Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Amy Adams and Ethan Hawke to Receive Actor Tributes and Oliver Stone to Receive Director Tribute at 2016 IFP Gotham Independent Film Awards
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today that Ethan Hawke and Amy Adams will be presented with Actor and Actress Tributes, and Oliver Stone will receive the Director Tribute at the 2016 IFP Gotham Independent Film Awards set for Monday, November 28th at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. “We are honored to have Amy Adams, Ethan Hawke, and Oliver Stone as our Actress, Actor, and Director Tribute honorees at this year’s Gotham Awards,” said Joana Vicente, Executive Director of IFP and the Made in NY Media Center. “Each with a remarkable body of work that […]
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#DocsSoWhite?: A Panel on Diversity in Documentary Filmmaking
#OscarsSoWhite is hardly a new phenomena in dramatic narrative circles and Hollywood, but determining where the doc community fits into the debate – is. Without empirical data, it would seem the doc community is doing a better job at building diverse and inclusive opportunities than Hollywood counterparts. But if that’s true, by how much? What measures are in place to ensure that the people in front and behind the camera better reflect the world in which we live and the stories we tell? How do public vs. private dollars impact this outcome? If, in the end, it is determined that […]
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TIFF Critic’s Notebook 0: The Salesman, Aquarius, Things to Come, Elle
This first dispatch cheats a bit, as will the next few: there was an embarrassment of riches this year in NYC as far as pre-TIFF/long-lead screenings go, so I started writing up the festival before actually getting there to give myself a head start — today’s dispatch, hitting before the festival technically kicks off, digs into some of the Cannes/Berlin titles that are crammed into marathon competitive P&I slots on day one proper. This is my first year attending TIFF, and as excited as I am to finally be attending, it’s inevitable that doing daily coverage will take its toll. Local color perhaps […]
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Maisie Crow’s Jackson opens Women’s Film Series in the Bronx
The Bronx Documentary Center (BDC) kicked off its 2nd annual Women’s Film Series Friday night with Maisie Crow’s Jackson, a documentary about the only abortion clinic in the state of Mississippi and pro-life opposition attempts to shut it down. Situated in the Melrose neighborhood of the South Bronx, the BDC is a block away from both the only Planned Parenthood in the borough and a Bronx Expectant Mother Care, known as EMC Frontline. (“All about saving the unborn lives threatened by abortion,” is how EMC Frontline is described on its website.) The tension between these two organizations is heated, having […]
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“Shorter is Better”: Sundance Programmer Mike Plante Offers Advice on Short Film Strategy at the Sundance NEXT Festival
A calling card to showcase proficiency and ambition, a vehicle to find resources for a larger project, or simply the most appropriate, or simply cost effective, way to tell a story, short films continue to be crucial for the development and discovery of emerging storytellers. The lack of access to more substantial budgets and the relative democratization of the medium via new technologies are major reasons why filmmakers continue to rely on short form narratives to fine-tune their craft at a lower risk. Today, festivals are receiving more and more short film submissions, making standing out from the pack increasingly […]
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IFP Announces Public Events for IFP Film Week
IFP’s signature event, IFP Film Week, has expanded this year to include numerous screenings, talks, meet ups, exhibitions, and tours open to the public and centered on cutting-edge independent content for the big screen, small screen and Internet. Public programs run September 17-22 in and around IFP’s headquarters, Made in NY Media Center by IFP in DUMBO, Brooklyn. At a press reception last night at the IFP’s Made in New York Media Center, IFP’s Head of Programming, Amy Dotson, noted that some 5,000 meetings for attending filmmakers were being set up for Film Week itself, which remains the only international co-production market in the […]
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Racism in Baltimore via Pest Control: Theo Anthony on Rat Film
An ethnographic and sociological nonfiction horror film, Theo Anthony’s Rat Film is a free-form experience with topical relevance. Long burdened by a documented history of residential segregation, Baltimore, Maryland — Anthony’s current place of residence — has served as a recent political hotbed due to the unjustified death of African-American resident Freddie Gray while in police custody. Less than a month after a court ruling declared (in the midst of the strengthening Black Lives Matter movement) all tried police officers not guilty of any wrongdoing in the Gray homicide, Anthony’s challenging film debuted in Switzerland at the Locarno Film Festival to much […]
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Considering the Possibilities of VR at the IFP Screen Forward Labs
[Editor’s note: this is a guest post from Taylor Cohan, the creator/director/producer/writer of the webseries Newtopia and a partcipant in this year’s IFP Screen Forward Labs.] Before the IFP Screen Forward Labs started, we received a sheet asking us to rank the different workshops taking place at the lab in terms of our interest. We hadn’t ever thought about incorporating VR into our project, but I still ranked the VR workshop as #2. Our first activity at the labs was a group screening of our films for the fellows and IFP staff. Our project screened and then we got feedback from […]
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Locarno Critic’s Notebook #2: The Dreamed Path, The Sun, The Sun Blinded Me and The Human Surge
Angela Schanelec’s continued lack of recognition, at least outside of Germany, is genuinely baffling. Judging from the dismissive-to-hostile reactions that followed the premiere of her eighth feature at the Locarno Film Festival, this regrettable state of affairs is unlikely to change. And yet, out of the competition entries I managed to see, The Dreamed Path is the only one I feel deserves to be called a masterpiece. The Dreamed Path is a demanding film, even more so than Schanelec’s previous work, but the challenge is legitimated by being commensurate with her thematic ambition: to dissect the torturous dialectic between the universal […]
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NEXT Fest 2016 Filmmakers on Accepting Financial Limitations in Exchange for Freedom to Make Uncompromising Cinema
To fuel their tentpole machines, studios have gotten into the habit of poaching successful independent filmmakers to direct (or at least assume the role of the director in a ceremonial way on) their most valuable franchises. Some would argue that the practice exists to cut down on costs and allow executives to easily manipulate a filmmaker with less leverage or experience. Indeed, when this happens, the result is often disastrous. Nevertheless, young storytellers continue to be tempted by studio-based jobs-for-hire that wind up costing them their creative freedom. By comparison, the independent model allows filmmakers an enviable amount of experimentation, […]
