“A whole week of fun,” reads a prominent advertisement in the background of the final scene of Henry King’s State Fair (1933), as Janet Gaynor and Lew Ayres slip out of frame in a lovers’ embrace and “The End” unfurls behind them on a billboard. This happened also to be my final image, projected in 35mm on the screen before me, of Il Cinema Ritrovato, the blissful, week-long festival in Bologna, Italy that each year offers itself up as an event of seemingly endless Elysian splendour.  But of course, like the Iowa State Fair in King’s movie, it had to […]

IFP, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the 150 films, series, digital and audio projects to be showcased at the Project Forum this September. The Project Forum, says IFP, is “the only international co-production market in the U.S. featuring stories for multiple platforms and hosting over 3,000 pre-scheduled artist & industry meetings dedicated to moving those projects forward. In addition, IFP Week presents a multi-day slate of talks, public screenings and events celebrating bold and singular storytelling in all its forms. Approximately 300 directors, writers, producers, executive producers and other creators will attend the event this year to pitch their projects to […]

Bertrand Bonello, cinephile filmmaker, is not one to conceal his references. On War, with Mathieu Amalric in the lead as a director called Bertrand, quotes from Apocalypse Now at length, House of Tolerance transplants Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flowers of Shanghai to belle époque Paris and Nocturama concocts a beautiful synthesis of Carpenter and Romero. Yet, as the disparity of these citations indicates, Bonello’s shapeshifting, consistently surprising cinema makes it difficult to pinpoint what might have been his formative influences. Had I been pressed to try, I wouldn’t have come up with Pasolini, so it was a surprise to discover that his […]

Aristotle Torres is at the 2019 Sundance Directors Lab with his feature Story Ave, a coming of age tale about “a young graffiti artist who runs away from his rough home life and holds up an unsuspecting old man in a robbery gone right that will change both of their lives forever.” Here, in a guest post for Filmmaker, he relays his experience there.   When I returned from the Sundance Directors and Screenwriters Lab, friends, family, and aspiring filmmakers hit me with variations of the same question: “So, what were the Sundance labs like?” I get it. These are highly […]

The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the 10 feature films selected for the Narrative Lab, part of the IFP Filmmaker Labs, IFP’s year-long fellowship for first-time filmmakers currently in post-production on their debut feature. The Lab will support the creative teams as they prepare to finish and release their films into the world. Recent films that have participated in the Narrative Lab have included Clementine; Dead Pigs; House of Hummingbird; Jinn; Lost Bayou; Menashe; Noah Land; Nancy; and The Third Wife. The program runs July 15-19 at the Made in NY Media Center by IFP located in DUMBO, […]

A reminder that the documentary world is rapidly evolving was once again made clear at this month’s 26th edition of the Sheffield Doc/Fest. At the festival’s two-day pitch event, the MeetMarket, as well as at the lively boutique cinema hub at Showcase Cinemas, there were buzzy talks around smartphone filmmaking, the growing rise of short-form content, the emerging marketplace for podcasts and the array of distribution opportunities now available to all forms of docs. Addressing the festival’s diverse span of content —- subject matters ranging from gender relations and frayed international politics to Macedonian beekeeping woes — festival programmer Luke […]