Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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SFFILM Announces Its Launch Program’s 2018 All-Doc Slate
SFFILM announced today the five titles that will comprise its 2018 Launch Program, an initiative intending to highlight for the industry a select group of world-premiering films drawn from different sections of the San Francisco International Film Festival. Films in last year’s Launch Program went on to be bought by distributors includingMagnolia Pictures and Sundance Selects, and SFFILM hopes to build on that momentum this second year. Interestingly, this year’s line-up consists entirely of docs as opposed to the 2017 edition, which featured two of five fiction titles. “We are delighted to shine the spotlight on our second year of […]
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“Storytelling is in Our DNA”: Darren Aronofsky’s Ten Rules for Independent Filmmakers at SXSW
“Storytelling makes us human, it’s in our DNA,” said writer-director Darren Aronofsky in a keynote panel at SXSW. Giving Filmmaker a shout-out along the way, Aronofsky recalled his early days at Harvard and the American Film Institute and the hours spent watching the first works of Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Robert Rodriguez and Richard Linklater on VHS, wondering how he’d break into directing. His research led him to the making of his feature debut Pi, an experimental psychological thriller that was “weird,” was shot on high-contrast black-and-white reversal film, and opted for a non-linear form of storytelling. The film won […]
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Sustainability and History: The 2018 International Film Festival Rotterdam
The 47th edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam presented 531 films of various lengths, 140 of which were world premieres, and welcomed more than 2,400 industry professionals. To tick off each special event, master class, conference, installation, curated program, party, award winner and grand announcement would consume this entire report. (The IFFR wrap-up press release clocks in at 1,400 words.) Needless to say, IFFR benefits from and suffers for its size, in mostly predictable ways. There are few places other than Rotterdam in January where one might watch Phantom Thread scored live by an orchestra, spend a night in […]
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At Bydgoszcz, Bigger Was Better — A Glimpse at Our 8K Future
DPs, not directors, are the rock stars at Camerimage, the film festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland, devoted to the foundational art of the motion picture camera. The world’s best cinematographers, if not working, flock there each autumn.The 25th edition, which wrapped several months ago in November 2017, proved no exception. The festival hub is a modernist opera house, perched above The Brda, the narrow river that bisects picturesque Bydgoszcz (once known as “Little Berlin”). Centrally located, Opera Nova hosts two theaters, including the festival’s main venue. A long, ground-floor lobby and second-floor hallway, curved thanks to the building’s cylindrical shape, house […]
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25 Films and Events We’re Looking Forward to at the 2018 SXSW Film Festival
SXSW, with its tens of thousands of tech enthusiasts and thousands of filmmakers and film fans, kicks off tomorrow with a typically sprawling program that mixes independent discoveries with coolhunting studio films, cutting-edge genre work with artistically-minded episodic series. As always, there is a lot we are excited about seeing, beginning with these 25 films you might put a little digital star next to in your festival app. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable. The great Garry Winogrand — depending on the day, my favorite photographer — is the subject of Sasha Waters Freyer’s documentary, which happens to be the […]
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Tribeca Film Festival Announces 2018 Feature Film Lineup
The Tribeca Film Festival has just unveiled the feature film lineup for its 2018 edition. The closing night film is Liz Garbus’s The Fourth Estate, about the New York Times’s coverage of President Trump’s first year in office, the centerpiece is Drake Doremus’s sci-fi romance Zoe, and among the others are a slew of films we’ve been tracking here at Filmmaker. Work by former 25 New Faces like Eva Vives, John Maringouin, Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck, new movies by Miguel Arteta and Mads Brugger, the first feature by interactive superstar Meredith Danluck, Nancy Schwartzman’s campus rape doc Roll Red […]
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San Francisco International Film Festival Announces its 2018 Golden Gate Award Feature Competitions
The San Francisco International Film Festival’s Golden Gate Awards Feature Competitions were announced today, and the 20 films span many well-received pictures we’ve had our eye on here at Filmmaker over the last year. These include 25 New Face RaMell Ross’s Hale County, This Morning, This Evening, Mila Turajlić’s The Other Side of Everything, Jordana Spiro’s Night Comes On, and Sandi Tan’s Shirkers. There are two world premieres: a US/Ghana production by Bay Area directors Zachary Fink and Alyssa Fedele, The Rescue List, about a safe house for kids escaping the country’s child labor system; and Tre Maison Dasan, US […]
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The Challenge of Making Fiction Podcasts Discussed as IFP Expands into Audio Storytelling
“Podcasting has just been invented as a medium, and no one knows what a fiction podcast is,” said John Dryden, Director of Scripted Content at Panoply Media, at last week’s IFP Audio Thought Leader Summit at the Made in New York Media Center. “It’s just not a radio drama. Radio drama has been dead in the U.S. for 50 years, so we are starting from scratch.” Dryden was speaking along with Leital Molad, First Look Media’s Executive Producer, Podcasts, on a panel titled “New Fiction: Developing Scripted Narrative Podcasts,” moderated by the Media Center’s Programming Producer Bill Curran. Between the […]
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BVOD (Blockchain Video on Demand), “Crewfunding” and VR Enthusiasm at the EFM’s Horizons Section
Artificial intelligence (AI), the blockchain and mixed reality were at the center of the recently completed Berlin Film Festival’s newly expanded Horizons section. Taking place within the European Film Market (EFM), the 2018 program’s focus on buzzy technological innovations bucked the predictions of some skeptics by drawing sold-out crowds and with several tech companies choosing the festival to launch their platforms. The continued expansion of virtual reality (VR) was also in discussion, with a wide range of projects, including the virtual behind-the-scenes of Wes Anderson’s opener Isle of Dogs, available for viewing in the festival’s inaugural VR cinema. EFM Director […]
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Berlinale 2018: Fascism, Reconciliation and Surprises
“Through images of natural turmoil the viewer gets the idea that societal events are just as unavoidable as any flood disaster. Constantly receiving outbreaks of natural violence served up as news, the spectator automatically transfers natural laws of causality to human conditions and inevitably ends up mistaking the crisis of the capitalist system for a geological tremor.” — Siegfried Kracauer, “The Weekly Newsreel” in Die neue Rundschau 42, no. 2, October 1931 This year’s Berlinale was marked by two retroactively related occasions. The first one, celebrated by a retrospective, was the centenary of the Weimar Republic, that liminal space that historically divides […]
