Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Cannes Dispatch #2: Faces Places, Claire’s Camera, The Square
At some point the past year, Rive Gauche icon Agnès Varda and French photographer JR went on a road trip through rural France documenting whatever locals they encountered and, lucky for us, decided to make a movie about it. The main activity of their excursion involved producing pieces for JR’s ongoing Inside Out project, wherein he takes portraits of the subjects he happens upon (or lets them enter into his van-cum-photobooth to capture their own images), prints them out at a scale somewhere between life-size and mammoth, and then pastes the images onto a building or transportation vessel that is meaningful […]
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The Curse (?) of Black Rock: Director Sam Kuhn’s Cannes Diary
Director, screenwriter and boatbuilder (!) Sam Kuhn is in Cannes premiering his short film, Möbius — described as “a moth-eaten tale of magic and mutation half remembered by a teen poet who’s beloved lies lifeless in a stream” — in Critic’s Week. Filmmaker asked Kuhn, who hails from the Pacific Northwest, to keep a diary of his experiences, which rapidly went from jet-lagged to deeply strange. Here are his first two entries; click here for them all. Day 1 First day of the festival in truth and after months of confusing-as-hell email chains with the French, surprise re-edit of the […]
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Cannes Dispatch #1: Ismael’s Ghosts, Loveless, Wonderstruck
It’s fitting that the Cannes film festival, presently celebrating its 70th incarnation, would choose to open this edition of shameless and unbridled self-reflexivity with a film that does the same. Arnaud Desplechin’s latest, Ismael’s Ghosts, is pure, saturated Desplechin (at least when he isn’t tipping his cap to Hitchcock’s Marnie and Vertigo), perhaps to a fault. Detailing a years-spanning love triangle set to its maker’s characteristic whip-pan rhythm, this is a vision so consciously expressive and overloaded with formal decoration (time jumps, iris-ins, rear-projection montage, direct address to camera and so on) that it finds itself explicitly likening its manically layered […]
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Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2017: New Images for the 21st Century
As my seventh annual camera round-up for Filmmaker goes to press and online, NAB 2017 has just wrapped, and one major take-away is clear: the march towards full-on realism — visual sensations so real that images appear palpable — is in its infancy. [Author’s note: this deep dive into camera tech was written for the Spring 2017 issue of Filmmaker. Despite arriving online at a later date, it remains timely and informative. Stay tuned for my Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2018 in Filmmaker, coming soon!] Call it hyper, call it immersive, call it virtual, the fact is that display […]
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IFP Announces 10 Films Chosen for its 2017 Narrative Lab
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker’s publisher, announced today the projects selected for the 2017 edition of its Narrative Labs. A program designed for first-time filmmakers currently in post-production on narrative films, it provides resources and mentorship on all the activities that go into finishing a film and taking it out into the world, from work with music and sound, to locking picture, to festival and distribution strategies. The program begins today and runs through May 12 at the Made in NY Media Center by IFP located in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Commented IFP Executive Director Joana Vicente in a press release, […]
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Tribeca 2017 Critic’s Notebook: This Land Is Your Land
#Tribeca2017 came to a close last night, after a final day of screenings dominated by the many winners from both Thursday evening’s award ceremony, held at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, and Saturday evening’s audience award announcement. Among the dozens of awards the festival gives out, Rachel Israel’s New York-set romantic comedy Keep the Change, which centers on an autistic couple, took home the Founder’s Award for Best Narrative Feature, while Elina Psykou’s Son of Sofia took home the Best International Narrative Feature prize. Elvira Lind’s Bobbi Jene, already a favorite in these parts, swept the documentary prizes for Feature, […]
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Tribeca 2017: A Review of Tribeca Immersive
Alongside the Tribeca Film Festival’s film screenings and live events, the Tribeca Immersive exhibit at 50 Varick Street has been regularly packed full of attendees, with the enthusiasm of everyone from industry veterans to neophytes who have never seen a VR project before filling the space with energy. The event’s organizers, led by Ingrid Kopp, have done a stellar job in curating an excellent and diverse group of virtual reality and interactive projects from around the world, making Tribeca a leading global venue for new VR on par with Sundance or any other festival that includes virtual reality. I was gratified to see […]
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Tribeca 2017: Erik Nelson on A Gray State
Originating as a concept trailer tapping into an increasingly burgeoning pocket of anti-police-state paranoia, David Crowley’s A Gray State was a film that warned of big government (FEMA = bad) taking over its innocent citizens to enslave and execute them. Like The Purge but with more guillotines and public massacres, Crowley’s footage depicted a low-budget world of state-led slaughter in the streets taking place to control those it sought to protect. A rebellion would be imminent, the story implies, and its tagline, “by consent or conquest,” sounds as much like generic action movie marketing as it does a patriotic call-to-arms. To doubters, the film would […]
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Tribeca 2017: Drew Xanthopoulos on The Sensitives
There’s a certain feeling of disappointment when you knowingly choose to keep your cell phone, doubling as your alarm clock, near your face when settling in for an evening’s sleep. Having been warned of radiofrequency waves’ ability to cause cancer, keeping an electronic device that close to your brain for hours on end is not, we’re told, a wise decision to make. There are so many electric and synthetic materials in today’s everyday devices that to avoid them all would be to effectively remove yourself from modern society. You accept the potentially harmful results in order to live and work […]
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“We Need to Stop Patting Ourselves on the Back”: Speakeasy Spotlight at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival’s 20th Anniversary Edition
There was much reason for celebration at the 2017 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (April 6-9) down in Durham, North Carolina. The state had just (kinda sorta) repealed the ridiculous bathroom bill — which had had me scrambling to cover all the queer films I could find at the 2016 fest — and this year’s 20th anniversary inspired artistic director Sadie Tillery to create “DoubleTake,” a wide-ranging retro program featuring 19 films, one from each year of the festival’s history. This diverse selection included everything from Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen’s 2001 Benjamin Smoke, to Linda Goode Bryant and Laura […]
