The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP, and Filmmaker‘s publisher) announced today the nominees for its 26th annual Gotham Awards. Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea tops the list with four nominations, including Best Feature and, for Casey Affleck, Best Actor. Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight also placed highly, scoring a Best Feature nomination as well as Best Screenplay, Breakthrough Actor for Lucas Hedges and a special Gotham Jury Award for its acting ensemble (actors Mahershala Ali, Naomie Harris, Alex Hibbert, André Holland, Jharrel Jerome, Janelle Monáe, Jaden Piner, Trevante Rhodes, and Ashton Sanders). This is the second year the Gotham Awards have included […]
Birmingham, tucked right in the middle of Alabama, is easily the biggest city in “the heart of Dixie”; its 1.1 million-person metropolitan area dwarfs the populations of Huntsville and Mobile, Montgomery and Tuscaloosa. The central business district, like that of many American cities that haven’t gentrified after white flight, can feel eerily vacant on the weekends or at night. But during the Sidewalk Film Festival, whose 18th edition was held on the final weekend of August, the center of its modest downtown contains many wonders. Sidewalk knows how to throw a party; in front of the historic Alabama theater, the street is […]
Drama teachers will command their students to roll around studio floors in all black outfits to loosen their bodies. Training for an emerging actor is often technical, involving a long and difficult process of deconstructing what it is to be human. It’s this concentrated discipline that’s the backdrop for Alison Maclean’s newest feature, The Rehearsal, which recently played the Main Slate of the 54th New York Film Festival. “It’s ironic that I wanted to make a film about the acting process because that’s the aspect of filmmaking I’ve always found the most challenging,” said Maclean. “I’ve wanted to go deeper […]
Director Jim Jarmusch sat down with New York Film Festival Director Kent Jones for this year’s On Cinema master class, to discuss some of his favorite films and directors, including Samuel Fuller, Abbas Kiarostami, Aki Kaurismäki, Robert Wise, Nicholas Ray, and others. You can watch the entire one-hour conversation in the video above. Jarmusch had two films at the 54th New York Film Festival: Main Slate selection Paterson starring Adam Driver, and Gimme Danger, a documentary on Iggy Pop and the Stooges, which will open at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on October 28.
DOC NYC has announced the full lineup for its seventh edition, which runs from November 10-17 in Manhattan. The 2016 festival, held at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village and Chelsea’s SVA Theatre and Cinepolis Chelsea, includes 110 feature-length documentaries (44% directed/co-directed by women) and over 250 films and events overall. World premieres at the festival include City of Joy, about a women’s leadership community in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo; the new Netflix series Captive, about stories of hostage-taking; HBO’s Every Brilliant Thing, directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, capturing the poignant and funny one-man show by Jonny Donahoe; and Rikers, a searing indictment of the New York […]
My book editor on Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films — the venerable, celebrated Patrick McGilligan — once told me in an e-mail, “There is nothing like one’s first book. You forever feel a special connection to that first subject matter. I feel the same fondness about James Cagney, my first book’s subject, as you probably do for Sidney J. Furie, your first.” For certain, I find that to be true. But I feel an even stronger bond to Furie, by sheer virtue of the fact that I was the very first to write a book — or, for that matter, any kind of […]
After winning the Silver Bear for Best Director earlier this year at her world premiere in Berlin’s 66th International Film Festival, Mia Hansen-Løve brings her latest picture, Things to Come, to the New York Film Festival’s main competition slate on October 14th. Starring Isabelle Huppert in an arresting performance as Nathalie, a Parisian philosophy professor, Hansen-Løve’s film follows Nathalie as she picks up the pieces of her life even as it is disassembling. While her mother is sick, her job is compromised, and her husband is leaving her, Nathalie forges ahead, carving a new, albeit unfamiliar course for her future. In […]
“It was important for me to spend time in Coney Island. It’s a beautiful place, very Fellini,” said Alice Rohrwacher in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center Amphitheater at Lincoln Center. The Italian filmmaker spent the last month in New York because she was selected as the 2016 Filmmaker in Residence, a program co-founded by Film Society of Lincoln Center and Jaeger-LeCoultre to support filmmakers in early development. Previous filmmakers selected for the program include American Honey’s Andrea Arnold and Chevalier’s Athina Rachel Tsangari. Besides participating in a New York Film Festival talk about her career and working on the screenplay […]
There are fewer films to deal with in this last of a three-feature curtain raiser. Writing commentary on the selections in the other two — six and five films, respectively — is enervating after two-and-a-half front-loaded weeks of screenings, plus repeats. The potential for gratuitous collateral damage spikes and hovers precariously, which translates into: In a very few cases, one risks being harsher than intended. Some of the harshees might be worth reviewing when they open commercially, when everyone is more focused. In The New York Times‘ Critic’s Notebook (November 10, 2016), Manohla Dargis considers both the long- and short-term risks of […]
Launched in 2011, the Sundance Institute’s Artist Services program was initially designed to help Sundance alumni filmmakers get their work in front of audiences in a shifting industry environment in which DIY distribution strategies were increasingly an option. While digital distribution opportunities continue to be offered to Institute alumni, Artist Services has expanded its educational initiatives and online resources to include all indie filmmakers, not just ones who have screened at Sundance. Through online resources, live workshops, and a network of allied organizations, the program provides support and insights on creative funding, marketing, and distribution. Artist Services also holds daylong events around the […]