Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Critic’s Notebook: The 2024 Berlin International Film Festival
Off-screen at least, Berlinale was a political mess this year. The final edition of director Carlo Chatrian, who came from Locarno six years ago and brought his adventurous taste with him, was marred by conflict. The festival began with prominent and necessary protests against genocide in Gaza and controversy over the invitation (later revoked) of leaders from Germany’s far-right AfD party. And it ended ugly, when No Other Land co-director Yuval Abraham, who made his film with a Palestinian-Israeli collective of filmmakers and activists, received death threats and had his family in Israel menaced after his acceptance speech for its […]
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Watch Now: Short Films from the 2024 Filmfort Film Festival
Filmmaker is proud to continue our annual partnership with the Filmfort Film Festival by exclusively hosting six short films from this year’s lineup, which will be available to view on our site through Saturday. The three day festival—which occurs during the Treefort Music Fest in Boise, Idaho—highlights an array of emerging independent cinema. Alongside robust film programming, Filmfort also features DIY panels and filmmaker Q&As in the heart of the city’s downtown area. Check out this year’s selection of films below. Broken Flight dir. Erika Valenciana, Mitchell Wenkus 2023, USA, 18 mins Synopsis: At the Willowbrook Wildlife Rehabilitation Center, Annette […]
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True/False Film Fest 2024: Creative Subjects
“Are you getting what you want, bitch?” Philly Abe, the focus of Elizabeth Nichols’s Flying Lessons, repeatedly offers similarly styled examples of “director-subject negotiations,” in which the latter grumbles before giving the former what they want, now with the added gift of self-reflexive dramatic tension. Director-subject relations are currently an especially fashionable topic (cf. the recent, clearly-titled film Subject); at this year’s True/False Film Fest, Flying Lessons provided its most interesting treatment. Abe is presented first as a representative of a vibrant and unprofessionalized ’80s downtown NYC arts scene but has an equally important relationship to the filmmaker, whose presence […]
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Critic’s Notebook: The 2023 Red Sea International Film Festival
A series of miles-long empty dirt lots lie wedged between the Ritz Carlton and the Red Sea Mall, the two primary venues of the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Barren, with all signs of previous inhabitation fully erased, the site of the future Jeddah central district is a curious sight in the middle of a city of four million. When completed in 2027, it will be the cultural, industrial and touristic center of the city; for now, as endless empty space, it’s such a vertigo-inducing sight of rapid construction and development that it’s impossible to imagine anything […]
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Masterclasses at Qumra 2024 by Leos Carax, Claire Denis and More
Launched ten years ago by the Doha Film Institute, Qumra is an industry convention held annually in Qatar’s capital city of Doha. Through panels, workshops, screenings and masterclasses, Qumra brings together a cross-section of producers, festival programmers and journalists in an effort, according to organizers, to “provide mentorship, nurturing, and hands-on development for filmmakers from Qatar and around the world.” This year’s edition, which ran from March 1 to 6, arrived at a particularly fraught moment for the Middle East with Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. After cancelling last November’s Ajyal Film Festival in solidarity with Palestine, the DFI, which […]
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11 Films and VR Experiences We’re Looking Forward to at the 2024 SXSW Film Festival
With the SXSW Film Festival kicking off today in Austin, here are 11 works we’re particularly excited about and believe worthy of recommendation. The festival runs through March 16. Babes. Actress Pamela Adlon, especially beloved by this writer for voicing the endearingly “not right” Bobby on King of the Hill, world premieres her directorial debut at this year’s SXSW. From a script by Ilana Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz, Babes charts the unexpected (and perhaps actively resisted) growth of chronically single woman Eden (Glazer) when she discovers she’s become pregnant from a one night stand. Desperate for direction, Eden immediately seeks […]
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Los Angeles Festival of Movies (LAFM) Announces Inaugural Lineup for April 4-7, 2024
Co-founded by Micah Gottlieb and Sarah Winshall, the inaugural edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies is slated to take place this April 4 through 7 in venues across east Los Angeles. Today, the festival announced its inaugural lineup, including selections from former 25 New Faces of Film Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn (recently interviewed by Jordan Cronk about their new film, Dream Team) and Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan. Below, find the full line-up with descriptions from the festival’s press release. Official Selection Dream Team, dir. Lev Kalman & Whitney Horn Gasoline Rainbow, dir. Bill Ross IV & […]
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Doc Fortnight 2024: The Axis of Big Data, Preemptive Listening, Small Hours of the Night, Silence of Reason
MoMA’s annual Doc Fortnight begins as the Berlinale winds down, allowing the fest to grab freshly premiered titles from there, Rotterdam and Sundance (from the latter, opening night selection Realm of Satan, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat and Black Box Diaries). This year’s 23rd edition has 13 features, six shorts and three “evenings with”; I was able to sample about half of the work one way or another. Days after Zhou Tao’s The Periphery of the Base Berlinale premiere, his conceptually immaculate The Axis of Big Data makes its North American premiere here. The milky grey background of the opening […]
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Sundance Institute Announces 2024 Momentum Fellows
The Sundance Institute announced today the eight storytellers who comprise the 2024 Momentum Fellows cohort. Led by the Institute’s Women at Sundance and Artist Accelerator programs, the fellowship “specifically targets mid-career artists hailing from historically marginalized backgrounds, offering them tailored support and resources.” From the press release: The fellowship supports creators working in fiction or nonfiction who have recently achieved a noteworthy accomplishment, such as a highly regarded feature film or series. Momentum provides participants with a full-year program of customized support around current goals they identify for themselves to level up in their craft and career, including an unrestricted […]
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Rotterdam 2024 Critic’s Notebook: A Spoiling Rain, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, Under a Blue Sun and 102 Narra
The International Film Festival Rotterdam has always been something of a grab bag. This year, at the 53rd edition, the Dutch festival showed 424 films across its various programmes — a reduction from past years due to widespread budget cuts. Still, 424 films (including 183 world premieres) is a mammoth undertaking for any one film critic at a major festival lacking an intuitive method of whittling down a schedule. This is especially true for international press less interested in the trickle-down from Cannes or Venice — Agniezka Holland’s audience award-winner Green Border, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, and Alice Rohrwacher’s La […]
