Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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“I Just Saw People Falling Out of the Sky”: Andrew Hevia on Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window
A stranger in a foreign land, with a camera and a penchant for cheap beer: Andrew Hevia’s hyperdigital documentary Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window follows the Miami-bred filmmaker as he visits Hong Kong for the Chinese edition of Art Basel. At first determined to make a traditional documentary accessible for public television audiences, Hevia’s plans are quickly thwarted once he discovers the elusive intricacies of the region. He’s a Cuban-American who can’t understand the language of his new surroundings. Rather than view that as a hindrance, he takes to meeting artists and art collectors, attending art shows, wooing […]
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“A Movie Where Nobody Wears Clothes and It’s PG-Rated”: Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli on So Pretty
Before Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli began the bulk of production on her second feature So Pretty, she wrote an essay for this site outlining some of the goals and background behind the production: The film is an adaptation of a 1980s German gay novel [Ronald M. Schernikau’s So Schön] that I am transposing and translating to a cast of feminine people of many genders in 2018, New York City. […] Given the explicit gender-trouble and queer elements of So Pretty, as well as the fact that it takes seriously the novella’s paraphrased subtitle “a utopian film,” my film must create an image […]
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Ecological Destruction and Aesthetic Nightmares: Venice Art Biennale 2019
Although it starts just days before Cannes, the Venice Arts Biennale is routinely ignored by film journalists. Perhaps it’s because of the (incorrect) presumption that the yearly film festival sweeps up the important material, or perhaps it’s the weird art/film world divide. But key film figures routinely make their presence known at the Biennale: when I first attended in 2007, José Luis Guerín represented Spain with an installation-based riff on In The City of Sylvia, while Tsai Ming-Liang screened It’s A Dream for Taiwan. Meanwhile, a figure then best-known in the art world, Steve McQueen, shared two filmed works in […]
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IFP Announces Ten Projects Selected for 2019 IFP Episodic Lab
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today the ten projects selected for the Episodic Lab, IFP’s yearlong fellowship for breakthrough content creators working on fiction and nonfiction series projects aimed for television and digital platforms. Commented IFP Executive Director Jeffrey Sharp, “The IFP Episodic Lab is the perfect place to incubate and workshop these great series projects: it offers the creators and their teams mentorship to pull off their vision in the TV and digital landscape. It is also the perfect place for the teams to strengthen their pitches before they go out to market—specifically, IFP Week […]
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Winners Announced for Spring, 2019 SFFILM Westridge Grants
SFFILM, in partnership with the Westridge Foundation, announced today the five filmmaking teams receiving a total of $100,000 in screenwriting and development for their narrative features. One of the few grants open to early-stage narrative filmmakers, the SFFILM Westridge grants, awarded twice annually, “are designed for US-based filmmakers whose stories take place primarily in the United States and focus on the significant social issues and questions of our time.” In a statement, the jury said, “We are thrilled to be able to support these five filmmakers and their exceptional projects. Each has used their unique voice and experience to illuminate […]
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US in Progress Paris Announces 2019 Selection of Eight American Independent Works in Progress
US in Progress, the biannual event connecting American independent filmmakers in postproduction with European industry support, has announced the eight films that will be presented June 19 – 21 at the Champs-Élysées Film Festival in Paris. The only European event devoted exclusively to American independents, US in Progress is a joint program between Champs-Élysées and November’s American Film Festival in Wroclaw. As the organizers write, “This professional programme is a collaboration between these two festivals and seeks to facilitate the circulation of American independent cinema in Europe by bringing decision makers from all over Europe to discover new US filmmakers.” […]
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Cannes 2019 Dispatch 6: Parasite, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo
A great prize list aside—better than any since at least 2011—I can’t fall in line with a majority of this year’s press corps in declaring this a banner year for Cannes; ironic, given that, on paper, this indeed was going to be a banner year for Cannes: Malick! Bonello! Hausner! Tarantino! Dumont! Diop! Lav! Bong! There was something for everyone, and most of it seemed to go down quite smoothly, even as distinctions between the good, bad, and ugly was as indiscernible as ever. On the two critics’ grids I participated in, for example, virtually every film across every section […]
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Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite Wins Cannes Palme d’Or; Mati Diop’s Atlantics Picks Up Grand Prix
South Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s dark social satire/thriller Parasite won the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or. It’s the first time a Korean director has won the award, and jury president Alejandro González Iñárritu said the jury was unanimous. First-time French-Senegalese feature filmmaker Mati Diop — the actress known for roles in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum and American indies like L for Leisure and Fort Buchanan had previously directed shorts and a medium-length documentary — won the festival’s second prize, the Grand Prix, for her Atlantics. It’s a magic-realistic-tinged tale of women left behind in Senegal […]
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Cannes 2019 Dispatch 5: Fire Will Come, Tommaso
We all know that Cannes appraises itself as the supreme purveyor of a given year’s most handsome industrially-produced arthouse motion pictures (that is, those that happen to have completed their post-production by late April of said year) — a launchpad for quote-unquote major achievements by the world’s most recognizable and uncompromising narrative filmmakers. Its unwillingness to accommodate the more outre or difficult projects from directors who fit that description hasn’t been too contentious thanks, mostly, to the Directors’ Fortnight’s relatively eclectic and much less constricted programming philosophy—carried over from one artistic director to the next for more than half a […]
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Cannes 2019 Dispatch 4: Lux Æterna, Jeanne, Young Ahmed
Gaspar Noé may never mature in the ways his detractors wish (rather, many of them long for the day that he disappears completely), and yet his work, especially from his erotic 3D film, Love (2015), to the present, continues to surprise me. Creator of his own distinct cinematic idiom—one almost always described as both formally and thematically extreme—Noé returns to Cannes only a year after his Directors’ Fortnight success story, Climax, with a medium-length, stroboscopic, essayistic polyptych titled Lux Æterna. Even as Lux opens with a gently flickering title card that quotes Fyodor Dostoevsky on epilepsy—a state he said offers […]
