Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Karin Chien, Amy Hobby and Tabitha Jackson Are New Documentary Fellows at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center
Harvard’s Shorenstein Center announced today the three film professionals who comprise their Spring 2024 cohort of documentary film fellows. Producer and distributor Karin Chien, producer and former executive Amy Hobby, and former director of the Sundance Film Festival as well as Sundance’s Documentary Film Program Tabitha Jackson will, according to a press release, “join the Center under the auspices of the newly-established Documentary Film in the Public Interest research initiative and will spend the semester conducting research and engaging with the Harvard Kennedy School community about the challenges facing the field and its impact on civic life.” “The Documentary Film […]
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Revisiting Silk Stalkings: Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn on IFFR 2024 Premiere Dream Team
Dream Team, the third feature by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, is another in the writer-director duo’s run of genre pastiches that double as sociopolitical parables. Here, the influence of ’90s basic cable TV thrillers is channeled into an episodic story about a pair of Interpol agents (Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai) who travel to Mexico to investigate the mysterious death of a corral smuggler. Shot by Horn in characteristically textured 16mm, the film unfolds between a variety of West Coast locales stretching from Baja California to Vancouver. As the body count rises and rumors of a physic coral […]
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SXSW Announces 50 New Projects for Its 2024 Program, Including Films from Michael Mohan, Nicole Riegel and Alice Lowe
The SXSW Film Festival announced today 50 new films, XR projects and television programs that complete the 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival lineup. Among the world premieres are the latest from The Voyeurs director Michael Mohan, who reunites with star Sydney Sweeney in Immaculate; Dev Patel’s action thriller Monkey Man; Alice Lowe’s followup to her Prevenge, Timestalker; and a new film from The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby director Ned Benson, The Greatest Hits. Festival favorites traveling from Park City to Austin include Didi, Black Box Diaries, Love Machina, Ghostlight and I Saw the TV Glow. Of particular interest to […]
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“I Come From the One-Woman-Band Show of Visual Journalism…”: Emily Kassie on Producing Sugarcane
Tackling a timely but under-discussed contemporary issue in both the United States and Canada, journalists Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie investigate a string of abuses and missing persons cases at an indigenous residential school in Sugarcane. Below, Kassie, who in addition to directing the film with NoiseCat produced it alongside Kellen Quinn. Below, she recounts her debut experience as a producer and how she made a transition from the world of visual journalism. Filmmaker: Tell us about the professional path that led you to produce this film, your first? What jobs within and outside of the film industry did […]
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“Establishing the Idea of Ending Scenes Abruptly…”: Editor Greg Jardin on It’s What’s Inside
In the Sundance 2024 Midnight premiere It’s What’s Inside, the feature debut of writer-director Greg Jardin, an uninvited guest with a mysterious suitcase derails a pre-wedding party. Below, Jardin discusses what led him to edit his own film, the balance between long shots and flutter cuts, and more. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor questionnaire here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Jardin: I started out directing low-budget music videos, which I more or less […]
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“Ninety Percent of Our Film Takes Place In One Location” | Greg Jardin, It’s What’s Inside
Films are made of and from places: the locations they are filmed in, the settings they are meant to evoke, the geographies where they are imagined and worked on. What place tells its own story about your film, whether a particularly challenging location that required production ingenuity or a map reference that inspired you personally, politically or creatively? Ninety percent of our film takes place in one location, which makes that the default answer – a giant house in the middle of nowhere. The whole impetus behind the film’s premise was coming up with something that could unfold in a single […]
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“The Grandest Orphan Cinema”: Ehsan Khoshbakht on MoMA’s “Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925–1979” Series
Starting with a packed house on the night of October 13 and concluding right after Thanksgiving, MoMA showcased “Iranian Cinema before the Revolution, 1925–1979,” the largest retrospective of Iranian cinema ever held inside or outside of Iran. With close to 70 films covering the pre-revolutionary period, there were works from Iran’s most famous filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami; the most famous film of this era, the late Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow; and repertory favorites like Ebrahim Golestan’s Brick and Mirror, Bahram Beyzaie’s Downpour and Forough Farrokhzad’s The House is Black. But, significantly, there were also films by lesser-known but just as vital […]
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In Full Frame: Director Rose Troche and Sundance Institute’s John Nein on Restoring the Lesbian Classic Go Fish
“It’s very much like having a kid out there in the world doing its own thing,” said writer/director Rose Troche last month as she was finishing the restoration of her debut feature Go Fish, which screened as part of Sundance’s 40th Edition programming this week, three decades after its original premiere at the festival. “It’s one of those films that has never gone out of the conversation, this funky movie made for $17,000 that launched these careers.” Troche is right —while many films from Sundance in the ’90s never made the leap to digital distribution, the lesbian drama Go Fish […]
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Slamdance 2024 Announces Winners, The Accident and Inheritance Take Top Prizes
The 2024 Slamdance Film Festival, which returned this year to its original home at the Doubletree Park City (i.e., the Yarrow), announced the winners of its Sparky Awards on Friday. Giuseppe Garau’s The Accident, a 16mm-shot film about a newly separated woman finding employment within the tow-truck industry, won the Narrative Feature Grand Jury Prize. The Documentary Feature Grand Jury Prize went to Matt Moyer’s and Amy Toensing’s Inheritance, an Appalachia-set film dealing with the opioid epidemic. Kiarash Dadgar, whose short film The Steak played the festival, was awarded the AGBO Fellowship, which comes with $25,000 in prize money and […]
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Sundance Film Festival 2024 Announces Awards
The Sundance Film Festival has announced the awards for this year’s edition. The list follows below, with links to our coverage of the films in question as available: GRAND JURY PRIZES The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic was presented to In The Summers / U.S.A. (Director and Screenwriter: Alessandra Lacorazza, Producers: Alexander Dinelaris, Rob Quadrino, Fernando Rodriguez-Vila, Lynette Coll, Sergio Lira, Cristóbal Güell) — On a journey that spans the formative years of their lives, two sisters navigate their loving but volatile father during their yearly summer visits to his home in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Cast: René Pérez Joglar, […]
