The Sundance Film Festival has just announced the 112 feature films set to hit Park City next January 24- February 3. From a record breaking 14,259 submissions, these selections represent 33 countries. 40% of the films were directed by one or more women; 36% were directed by one or more filmmaker of color; and 13% by one or more people who identify as LGBTQIA. Highlights include new films from Joanna Hogg, Kim Longinotto, Alma Har’el, Martha Stephens, Penny Layne and Joe Berlinger, as well as the first features from former 25 New Faces Michael Tyburski, Joe Talbot and Pippa Bianco. Scroll […]

The 2018 Gotham Independent Film Awards are in the can and The Rider, Chloe Zhao’s stunning second feature, emerged at the top of the heap, beating out the more bookie friendly bets in The Favourite and First Reformed. Those films did not go home empty handed: Ethan Hawke and Paul Schrader won Best Actor and Best Screenplay, respectively, and Rachel Weisz was on hand to accept her Actress Tribute and an Ensemble Award for The Favourite. Read on for the full list of winners. Best Feature  “First Reformed” “The Favourite” “Madeline’s Madeline” “If Beale Street Could Talk” “The Rider” Best Documentary “Bisbee ‘17” “Hale […]

The upcoming FilmGate Interactive Media Festival (November 30th – December 6th) will mark its sixth year of bringing the immersive arts to South Florida. A quick glance through the lineup shows it’s the most impressive edition yet. Divided into four programs — Miami @ Play, Festival Panels, Interactive Installations, and the Virtual Reality Portal (with its 35-plus interactive experiences to choose from) — not to mention the many parties (this is Miami after all), the 2018 edition may just make the folks in town that same week for Art Basel look 20th century passé. Starting with the panels (on December […]

This edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (November 14th-25th) — now in its third decade, but also marking its inaugural year under the exciting new leadership of Syrian documentarian Orwa Nyrabia — offered one of the most binge-worthy lineups I’ve experienced in all my years covering the world’s largest doc fest. Of the nearly two-dozen films I managed to catch both in Amsterdam during my stay (once again guests were put up at the lovely — and couldn’t get more convenient — Hotel NH Carlton, which doubles as the fest’s headquarters) and online, not one disappointed. Indeed, veteran […]

People are “natural scriptwriters,” Claire Simon noted towards the beginning of what turned out to be a surprisingly lively discussion between the French documentarian and the US’s own Steve James about one of the hottest topics in the doc industry today: serialized storytelling. The setting was an intimate theater at De Brakke Grond (the longtime headquarters of IDFA DocLab, where this year’s Humanoid Cookbook theme whimsically allowed for browsing a menu before ordering, or rather requesting, VR experience time slots). The moderator was film programmer Sean Farnel. The two veteran directors opened by acknowledging the biggest difference between feature films […]

Alex Winter’s The Panama Papers is a globetrotting, newsroom-hopping peek inside the multinational process, which ultimately brought together over 100 media organizations in 80 countries under the auspices of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). That led to the 2016 mass publication of documents from the highly secretive, Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca — which in turn brought down heads of state and business leaders the world over, and cost the lives of at least two reporters affiliated with the leaked trove. I was fortunate enough to catch Winter’s film at this year’s IDFA (in the stunning Tuschinski Theater, […]