Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Discoveries from the Middle East at the Seattle International Film Festival
The last time I saw Seattle, Barack Obama was a president-elect. I arrived November 2008 on a road trip with two close friends, both of whom had worked full-time to get Obama elected. The trip had a practical function — to help one of them move to L.A. — but in earnest it felt like a victory lap. We traveled through Denver, Missoula and Vancouver before reaching Seattle, our last stop as a trio. We celebrated Thanksgiving in the city. We caught a screening of Rachel Getting Married, Jonathan Demme’s ode to a multicultural America. With the end of the […]
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Win Tickets to See Bruce LaBruce’s The Misandrists in NYC and LA
A force to be reckoned with since his first short in 1987, queercore filmmaker Bruce LaBruce (who we interviewed last year regarding his latest short porn film) has worked consistently since then. His latest feature, The Misandrists, is right in keeping with his established interests. From the official synopsis: When an injured male leftist on the run discovers the remote stronghold of the Female Liberation Army — a radical feminist terrorist group whose mission is to usher in a female world order — one of the members takes pity on him and hides him in the basement. However, the man in […]
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IFP Announces 20 Feature Films Selected for 2018 Filmmaker Labs
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the 20 feature films selected for the IFP Filmmaker Labs, IFP’s year-long fellowship for first-time filmmakers currently in post-production on their debut feature. Combining documentary and narrative features together for the first time, the program begins today, running May 21-25 at the Made in NY Media Center by IFP located in DUMBO, Brooklyn. The Filmmaker Labs continues its dedication to supporting underrepresented voices. Over 60% of this year’s attending Lab Fellows, and over 70% of the directors specifically, are diverse in regards to gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and disability. Furthermore, this year’s […]
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Cannes Dispatch #7: Climax
In a genuinely shocking turn of events, self-promoting shit-stirrer Gaspar Noé’s new film Climax — re-screened for festival-goers yesterday after it won the Directors’ Fortnight’s Art Cinema Award — is one of the best and most broadly-loved films to premiere in Cannes this year, pleasing devoted followers while winning over a fair many skeptics in the process. I’ll confess to being reasonably on board with his let’s-not-call-it-a-“project” coming into this one — especially when he works in 3D, as he did in his throwback to ’70s erotica, Love (2015) — though my enthusiasm for his movies has been invariably mitigated by […]
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Cannes Dispatch #6: Under the Silver Lake, Burning
While there are discoveries to be had at this festival, Cannes is notoriously light on unknown quantities; Yomeddine is the only debut in this year’s Competition slate, and who knows how or why that happened. It’s a festival that prides itself on grandiosity and presenting the vanguard of arthouse filmmaking, albeit with some degree of familiarity, which means that much of the excitement of coming to watch movies here stems either from promises fulfilled or witnessing the occasional familiar face move in a new direction. Invigorating as these latter cases are to behold, they inevitably arrive with mixed results, as exemplified in […]
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Inclusion Riders, Female-Led Projects and the Beginnings of Change around Gender Parity at the Cannes Film Festival
CANNES – Given the news events of the last year, it’s no surprise that the deficit of women and people from ethnic, disabled, and LGBT backgrounds working within the film industry has been a focus at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. On a positive note, practical action has been a key theme here, with many female industry figures expressing a sigh of relief that change is slowly happening across the various sectors of the film industry. Still, this is not without considerable effort. To start the festival, an anti-sexual harassment hotline was put in place in partnership with the French […]
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Cannes Dispatch #5: BlacKkKlansman, The House That Jack Built
Among the markers of a great film—of a great work of art in general—is its ability to conjure itself up unannounced, repeatedly, in the light of neighboring films and artworks; it becomes a lens through which other work is viewed, a standard by which everything else is held, a shadow enlightening the world we now walk through. This is one way of briefly reiterating something I attempted to articulate in my third dispatch: Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Bookis great art, corroborated for me by its persistent presence in my consciousness during the last several days of movie watching—most notably (and […]
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Cannes 2018 Dispatch #4: Shoplifters, Girl, Happy as Lazzaro
Over the last couple of days, I’ve encountered a string of films that I’ve found to be less than generative, and hence difficult to write about. Cannes, like most international film festivals, offers a selection of films that tend to be too forthcoming about their moral positions, and too specific with regards to how their viewers are intended to emote. For instance, this morning’s competition screening, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters—a poignant, carefully structured look at an impoverished Japanese family’s daily life—is nice to look at, impressively acted and easy to be moved by, but places hard, unmissable accents on all of […]
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Cannes 2018 Dispatch #3: The Image Book
Last week I had coffee with American filmmaker/projectionist/translator Ted Fendt, and he said something that has, as I’d expected, stayed with me during my time watching and thinking about movies in Cannes. He suggested—or at least wondered aloud—that the lack of great writing on Jean-Luc Godard’s late period might be attributable to the fact that it is so difficult for critics to match the radicality of the films themselves. I was immediately inclined to push back against the idea, just as I was intrigued by it, and proceeded to wonder if a thorough exegesis of a Godard film might be […]
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Cannes 2018 Dispatch #2: Donbass, Petra
Speaking of soap operas: Jaime Rosales follows Farhadi’s plunge into the vernacular of Spanish culebrones with a complementary appropriation of melodrama in Petra, an achronological chronicle of one woman’s search for truth, history and her own identity. Starring Bárbara Lennie (who, funny enough, also appears in a significant supporting role in Everybody Knows), the movie intrigues from the outset, playfully opening with a title card announcing Chapter II, along with a concise summary of the key narrative information this chapter will provide (“How Petra enters Jaume’s world”), a strategy that each subsequent chapter also employs. At his characteristically unhurried tempo, […]
