Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Venice Film Festival 2020: Notturno, Dear Comrades, In Between Dying
Seven years after Sacro GRA became the first nonfiction feature to win the Golden Lion, Gianfranco Rosi returned to Venice with Notturno. The opening titles succinctly provide context—three years of footage captured adjacent to ISIS-related warfare in Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon—while the first shot immediately re-establishes Rosi’s total ability to sculpt reality: groups of soldiers jogging in laps, separate squads with just enough time between one brigade passing and the next that it’s a visual and sonic surprise every time, the whole unignorably and beautifully color corrected. The shot holds as multiple divisions jog past the camera, their bodies outlining […]
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“Can a Psychopathic Institution Be Redeemed, or Should It Be Eliminated?”: Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott on Their TIFF-Premiering Doc The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel
I can still recall my red pill moment while watching Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar’s 2003 documentary The Corporation with my best friend, at the (pre-financial crisis) time an analyst at a big bank. “Corporations are people? What the hell?” I practically shouted. “Yup,” he simply responded with a weary shrug. For many clueless progressives like myself, unaware that corporate power had been spreading like the coronavirus, silently hijacking all branches of our government for decades, The Corporation was both horror film and wakeup call. The real deep-state conspiracy. Since then we’ve endured the Great Recession and our current economic calamity/health catastrophe/racial injustice awakening. […]
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TIFF 2020 (I): David Byrne’s American Utopia
Even without the pandemic, and the attendant pulling of high-market-value films from the festival circuit until it’s over (?), it’s likely Spike Lee’s David Byrne’s American Utopia would have been the opening night film of TIFF 2020. The goal of gala presentations is to sell out expensive seats, and the Q&A combo of Lee and Byrne after a concert movie would have been a surefire bet. A mostly workmanlike rendering of Byrne’s 2019 Broadway show, American Utopia opens with “Here,” one of two songs co-written with Daniel Lopatin from the fairly poky album of the same name—the least familiar selections, five in all, […]
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15 Films and Events We’re Looking Forward To At the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival
For me, TIFF 2020 began yesterday with a stroll from my bedroom to the computer, coffee in hand, to check whether the promised link and password to the festival’s new digital portal had arrived. It did, I logged in, noted that the streaming platform supports AirPlay, and started a calendar of screening times, as most titles are available only in 48-hour windows. (Plus, some are geoblocked here in the States.) A far cry from my usual short flight to Billy Bishop Airport, an afternoon typing P&I screening times into my phone and then looking for a party to go to. […]
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Carrie Lozano Announced as Sundance’s New Director, Documentary Film Program
Carrie Lozano — award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist, lecturer and co-founder of the International Documentary Association’s Enterprise Documentary Fund — was announced today as the new Director of the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program. She succeeds interim director Kristin Feeley and prior director Tabitha Jackson, who became the head of the Sundance Film Festival this past January. From the press release: As Documentary Film Program Director, Lozano will elevate and support nonfiction filmmakers worldwide at all stages of creating and distributing new cinematic work. She will also work to advance and elevate the health of the independent nonfiction field, ensuring that […]
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The Five Rules of Success, PVT Chat, Time of Moulting and Wildland: The 2020 Fantasia Festival
While it’s doubtful anyone really wants to see their favorite film festival go virtual, in this year (and maybe more) when nearly everything is pivoting to online status, Montreal’s annual Fantasia marathon is one you’d expect to suffer the most from the transition. Yet, from the other side of a screen 1,500 miles away, the festival sure seemed to pull off the difficult feat of making it all work. No late-night Irish bar hangs, no traditional audience chants, no horror fan takeover of the utilitarian urban campus of Concordia University and its construction-riddled surroundings for three weeks of sleepaway-camp shenanigans. […]
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IFP Announces Public Programming Slate for 42nd Virtual IFP Week
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker’s parent organization, announced today the virtual public programming for the 42nd IFP Week, taking place virtually Sunday, September 20th to Friday, September 25th. The first four days of the week will be film and TV related programming with the final two days dedicated to audio programming to support creators working in the audio space through the introduction of the first-ever IFP Week Audio Hub. Additional details on audio programming will be shared in the coming weeks. Kicking off Sunday, September 20th, IFP Week will feature a series of panel conversations exploring the future of the […]
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FIDMarseille 2020 (2): Zaho Zay, Forensickness
Each FIDMarseille 2020 movie came with a video introduction from the filmmakers, who were given seemingly complete freedom in deciding how, and at what length, to approach this; eschewing the standard-issue speech-to-webcam, Zaho Zay’s had to be the best one. In a living room, a woman (presumably co-director Maéva Ranaïvojaona) paces along to an audio clip from Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? of Jean-Marie Straub ranting about the indissolubility of form and ideology. “Form, form, your infamous form,” he snarls, the woman roughly lip-syncing to a rant she seems to have heard and contemplated many times before. This intro is […]
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U.S. Genre Film Festivals Collaborate on Nightstream, a Collective Virtual Event
Five U.S. film festivals — Boston Underground Film Festival, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, North Bend Festival, Overlook Film Festival and Popcorn Frights Film Festival — are responding to the coronavirus pandemic’s challenges to the festival and exhibition landscape by creating a new virtual festival, Nightstream, that will run October 8 – 11. Programmers from all five festivals will curate the event, which will contain, according to a press release, “a mix of international horror, fantasy, sci-fi, vanguard, and underground films that capture the distinct curatorial spirit of each festival.” In addition, “Proceeds from the event will be shared with all participating filmmakers […]
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TIFF Announces Its 50-Film 2020 Lineup, with Pictures from Chloé Zhao, Spike Lee and More
TIFF co-heads Cameron Bailey and Joana Vicente have announced the 50 films that will comprise the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival. Necessarily due to the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s TIFF is very different edition — the film count is down from 2019’s 300+, and most press and industry will attend virtually — but there are still many anticipated world premieres and diverse international offerings. “We began this year planning for a 45th Festival much like our previous editions,” said Bailey, Artistic Director and Co-Head of TIFF, in a press release, “but along the way we had to rethink just about […]
