Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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“Making a Good Movie Has to Come from the Heart, Not from a Mental Understanding of an Issue”: Matthieu Rytz on Anote’s Ark
Premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Matthieu Rytz’s Anote’s Ark follows the international, one-man crusade of Anote Tong, president of Kiribati. That island republic is situated smack in the middle of the Pacific with an indigenous population — exemplified here by Sermary, a young mother of six forced to choose between family and a future in New Zealand — poised to lose their 4,000 year-old way of life as climate change will soon cause the entire country to disappear into the ocean. As the title implies, Tong is less concerned with saving Kiribati itself — he’s painfully aware it’s […]
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Onrushing Now
Nick Nolte had walked into a bar. Nolte was a constant in a screenwriting partner’s Malibu hinterlands, hair ever elevated, stalking across a parking lot to Coogie’s for the midafternoon breakfast, resplendent in striped Sulka pajamas and happy dudgeon. This time, it was dark and it was Toronto, across from the Sutton Hotel headquarters of the festival. The upstairs of now long-defunct Bistro 990 on this night in the late 1990s is rich with heightened voices but not shouting. I’m standing near Nolte with a cofounder of Indiewire, Mark Rabinowitz. Our eyes literally grow large just as our ears figuratively […]
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Hereditary, Horror and the Power of Choice
It was the closing night of the Overlook Film Festival and everyone was gathered at a mansion on the outskirts of town. I was coming out of the bathroom, spooked, because A24 had planted some Hereditary sound effects next to the toilet. Jesus. The film, which comes out today, had closed the festival earlier that night and had left everyone on edge — deliciously so. I grabbed a glass of wine, discussing the experience with a stranger who was leaning against a wall outside next to some friends. Why do we put ourselves through all this? There was a number […]
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IFP Announces 12 Episodic Projects for Female-Driven 2018 Edition of Screen Forward Labs
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, has announced the 12 serialized projects comprising its 2018 Screen Forward Labs. Now in its fourth year, the Screen Forward Labs were created to support the increasingly large number of early-career creators making web, series or app-based work. Notably, says IFP Executive Director Joana Vicente in the press release, 73% of this year’s projects are from female creators, and 50% are led by all-female teams. For the first time this year, fiction and non-fiction projects co-exist in the same program, and genres and themes include post-apocalyptic science fiction, a personal drama involving […]
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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 […]
