Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Queen Sugar and Time for Action Forum: IFP Announces IFP Week Public Programming
IFP, Filmmaker’s parent organization, announced today the public events for the upcoming 40th anniversary edition of IFP Week, its signature event. Taking place from September 15-20, 2018, the programs will include public screenings and talks, “all centered on cutting-edge independent content for the big screen, the small screen, and now your headphones.” From the press release: Under the leadership of Head of Programming Amy Dotson and Programming Producer Bill Curran, the IFP Week public talks and events take place in and around Brooklyn, NY at BRIC, The William Vale Hotel, the Brooklyn Army Terminal, DUMBO Loft, and IFP’s headquarters, the Made in […]
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IFP Announces the 150 Projects to be Featured at IFP Film Week’s 2018 Project Forum
IFP, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the 150 films, series, digital and audio projects to be showcased at the Project Forum during 40th anniversary of IFP Film Week this September. The Project Forum, says IFP, is the “United States’ only international co-production market featuring stories for all platforms.” Indeed, in addition to writers and directors, the event now specifically highlights the role of showrunners and audio storytellers in its various projects. “We’re thrilled to celebrate IFP Week’s 40th edition this year,” said IFP Executive Director Joana Vicente in the press release. “This highly anticipated event has, continued to evolve over the […]
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“Zooms are Totally Underutilized”: Bo Burnham on Eighth Grade
With Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade now in theaters, we’re reposting this interview with the writer/director conducted during SXSW 2018. The movie: Eighth Grade The Plot: Shy and uncertain (except when doling out life advice on her sparsely followed vlog), eighth grader Kayla (a revelatory Elsie Fisher) struggles through her last days of middle school. The Interviewee: Bo Burnham. Eighth Grade is the feature directorial debut for the multi-hyphenate writer/director/musician/stand-up comedian. Filmmaker: Let’s start by talking about opening shots. The way you open the Jerrod Carmichael stand-up special you directed for HBO — this extremely tight close-up with Carmichael already on-stage […]
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“You Have to Forge Your Own Path”: Rick Linklater Headlines an Austin Film Society Tribute in Karlovy Vary
As a native Texan and dutiful SXSW attendee traveling to the Czech Republic, I was thrilled to hear that Richard Linklater and the Austin Film Society would be the subject of a Tribute at this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival. The 53rd edition of the Czech-based event that concluded July 7 screened an early print of Linklater’s $23,000 indie phenomenon Slacker (of which he introduced wearing an Astros baseball jersey); Eagle Pennell’s 1983 cult classic Last Night at the Alamo; Robert Rodriguez’s inaugural low-budget hit El Mariachi; and Tom Huckabee and William Van Overbeek’s surreal, image-laden doc Death of a […]
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History Battles with “Fake News” at the 2018 Karlovy Vary Film Festival
Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF) concluded its 53rd edition on July 7th, and with it a solid line-up of both Western and Eastern European fare. Romanian director Radu Jude (Aferim!) won the Grand Prix for his darkly comedic past-meets-present holocaust drama I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians, and Barry Levinson won the Audience Award for Rain Man — a film that gave him the Oscar for Best Picture in 1989. The 76-year-old director was also honored with the Crystal Globe for outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema. Before discussing the film and industry […]
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YouTube Body Horror: Penny Lane on Her Morgellons Disease Doc, The Pain of Others
In the era of fake news and alternative facts, and of people constructing their own custom-made versions of reality, Penny Lane’s The Pain of Others feels very timely, to say the least. Defying any expectations and preconceived notions, Lane’s perfectly titled “body-horror doc” acts as a challenging and thought-provoking sociological study of one unusual YouTube community (which, with Maxim Pozdorovkin’s Our New President also on the fest circuit this year, makes me think “YouTube behavioral psych” might soon become a thing). The Pain of Others weaves together the video diaries of three women suffering from Morgellons disease, a term given […]
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BAMcinemaFest 2018: Four Features and Four Shorts
The mix of films in the 10th edition of BAMcinemaFest offers isn’t totally unexpected: a significant plurality of Sundance premieres (tightly curated, or maybe more accurately culled), titles from SXSW and True/False, two North American and three world premieres. The programming, though, is tighter and more original than a simple survey of The Year To Date In Festival Premieres. (I have already written elsewhere about the following titles: América, Bisbee ’17 [which has been cut down substantially since its premiere], Clara’s Ghost, Crime + Punishment, Eighth Grade, Madeline’s Madeline, Shirkers, Skate Kitchen, The Task. Please please please do not miss that last one. I’ll wait to write about Support the […]
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Diversity, Immersion and the Rise of Short-Form Content: A Report from the 2018 Sheffield Doc/Fest
As it does every year, the 25th edition of Sheffield Doc/Fest offered more than just a stand-out mix of documentaries. Yes, there were many feature highlights — among them opening night film A Northern Soul, about one man’s desire to create and tour a musical bus post-Brexit in the U.K. working-class town of Hull; part archive/part testimonial fashion doc McQueen; the Sundance and Full Frame-winning Of Fathers and Sons, which masterfully depicts a father who loves his sons yet is teaching them to be jihadi fighters; and Under The Wire, which uses interviews and re-enactments to tearfully tell the story […]
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Unresolved Pain and the Spanish “Pact of Forgetting”: Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar Discuss The Silence of Others
Executive produced by the Almodóvars, and nabbing the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary and Peace Film Prize at this year’s Berlinale (not to mention, most recently, the Grand Jury Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest), Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar’s The Silence of Others was one of the most compelling films I caught at Hot Docs back in April. It was also unnervingly revelatory, as the Spotlight on Documentaries at IFP Week project — which will be co-presented by IFP tonight at New York’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival — deals with a disturbing piece of buried history I knew nearly […]
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“The Film Became About What Growing Up in the Midst of a War Does to a Child… ”: Simon Lereng Wilmont on The Distant Barking of Dogs
I discovered Simon Lereng Wilmont’s The Distant Barking of Dogs, a poetic look at everyday life on the frontline of the War in Donbass — as seen through the eyes of a 10-year-old Ukrainian boy who lives with his grandmother in the warzone — at IDFA last November. After nabbing the First Appearance Award at that prestigious festival, it went on to win the Student Jury Award (from an all-kids jury) at the Docudays UA fest, where I watched as the Danish director appeared onstage only to quickly step aside so that the young protagonist and his entire family, having […]
