Each year Filmmaker asks all the incoming feature directors at Sundance one question. (To see past years’ questions and responses, click here.) This year’s question: Whether capturing or creating a world, the objects onscreen tell as much of a story as the people within it. Whether sourced or accidental, insert shot or background detail, what prop or piece of set decoration do you find particularly integral to your film? What story does it tell? (Check back daily during the festival — new answers are uploaded each day throughout the festival.) “A Dream Refusing Deferment”: Garrett Bradley | Time “When I […]

“Essentially, cinema is dead, and this fellowship is bringing it back to life,” went part of the on-stage intro for the showcase screening at this year’s Borscht. “The people that most of you know are old, and we’re young, and I think we’re more exciting.” At the screenings I attended, Borscht co-founders Lucas Leyva and Jillian Meyer repeatedly, shamefacedly noted that they’d started the festival (and attendant collective of the same name, the screening of whose work is the fest’s top priority) with the intent of never showing the films of anyone over 30—only to, alas, themselves cross that decade […]

Anne Lai, who is currently the Director of Creative Producing and Artist Support at the Sundance Institute, has been named the new Executive Director of SFFILM. “The board, the staff, and I are very pleased to announce the appointment of Anne Lai to the role of Executive Director of SFFILM,” said Nion McEvoy, President of SFFILM’s Board of Directors, in a press release. “We are thrilled that the search has yielded such an excellent match for our organization and for the Bay Area arts community. We are excited to have Anne, with her incredible vision, exceptional leadership and management skills, […]

SXSW announced today the 102 features and episodic shows that from the first wave of films comprising the 2020 SXSW Film Festival. Judd Apatow’s Pete Davidson-starring The King of Staten Island will be the Opening Night feature. Other highlights include Frank Oz’s film based on magician and artist Derek DelGaudio’s acclaimed theater work, In & Of Itself; actor and director Amy Seimetz’s follow-up to Sun Don’t Shine, She Dies Tomorrow; features from directors on this magazine’s 25 New Faces list, including Nicole Riegel (Holler), Celine Held and Logan George (Topside), Tod Chandler (Bulletproof), Marnie Ellen Hertzler (Crestone), and Kitao Sakurai […]

Darkness falls around 4 p.m. every day in late November when you’re as far north as Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, whose annual Black Nights (PÖFF) nods to the presiding nocturnal mood. Most of the winter light is up on screen, where the festival’s vast programming unspools across 17 days that also are chock full with industry forums and meet-ups. A city of some 400,000 that feels like a village, the Tallinn most visitors experience divvies up between its tourist-speckled Old Town, whose medieval bonafides are rooted as far back as 1154, and the modern design/tech neighborhood Teleskivi, with acres […]

Cinephiles looking to cook up a zesty decade recap of the best in American indie film could have taken a Polish holiday this fall and landed in the eastern European cultural capital of Wroclaw for the 10th annual American Film Festival. The intensive marathon nods to red-white-and-blue archetypes in branding, which makes festival avatars of such staples of American mythology as motorcycle cops, 18-wheelers, Afro-sporting disco queens, football running backs, astronauts and desperadoes. Its mission, however, is at once more incisive and expansive than all that apple-pie iconography, distilling highlights and discoveries from the year’s major U.S. film gatherings, sprinkled […]