by the Sea. She’s best known for having edited all of Noah Baumbach’s narrative films since Frances Ha and is currently in postproduction on his next film, Yeh Din Ka Kissa. At what point did you join the project? I had been following it for a while, since I am a big fan of Kenny’s work. Between my agent and others, I got sent two or three drafts of the script and read them all, but I couldn’t seem to get an interview, I think because they were looking for someone with a bit […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 20, 2016
