Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Sundance 2020 Dispatch 2: Exil, The Earth is Blue as An Orange
In the very first scene of The Social Network, Rooney Mara tells Jesse Eisenberg that he may go through life thinking that girls don’t like him because he’s a nerd, but “that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.” That line rang through my head all through Visar Morina’s Exil, Komplizen Films‘s first Sundance world premiere, and was directly echoed near its end by Sandra Hüller—star of Komplizen co-founder Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann, here the long-suffering wife of Albanian immigrant Xhafer (Misel Maticevic), who’s convinced he’s being discriminated by German society. “Did it ever occur to you that it’s not because you’re […]
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14 Films Not to Miss at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival
Always a bellweather for the health — artistic as well as business — of the American independent film scene, the Sundance Film Festival began yesterday in Park City, Utah, preceded by more than the usual amount of pre-fest news and drama. On the positive front, Sundance 2020 is something of a launch party for a new documentary financing and production company, Concordia, formed by filmmaker Davis Guggenheim and former Participant Media production president Jonathan King, in partnership with Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective. One quarter of the Documentary Competition slate boasts the Concordia logo. And then distressingly there’s Oprah Winfrey’s withdrawal as […]
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The Sundance Question: What Prop or Piece of Set Decoration is Particularly Integral to Your Film?
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.) “It is An Object That Should Not Belong to That World”: Maite […]
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All We Have Is Now: Borscht 0 (2019)
“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 […]
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Sundance Institute’s Anne Lai Named New Executive Director of SFFILM
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, […]
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SXSW Announces 102 Films and Episodic Shows from its 2020 Edition
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 […]
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Light Through the Darkness: The 2019 Black Nights Film Festival
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 […]
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Outside of the “Business-Oriented U.S.,” A Showcase for U.S. Independent Films: the 2019 American Film Festival in Wroclaw
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 […]
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Chris Doyle, Ed Lachman, Lech Majewski, John Bailey and More at Cameraimage 2019
This was the year Cameraimage brought it all back home. The much-vaunted Polish cinematography festival, which launched in 1993 in Toruń—a UNESCO World Heritage site whose history dates back to the 8th century—returned to its native soil after two decades away (first in Łódź, the industrial locus so close to David Lynch’s heart and host to the national film school, and for the last nine years in Bydgoszcz). The homecoming inspired a comical short starring two of the festival’s best-loved regulars on a mission to “save” Cameraimage, with the wiry and wild-haired Chris Doyle wheeling Ed Lachman, signature fedora firmly […]
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The Social Dilemma, High Art, Born into Brothels Added to the 2020 Sundance Film Festival
A new documentary world premiere — the latest from Jeff Orlowski, dealing with the social controls and neuroprogramming aspects of technology platforms and social networks — and two restored works from the Sundance Collection were announced today. Orlowski’s film, The Social Dilemma, will screen next month in Park City as will two distinguished works that are favorites here at the magazine: Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art and Zana Briski and Ross Kaufman’s Born into Brothels. From the press release: Archival screenings are made possible by the Sundance Institute Collection at UCLA, and give audiences the opportunity to discover and rediscover the […]
