Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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“Find Your Tribe”: Moonlight Director Barry Jenkins and Producer Adele Romanski Give Advice at IFP Week
Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski know what IFP Week is like. They know what it’s like to pitch a passion project. They even know what it’s like when time — in Jenkin’s case, several years — elapses between features. When the writer/director and producer, respectively, of Moonlight swung by this year’s Filmmaker Talks day at IFP Week, it was a kind of victory lap. After all, their last film together took home three Oscars, including Best Picture, on top of a towering pile of other accolades. But they used their talk with moderator Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker‘s Editor-in-Chief, to remember when life was […]
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“How Are You Going to Make a Video that’s 9,000 Pixels Long?”: The Mixed Media Art of Anne Spalter
Anne Spalter’s work not only reflects the world around her but also the world of the future she hopes to see. Wonder Why — the digital mixed media project currently taking over the Made in NY Media Center by IFP in Brooklyn, NY — is her most narrative work to date, mashing up everything from Wonder Woman’s Invisible Plane and Google Earth to campy star graphics and well-lit tunnels that she equates with hope. The result of putting these kaleidoscopic and powerful images into her unique visual blender creates an effect for the viewer akin to finding hidden letters of […]
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Enabling What is to Come: IFP Previews its 2017 IFP Week
“Film” — what’s in a word? It’s still the first half of Filmmaker, even as our new logo design nods to the ways in which this term’s meaning is continually mutating and no longer fixed in celluloid. But, as Joana Vicente, Executive Director of IFP (Filmmaker’s publisher) and the Made in NY Media Center notes, it’s been dropped this year from the name of IFP’s signature event, which begins today through September 21 in Brooklyn. Over the last several years “Independent Film Week” has shortened to “IFP Film Week” to, now, simply, “IFP Week.” That’s because, as Vicente says, “the […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 7: The Nothing Factory, Wavelengths Shorts
The very first thing I saw after arriving at TIFF was Pedro Pinho’s The Nothing Factory: a three-hour film is tough to slot into any festival schedule for practical reasons even before factoring in day-wearing-on exhaustion, and seeing it as a stand-alone first night entry point to the fest seemed like the right move. After some establishing shots of a squat silo being torn down and a factory in action, Pinho cuts to a couple having a sex scene. A phone call letting Ze (José Smith Vargas), the male half, know there’s trouble at the workplace intrudes: capitalism as coitus interruptus. […]
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“The Line Between Industry and Filmmakers is So Blurry Here”: Previewing the 2017 Camden International Film Festival and Points North Forum
An opening night world premiere, more North American film premieres, an expanded Storyforms VR section, and the return of its popular Points North Forum are all notable elements of the 2017 Camden Film Festival, which runs today through September 17 across Camden, Rockport and Rockland, Maine. Hot on the heels of Toronto, CIFF is a growing festival that is luring more and more filmmakers as well as funders to take part in discussions about non-fiction in an enviably bucolic environment. “The line between industry and filmmakers is so blurry here,” says Ben Fowlie, Executive Director of the Points North Institute, […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 6: Brawl in Cell Block 99, Prototype
S. Craig Zahler’s Brawl in Cell Block 99 replicates the structural mutations of his first film, Bone Tomahawk, at first a realistic Western that expands into a gorefest with inflections of Mad Max. Likewise, Brawl begins as a fairly low-key thriller (minus the part in which Vince Vaughn dismantles nearly half a car with his bare hands) that continuously ratchets up the bloodiness in uncreasingly unreal settings. Zahler’s definitely a gore enthusiast, which isn’t really my thing: it doesn’t particularly bother me, but I’d just as soon not deal with it. But, like Jeremy Saulnier, gore enables what I’ve liked about his work: Tomahawk relished […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 5: The Disaster Artist, Plonger
James Franco has been annoying a lot of people, myself included, for a variety of reasons, not least his relentless direction of a shocking number of movies, most quite poorly received: if I’m counting the credits on his IMDB page right, The Disaster Artist is his 16th feature since 2005 — not precisely Fred Olen Ray levels of shoddy productivity, but not that far off either. For easily his most mainstream effort (and, full disclosure, the only one I’ve seen), Franco recreates the making of Tommy Wiseau’s infamous cult movie The Room. I’m not much of a so-bad-it’s-good consumer, but I have […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 4: 3/4, Faces Places
Ilian Metev’s deliberately small-scale, extremely precise 3/4 puts a trio of non-actors through fictional paces. The family unit: teen classical pianist Mila (Mila Mihova), preparing for an audition that, if all goes well, will let her continue her studies in Germany; oft-annoying younger brother Niki (Nikolay Mashalov); physicist dad Todor (Todor Veltchev). (Mom is unseen: I’m the umpteenth to note that the title is both a time signature and way of noting that three out of four family members are present.) Mila’s stress over this impending potential pivot point in her life is transferred onto father and son, who react in different ways. Niki […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 3: Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri and The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Martin McDonagh and his brother John Michael started making movies about the same time; for The Guard, the most uncomplicatedly funny and successful of the films they’ve both made, I’m inclined to give the latter the edge. They’re very much brothers with a shared sensibility grown more matched over years spent living together as adults, while they wrote their separate work and watched the same movies: a gift for idiomatically spry humor, often in the insult-directed vein, balancing out an attendant tendency to go heavy on Catholic guilt and a fairly simplistic form of moral “complication.” Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 2: The Death of Stalin, Molly’s Game
In its own way, it’s an enlightening experience to attend, at least once, a Big TIFF Premiere, which I didn’t do during my first time attending last year. The Death of Stalin premiered in the Winter Garden, a venue on the seventh floor of a building whose ground level houses the Elgin theater; per Wikipedia — in a phrase which Googling only traces to there, so perhaps there’s a different way to refer to this — they are the world’s only surviving “stacked Edwardian theaters.” The Elgin seats 1,561, the Winter 992, so you can gauge the perceived star value and […]
