Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Garrett Scott: A Legacy of Generosity at Full Frame Documentary Festival
In 2006, documentary filmmaker Garrett Scott died unexpectedly, shocking the film community. His film, Occupation: Dreamland, co-directed with Ian Olds, won the Independent Spirit Truer than Fiction Award two days after his death. In the aftermath of this tragedy, his friends and collaborators founded the Garrett Scott Documentary Development Grant. The idea of the grant is to support first-time feature documentary makers by emulating a formative experience Garrett and Ian had when making Occupation: Dreamland. He visited Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, where he met with many people from the doc community. Full Frame is a […]
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Hot Docs 2018: The Silver Anniversary Edition
The 25th anniversary edition of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival (April 26-May 6) marked my very first visit to North America’s largest nonfiction fest (and also to its host city of Toronto, for that matter). Since I’ve covered IDFA, the world’s largest doc fest, numerous times, I just assumed Hot Docs would be similar in setup and vibe. On the contrary, I was pleasantly surprised to find there are several key elements that make this Toronto mainstay its own exciting, one-of-a-kind event. First off, there are the unique venues. Hot Docs is the only festival I’ve ever been […]
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Cannes 2018 Dispatch #1: Everybody Knows, Birds of Passage
One’s valuation of a film—really, any piece of art—is inseparable from the conditions in which it was experienced. The time of day or overall mood and health at the time of the screening (or link-watching) inform my appreciation of a movie just as much as anything else (save for aesthetic preference and sensibility, perhaps), and this extends to festival contexts—to the ways a film participates in the narrative arc of the nine or ten or twelve days of the event, to the impatience stemming from a lack of masterpieces (or good movies, period), and so on. I bring this up […]
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Anticipating an Exciting (?) Cannes: Films We’re Looking Forward to in the 2018 Edition
I was talking with some French producers recently, and they were seriously looking forward to this year’s Cannes Film Festival. And they were miffed by some of the preview articles that have been posted, including Todd McCarthy’s piece questioning the firepower of this year’s line-up. For years people have been wanting the Festival to be more adventurous, they told me, and now, when they are, Cannes is being criticized for not having the new films of the familiar auteurs who have appeared in the main selection so many, many times. I heard similar comments from a Latin American producer, who […]
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Tribeca Film Festival 2018: Ghostbox Cowboy, The Great Pretender and Diane
Nothing else I saw at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival was as vividly out of its mind as the improbable sight of actor Robert Longstreet roaring across the neon-lit night in Shenzhen, China, rendered absurd in the Toni Erdmann-like drag of a white wig and dental prosthetics. The busy Texas character actor is part of the eccentric circus called Ghostbox Cowboy, which takes a satirical harpoon to the American Dream, parading its deflated form before the funhouse mirror of 21st century China. The writer-director-cinematographer John Maringouin (Big River Man) lathers the frame in a visual texture that captures the psychic […]
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“Do Not Be Daunted by the Magnitude of the Challenge in Front of You”: Assia Boundaoui on Her Surveillance Doc, The Feeling of Being Watched
An Algerian-American raised in Bridgeview, Illinois, just south of Chicago, journalist and filmmaker Assia Boundaoui grew up being watched. The FBI has been aggressively spying on her predominantly Arab-American community at least as far back as the ’90s, despite the fact that the law enforcement organization uncovered very little lawbreaking in the process. And now Boundaoui has turned the tables — or rather the lens — on the Federal Bureau with her debut feature, The Feeling of Being Watched (an alumnus of Spotlight on Documentaries at IFP Week). The film’s a nonfiction journey that takes Boundaoui from dogged FOIA requests […]
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Fighting Eventfulness Deficit at the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival
Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre is a 1926 Art Deco show palace that first hosted vaudeville shows and silent movie screenings accompanied by the bass-note oscillations of a Wurlitzer Hope Jones Unit-Orchestra Pipe Organ. The classic venue is symbolic of its city, which made it the ideal spot for the Bay Area premiere of a the debut feature by another Oakland icon: activist, musician and now writer-director Boots Riley, who came of age as a moviegoer at the venue. “I saw Star Wars here,” he told an audience that packed the house during the recent San Francisco International Film Festival, where the […]
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How to Deliver Your Film to a Festival (2018 Edition)
Back in 2015, I wrote an article for Filmmaker on the best practices for delivering an exhibition copy of your film to festivals. In the ensuing two and a half, almost three years, I’ve received a lot of positive feedback, including a few panicked emails from filmmakers submitting their films to a festivals I worked at. Now in 2018, my editors have asked me to update it. Why the update now? Allow me the use of a clumsy and imperfect technical reference to Moore’s law that computing power doubles every eighteen months and the same has happened to available filmmaking […]
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IFP Announces Inaugural Audio Story Lab
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today the projects selected for the inaugural Audio Story Lab, IFP’s first foray into supporting makers with serialized audio projects. The two-day intensive program runs April 26-27 at the Made in NY Media Center by IFP. Based off the long-running IFP Filmmaker Labs and, more recently, the Screen Forward Labs dedicated to serialized content creators, the IFP Audio Story Lab will support groundbreaking audio artists with the necessary tools and mentorship to move their projects and careers forward. As part of IFP’s ongoing commitment to diversity, the IFP Audio Story Lab inaugural […]
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Canyon Cinema 50, Art of the Real and Emile de Antonio in NYC, Week of 4/27
A few weeks ago my Twitter feed abruptly devolved into a long argument about The Canon: is it just an ossified collection of movies made by white men that should be junked? I don’t think The Canon is a fixed, immutable body of work, never to be added or subtracted to — it’s being constantly reshuffled, with films and filmmakers rising and falling in prominence. Repertory houses have a major part to play in that process, which I note while in the position of wanting to commend a smattering of series and screenings kicking off this weekend in NYC, none of […]
