Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Revisiting History at the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival
Sante Fe has archeological sites that date back 13,000 years. As we drove to my hotel from the Albuquerque airport, almost an hour-long trek at midnight, my driver told me about the history of the city, rooted in Native American culture, that I had no idea dated that far back. “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain supposedly said. After spending a weekend at the Sante Fe Independent Film Festival, the thought felt applicable — the lineup of films demonstrated the cynical nature of oppression, struggle and minority battles that indeed continue in familiar patterns. Set on […]
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Premiering Docs within the New World Order: Thom Powers on DOC NYC 2017
The increasingly robust DOC NYC opens today through November 16, with over 100 documentary features unspooling in three locations in downtown New York and Chelsea. Among the 23 world and 23 U.S. premieres are new films from Barbara Kopple, Sam Pollard and Julia Bacha, whose Naila and the Uprising, about the woman of First Intifada, won the festival’s first pitch competition in 2016. Films unspool across 16 sections, including the new New World Order, focused on pictures with global news importance, and Metropolis, the competitive section featuring films from and about New York City. The DOC NYC Pro section is […]
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Y’allywood Babylon: The 20th SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable
This year’s 20th anniversary edition of the SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) Savannah Film Festival, which lays claim to being the largest university-run film fest in the world, continued its two-decades-long tradition of mixing Hollywood wattage with downhome southern hospitality. Once again the fest honored an eclectic mix of celebrity guests of all ages (elder statesmen and women included Richard Gere, Sir Patrick Stewart, Aaron Sorkin, Salma Hayek Pinault, Holly Hunter, and Kyra Sedgwick, while the “youngsters” featured the likes of John Boyega, Zoey Deutch, Robert Pattinson, Andrea Riseborough, and Willow Shields). The festival also played host to […]
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Watch Now for 48 Hours: Short Films from Eastern Oregon Film Festival
For the third year Filmmaker is happy to exclusively host online selections from the currently underway Eastern Oregon Film Festival. These films will stream exclusively here on the site until Sunday morning at 9:00 AM. This year, we’re hosting a work of philosophical science fiction by Blake Salzman, a new drama from festival veteran Frank Mosley, and an inspiring London-set work from Tal Amiran. You can watch all the films embedded below, and check out the rest of the lineup at Eastern Oregon Film Festival. Midwife (dir. Blake Salzman, 2017) Synopsis: In a bleak future where women are dying rapidly, […]
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With Four Nominations, Get Out Tops IFP Gotham Awards Announcement
Jordan Peele’s zeitgeist-y horror film Get Out topped the IFP Gotham Awards nominations this morning, scoring nods for Best Picture, Breakthrough Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actor. Other multiple nominees include Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time, Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya, : kogonada’s Columbus, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, and Dee Rees’s Mudbound, which scored a nomination for actress Mary J. Blige as well as a special ensemble acting jury award. A total of 34 films are cited in today’s release. Said IFP Executive Director Joana Vicente in a press release, “This year offered […]
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Critic’s Notebook NYFF: Call Me By Your Name, The Square, Western, Wonderstruck, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
For film writers who, like myself, remain chained to New York, NYFF marks the time of year when the much-hyped (or -hated) titles from the festival circuit finally pay us a visit. NYFF represents the last stop for many of the reliable sampler of films from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, and elsewhere before they enter theaters and launch their awards season runs. At last, we get to see the films the more important writers have already grown tired of debating on Twitter. From Sundance this year comes Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, a coming-of-age queer romance set in 1980s Italy. A […]
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Color, Crews and Shooting Digitally: Ed Lachman and Vittorio Storaro at NYFF 2017
One of the highlights of the 55th New York Film Festival was the Master Class with Vittorio Storaro and Ed Lachman. Hosted by Kent Jones, the 90-minute presentation covered a wide range of subjects and also included key clips from the work of the two great cinematographers. Storaro and Lachman have been friends for over 40 years. Lachman claims that he was Storaro’s first American fan, after seeing both The Spider’s Stratagem and The Conformist at the 1970 NYFF. He subsequently worked with Storaro on Luna, when the Italian DP began shooting American movies but had not yet secured a […]
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NYFF 2017: Mindhunter (Episodes 1-2), Good Streamable Chronological Narrative Content
The first two episodes of Netflix’s Mindhunter, directed by David Fincher, are slightly stylistically diluted but still distinctively his. Fincher also directed the last two episodes of the ten-episode first season, which has already been renewed for a second prior to dropping this Friday — whether I make it to his bookending episodes I have no idea, but fans should at least take a look at this starting point. “Peak TV,” or at least the limited-run series, has increasingly accommodated one director who wants to do it all: this year has seen airings of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope, Jean-Marc Vallée’s Big Little […]
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NYFF 2017: Let the Sunshine In
At Cannes, Claire Denis’s Let the Sunshine In (subtitled Bright Sunshine In on the DCP) premiered to many nonplussed reactions. By some considerable measure her talkiest film, Sunshine tracks a painter, Isabelle (Juliette Binoche), as she slams straight from one romantic dalliance into another. That is, effectively, the entire plot: there are a few scenes that do not involve men, but in general the film marches inexorably and restlessly through a series of failed partnerships. The dance and sex scenes are very familiar — Denis still gets defamiliarizingly close to skins and heads — but the rest is not, necessarily. Denis has […]
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John Cameron Mitchell to Host 2017 IFP Gotham Awards
Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today that John Cameron Mitchell will host the 2017 IFP Gotham Awards. The first awards show of the season, the IFP Gotham Awards is one of the leading honors for independent film and media, providing critical early recognition to groundbreaking independent films and their writers, directors, producers, and actors with ten competitive awards categories. The IFP Gotham Awards also honors selected film industry icons as tributes each year. The ceremony will be held on Monday, November 27, 2017, at Cipriani Wall Street, New York City. “We eagerly anticipate a fun, exciting and […]
