Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Poster Premiere: ACID 2025 Selection A Light That Never Goes Out
We’re pleased to premiere the poster for ACID 2025 selection A Light That Never Goes Out. From the Cannes section’s website: Lauri-Matti Parppei, who has recorded several albums in a parallel life, takes us to their hometown in Northern Finland, a place where people speak little and depression is a taboo – this is Pauli’s illness, as he returns home to heal his wounds. With a melancholic tone, the film, through its precise, no-frills directing style, weaves its story like a musical score. Pauli rejects success and returns to life thanks to a chaotic lineup of outcasts. Friendship, stronger than anything, […]
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UFO Announces Spring, 2025 Short Film Lab Cohort
UFO (Untitled Filmmaker Org) announced today the three new filmmakers comprising its 2025 Short Film Lab cohort. Selected filmmakers Daisy Friedman, Carin Leong (a Filmmaker 2025 25 New Face), and Emilio Subía will begin the Lab experience this month as they develop new scripted (Friedman and Subía) and nonfiction (Leong) projects. Filmmakers Emily May Jampel, Arielle Knight, and Samuel Wright Smith from the second Short Film Lab cohort announced last spring will continue in the program through December to develop their second projects engaging scripted narrative, hybrid nonfiction, and animation, in keeping with the Lab’s staggered enrollment model. The UFO […]
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Nominees Announced for 2025 Gotham Television Awards
The Gotham Film & Media Institute, Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today the nominations in twelve competitive award categories for the 2025 Gotham Television Awards, recognizing a range of series, including Adolescence, The Pitt, The Studio as well as performances from Kathy Bates, Sterling K. Brown, Ted Danson, Linda Lavin, Cristin Milioti, and Michelle Williams, among others. “Building on the success of last year’s inaugural ceremony, the Gotham Television Awards returns with new categories, expanded tributes, and a larger stage to celebrate the creators and artists making their mark on today’s television landscape,” said Jeffrey Sharp, Executive Director of The Gotham. “As […]
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The Popcorn List Releases Second Annual Survey of 19 Recommended Feature Films
The Popcorn List has released its second annual survey of recommended feature films. From the press release: The Popcorn List (TPL), an annual survey of acclaimed feature films returns for its second year with 19 film recommendations. TPL was founded in 2024 as a discovery and visibility initiative to amplify independent films that deserve to be seen more widely, highlight the discovery nature of film festivals and the craft of film curation, and respect audiences’ desire for story-driven movies. The result is an open-source database of acclaimed films without U.S. distribution (theatrical, VOD, self-distributed), as recommended by festival programmers across […]
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Visions du Réel 2025: Choose Your Illusion
In 2002, a George W. Bush aide coined the phrase “reality-based community”—a label meant pejoratively, anticipating the present belligerent moment. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” that (still!) anonymous official ranted. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” This psychotic assertion is paraphrased—nearly word-for-word, surely inadvertently—by the […]
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NAB 2025: LED Screen Advancements, Tariff Concerns and Hybrid Lenses
Nearly 1,100 vendors spread across three halls of the massive Las Vegas Convention Center for the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show which, over five days each April, covers a lot of ground, both physically and with the wide scope of technology encompassed under “broadcast.” In a press conference, Karen Chupka, NAB’s managing director and executive vice president, highlighted this Show’s new points of focus, including sports and content creators; ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith was a featured guest speaker at NAB earlier that same morning. Scrolling through each day’s list of scheduled panels and talks illustrates just how […]
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ACID Announces 2025 Cannes Lineup
The ACID section of Cannes has announced its lineup for this year’s edition. From the press release: ACID (Association du Cinéma Indépendant pour sa Diffusion) is a collective of filmmakers who support independent films by giving them greater exposure. Their goal? To help original, daring films reach their audience, both in France and abroad. […] ACID stands out for its unique selection process: filmmakers choose the films they support. Each year, 14 filmmakers see over 600 feature films for the Cannes Film Festival and select 9 of them, to receive invaluable support for their release in theaters and at festivals, […]
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Trade Wars: Ian Bell on WTO/99
The archival documentary WTO/99 functions both as historical document and prophecy of the future, chronicling the four days in 1999 when anti-globalization activists from multiple movements—labor unions, student groups, teamsters, anarchists, nonprofit organizations like Global Exchange and the Rainforest Action Network—took to downtown Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference. While the King County Sheriff’s Office and Seattle Police Department initially took a hands-off approach to supervising the peaceful protests, they quickly adopted a more aggressive tack after protestors successfully blocked WTO delegates from reaching the convention center on the first day of the conference. Tear gas, pepper […]
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Five Favorites from the 2025 New Directors/New Films Festival
The 54th edition of New Directors/New Films, co-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center, runs from April 2 to April 13. This year’s program includes 24 features and 9 shorts. As always, the slate is admirably international in scope, spotlighting work from 22 different countries, with many films making their U.S. premieres after screening at festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, Karlovy Vary, Rotterdam, and Venice. Although I’ve attended ND/NF for more than two decades, and reported on it for this website and others for almost half that time, I still get excited when the slate […]
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The Tides that Bind: Cinema At Sea Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival 2025
In a panel on Pacific Islander filmmaking organized by the Hawai’i International Film Festival last year, a Native Hawaiian producer noted that fellow creatives in the region were “not divided by land, but connected by water”—a thought at the heart of the new Cinema At Sea Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival in Naha. The southernmost and westernmost region of Japan, made up of multiple islands geographically closer to Taipei than Tokyo, Okinawa may be best known historically as the site of several bloody battles during WWII, or colloquially as the “Hawaii of Japan,” a sun-kissed vacation dreamland of azure waves […]
