Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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“No One’s Going to Knock at Your Door and Say ‘I Want to Hire You to Be a Filmmaker'”: Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell on MS Slavic 7
As codirector Sofia Bohdanowicz has delightedly noted, MS Slavic 7 has caused a minor flutter of interest among the Extremely Online Librarian community, amazed that anyone would make a film titled after a call number at Harvard’s Houghton Library. That collection, from the papers of the Nobel-nominated poet Józef Wittlin, includes two dozen-odd letters sent to him by his fellow poet and fellow Polish exile Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, Bohdanowicz’s great-grandmother and namesake. Within the world of MS Slavic 7, though, Bohdanowiczowa is the grandmother of Audrey, the character played by Deragh Campbell. Audrey is a recurring character in what now must […]
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True/False 2019: Anxiety and Research Projects
The sound of ocean waves links the first two images of Dora García’s Segunda Vez: a crowd of people, standing and watching something unseen in interior darkness, then an ocean cliffside—a “reverse shot” of a totally different space. The waves dissolve into room tone as the third shot cuts to a young man and woman silently regarding each other in a waiting room, then an elderly hand firmly gripping a cane and, finally, an enormous wall clock. None of these seem to share a common space or time; I assumed all would be clarified sooner or later and didn’t worry about it […]
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“I Had To Tell a Story About Five Guys Working Behind Computer Screens”: Hans Pool on Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World
Hans Pool’s Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World follows the diehard band of brothers (yes, there are no citizen journo sisters featured) behind the online investigative outfit Bellingcat, founded by a shy Brit determined to unmask some of the media’s most notorious blockbuster stories. Whether that be through geo-location mapping, voice analysis, drone imagery, or even fact-checking legacy organizations like the NY Times (one of several outlets to report a staged car bombing as real), the international collective takes tools once the province of law enforcement and other paid “professionals” to separate fact from fiction in a very 21st century way. Filmmaker spoke with the […]
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“I Have an Interest in Women Who Are on a Mission, Who Want to Create Impact”: Marie Skovgaard on Her CPH:DOX Opening Night Film, The Reformist
Marie Skovgaard’s The Reformist follows Sherin Khankan, a feminist revolutionary this American had never heard of, but who is practically a household name in her hometown of Copenhagen. Khankan, Denmark’s first female imam, founded the Mariam Mosque, one of the first in Europe to be led by women. And fortunately, Skovgaard was there to artistically document the mosque’s difficult birth as well as the trials and tribulations (both internally and externally) the uncompromising religious leader faced in its aftermath. Filmmaker spoke with the Danish director prior to the doc’s opening night, CPH:DOX premiere on March 21st. Filmmaker: So how did […]
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SXSW Notebook: E-Scooters, Three Studio Comedies, and the Political Party at the Paramount
Austin may have the highest scooter-to-citizen ratio of all e-scooter inclusive cities in the U.S. While my first impressions of previous editions of SXSW were the abundance of free swag and promotional doodads oozing out of the assorted pop-ups and festival-converted locales, this year it was all the scooters. In a single day, I witnessed a scooter driver get swiped by a car and two others fall clumsily to the pavement. University of Texas baseball star David Hamilton, Kaiser Health News reported, struck a pothole riding an e-scooter and tore his achilles tendon. He’s out for the season. Concerned Austin […]
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“Giving Yourself Time to Sculpt”: Pawel Pawlikowski’s Qumra Masterclass
An initiative of the Doha Film Institute, Qumra is an event that connects Qatari and international directors who are receiving different stages of DFI-funded support with industry delegates from across the spectrum of the film world and master filmmakers who meet with emerging talents and engage in public conversations. The 5th edition took place between March 15th and 20th, 2019. Fresh off the heels of the Oscar campaign for Cold War, Pawel Pawlikowski has been enjoying a sustained stay in the international spotlight since his 2015 film Ida became an award-winning critics’ favourite. While tonally distinct from one another, both […]
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Truth to Power: Why CPH:DOX is The Future of Progressive Fests
With the “golden age” of documentary filmmaking still upon us, there’s no shortage of doc fests to attend throughout the year (especially around November, when it often feels like a nonfiction pileup). The Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, however, knows how to set itself apart from the pack. Besides now taking place in March (and thus not needing to fight with IDFA over eyeballs and premieres), CPH:DOX strives to be “the best festival in and for the world.” What this means in concrete terms is that, though CPH:DOX showcases everything from cinematic art pieces to true-crime thrillers, it’s forever rooted […]
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Oxford Film Festival 2019: Diverse New Voices in Faulkner Country
Saturday night at the 16th annual Oxford Film Festival was prom—not an actual prom, but a sweet sixteen-themed awards ceremony complete with fried chicken and sangria, hosts in ballgowns and an electricity in the air where you felt the nostalgia of your own teenage dance. If you grew up in the south, like I did, your prom may not have felt anywhere as progressive as this one, and it wasn’t until I was standing in the packed auditorium of the awards that I realized I had mostly seen LGBTQ, minority-focused and movies with a female gaze at the festival, which […]
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13 Films and VR Pieces to Anticipate at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival
With SXSW already underway, here’s my quick list of films of interest at this year’s edition of Austin’s annual tech, music and film festival. The Beach Bum. Harmony Korine’s latest, The Beach Bum, which time travels the stoner comedy ethos of ’70s Cheech and Chong to the upscale mansions and beer-soaked boardwalk of contemporary Miami Beach, is sure to be a SXSW standout this year. Matthew McConaughey plays Moondog, a cheerfully debauched would-be poet whose writer’s block is more a product of his 420 lifestyle than existential exploration. “The idea of getting wasted is a virtue to Moondog, living in […]
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“I’m Really Interested in Expanding What We Call ‘Political Cinema'”: Brett Story on The Hottest August
Where Brett Story’s previous feature, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, interrogated the US’s carceral system in twelve formally and thematically distinct segments, her new film The Hottest August approaches climate change, in its broadest sense, through a freeflowing diaristic chronicle of a summer month. Over August of 2017, Story and her crew traveled to all five boroughs of NYC, capturing a broad polyphony of voices that, pleasingly, refuses to stay strictly on-thematic-task. The film just premiered at True/False before proceeding to SXSW; the first screening there is today. Over FaceTime Audio, I spoke to Story about working with a small crew, redefining […]
