All of a Sudden
The wearied refrain—Cannes 2026 was a ho-hum edition, no masterpieces to see here, take the earlier flight home—obscured the quiet revolution taking place in film after film. This was a year of stories that build: All of a Sudden, The… Read more
Cine Gear Expo
If NAB Show seems to inspire a mini–existential crisis in me each year, as I am forced to reckon with cinema’s diminishing relevance amidst other growth arenas in video, Cine Gear Expo invites more optimistic vibes with its film focus and Hollywood… Read more
The Gotham EDU Film and Media Career Development Program 2026 cohort
The Gotham, Filmmaker’s publisher, announces today the cohort of the 2026 edition of The Gotham EDU Film and Media Career Development Program. The eight-week virtual program will allow college students from across the country to glean insight from industry professionals… Read more
"Tim & Eric Made It 2 Cannes"
Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis, Nichols and May… Tim and Eric. A double-act for the ages, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim first teamed up as students at Temple University in Philadelphia, and secured comedy-legend status with their chaotic-good surrealist… Read more
In 1998, the Taiwan International Documentary Festival held its first edition, a decade after martial law was lifted in the island nation. It was a particularly exciting moment for documentary in Taiwan: independent video activism was on the rise, and new models of community media pointed to alternative structures for production and distribution. And yet, apart from Yamagata (founded in 1989), there were not many festivals of politically engaged nonfiction that specifically championed regional Asian cinema; the inaugural TIDF featured both an Asian Visions Competition and a Taiwan Competition strand. In its 15th edition this May, TIDF continued to explore […]
The inaugural season of the American Cinematheque series Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair took place in 2022, a cheeky stab at some summertime counter-programming. Its diverse lineup was aimed, as per the Cinematheque’s website, at spotlighting “filmmakers who wholly embrace a cinema of despair in pursuit of unpleasant truths and raw empathy.” Indeed, in the festival’s first 33 film–strong slate of repertory classics like Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), Come and See (1985), Winter Light (1963), Funny Games (1997), Breaking the Waves (1996), and Sátántangó (1994), this visceral quality was front and center as an organizing principle, even if the films weren’t united by much besides their baseline dreariness and […]
Cannes, while a real privilege to attend, is also a gauntlet—a marathon of viewing and socializing—and I’ve reached the point where my eyes have begun to droop and my head has started to throb. But there’s still work to be done! I’m here on behalf of the Asia Society, a global network of centers dedicated to deepening understanding between Asia and the rest of the world. We have a beautiful 258-seat theater at our museum building on the Upper East Side of New York, and my remit is to seek out new releases and repertory films that might eventually grace […]
It’s one of my closely held festival precepts that the odds of seeing a great film are much improved by making a beeline for the restorations and revivals. These are films that have endured beyond just one turn of the festival hamster wheel, their merits as art or artifact more or less established. Although a festival is first and foremost a showcase of things new and notable, sometimes the thought of enduring another two-plus hours of likely tepid drama is too much to countenance, and only a surefire prospect will do.That is why, despite the incredulity of my more seasoned […]
Dominga Sotomayor’s cinema is one of confined spaces. Her features tend to unfurl in tight, growingly claustrophobic settings. In her 2012 debut Thursday till Sunday, the action took place by and large inside a car en route to the beaches of northern Chile; her festival prizewinning breakout Too Late to Die Young (2018) never strayed beyond the confines of a bohemian commune at the dawn of the country’s post-Pinochet era; and her Netflix-produced Swim to Me (2025) zoomed in on an affluent villa in present-day Santiago. So it is for Sotomayor’s Cannes-premiering La Perra, a character study set on a […]
Crisp powder blue shirting, the shock of red wool, and a puff of a curly bob—Visions du Réel Artistic Director Emilie Bujès was everywhere at this year’s festival, whether on stage at Place du Réel, smiling as she greeted friends old and new, or grasping a karaoke mic with her staff. Just two weeks before the opening of the annual creative nonfiction festival in Nyon, Switzerland, Bujès announced that she was leaving her role to join the Geneva International Film Festival in August. Her final edition in charge leaves an indelible fingerprint on the landscape—this year, VdR felt more international […]