Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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LGBTQ in NC: Covering the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival and the RiverRun International Film Festival During the HB2 Boycott
Before North Carolina passed its HB2 legislation, officially known as “An act to provide for single-sex multiple occupancy bathroom and changing facilities in schools and public agencies and to create statewide consistency in regulation of employment and public accommodations” (or, for me, the simpler and more accurate “WTF?”), I’d been looking forward to covering two film festivals back-to-back on my very first visit to the southern state. Yet as the nationwide call for boycott gathered speed, and the opening night of Durham’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival approached, I found myself in a queasy quandary. So I did what any […]
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Tribeca Critic’s Notebook #2: Obit and Contemporary Color
The day I sat down to write my second dispatch from Tribeca, Prince died. I took an hour to let the gut-punch settle. Most of us have that luxury, to just sit and sulk. Maybe we revisit an album or post a little thing on Facebook. We grieve that abstract grief over a person we never met. If you’re like me, you shut down and marinate in the art with a renewed appreciation. The subjects of Obit have a much harder job. They only get a minute to mourn. After that, they set about a seemingly impossible task: to encapsulate a […]
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Tribeca 2016: Five Questions for Obit Director Vanessa Gould
While there have been several documentaries exploring the inner-workings of the Gray Lady, the life and challenges of a New York Times obituary writer is a profession that has yet to receive its due. Working on strict deadlines that arrive at a moment’s notice (such is life and, in effect, death), these obit writers have to be on call to craft a minimal but effective summation of character while working with limited time and limitless resources. A fascinating subject that immediately evokes a plethora of questions (what’s the criteria for determining who gets a Times obituary? How quick is a […]
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Tribeca 2016: Patrick Osborne on Winning an Oscar and his Animated VR Piece Pearl
Patrick Osborne came to national attention with his animated short Feast, a delightful film about a food-loving dog that screened with Disney’s Big Hero 6 and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short for 2014. It dealt with family, loyalty, and growth and change over time, particularly the strain and eventual reward as new loved ones enter the circle of a previously cohesive relationship: it’s initially difficult for Winston, the dog, to accept his owner’s new girlfriend, but ultimately it is he who makes the decision to save the relationship and he enters a much wider and more loving world as a […]
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Tribeca 2016: Five Questions for National Bird Director Sonia Kennebeck
“Detached, inhuman and unreal” — that’s how Sonia Kennebeck describes the act of killing via Predator drones. An emblem of American foreign policy in the Obama era, so-called unmanned aerial vehicles allow nations to monitor and assassinate their enemies from thousands of miles away. Kennebeck interviews the operators and survivors of drone warfare in National Bird, her whistle-blowing documentary executive produced by Errol Morris and Wim Wenders. Below, Kennebeck discusses the ethical dilemmas of drone warfare, drones as a cinematic tool and how she found her remarkable subjects. The film screens this week at the Tribeca Film Festival and has been picked up by FilmRise for distribution. Filmmaker: […]
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Tribeca 2016: Five Questions for High-Rise DP Laurie Rose
Cinematographer Laurie Rose began his career as a feature film DP with Down Terrace, the debut film from British director Ben Wheatley. Rose has gone on to shoot all five of Wheatley’s features, including his latest, High-Rise. The first major adaptation of a J.G. Ballard novel since David Cronenberg’s Crash, High-Rise depicts a society in all-out decay. The film is set largely in a single apartment building, where tenants’ petty squabbles and decadent parties devolve into a hellish dystopian vision of mankind at its most feral. Below, Rose discusses his love of practical effects, his career with Wheatley, and how Andrew Bujalski’s […]
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Going Reverse Oedipal Outside the Margins: Eight Tribeca 2016 Short Films
The wide-ranging 15th edition of the Tribeca Film Festival feels more screen-agnostic than ever, with films, television, VR, and interactive projects expanding across two weeks of downtown-centric programming. While resisting the urge to identify an all-encompassing theme that sloppily groups all these works into a State of the Union address, the shorts I viewed provided an appropriately hefty sampling of independent cinema comfortably outside the margins. Famous faces, small budgets, issue-driven calls-to-action, oddball foreign comedies, intriguing student work, and throwbacks to pop cinema were all accounted for. Given the scope and depth of the films being offered then, take the following as […]
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Directors Leo Chiang and Johnny Symons Talk Screening LGBT Doc Out Run in Boycott State North Carolina
Ironically launching at the stellar Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina right as the anti-LGBTQ HB2 legislation hit the fan, S. Leo Chiang and Johnny Symons’s Out Run follows the Ladlad Party in the Philippines — the only LGBT political party in the world — in the run-up to what could be a history-making election. An artistic political doc, Out Run is both riveting and familiar, as the leaders (including Bemz Benedito, a trans woman who serves as the face of the party) deftly employ campaign strategies that include everything from transforming beauty parlors into headquarters to […]
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IFP Announces Slate for Second Annual Screen Forward Labs
Commencing today at the IFP’s DUMBO-based Made in NY Media Center is the IFP Screen Forward Labs, an intensive program dedicated to the work of creators making story-driven, serialized projects for all formats, including television, web, VR or apps. This year’s selections include an animated and VR piece about the mind of Oliver Sacks; a 35mm-shot horror-thriller set in the world of infomercials; an iPhone-shot horror serial; and a suburban-set comedy about motherhood from indie director Susan Skoog (Whatever). According to IFP, 80% of the creators/writers/directors are women and/or diverse voices. 30% feature predominantly African-American and Latino casts. “We are […]
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“What About the First Time I Got Drunk?” Jenny Gage and Tom Betterton on All This Panic at Tribeca
In their impressively fleet debut All This Panic, the personal/professional partnership of Jenny Gage (director) and Tom Betterton (DP) train their gaze on a group of teenage girls growing up in Brooklyn. Tracking Lina, Ginger, Dusty and Delia as they transition from 16 to 19 (with older and younger outliers), the film unfolds in a 79-minute blast, articulately speeding through years of teen not-quite-turmoil. Impressively locked in, edited for speed and emotional impact, and exponentially more complex than most depictions of contemporary teen girls in either fiction or non-fiction filmmaking, All This Panic is an empathetic rush translating their experiences into something […]
