Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Sexploitation Star Kitten Natividad on Russ Meyer, Roger Ebert, Porn and the Hot Docs-premiering League of Exotique Dancers
Rama Rau’s League of Exotique Dancers is an absolutely delightful and lovingly crafted doc structured around a group of legendary striptease artists as they prepare to return to the stage for the Burlesque Hall of Fame Weekend in Las Vegas — a trip which becomes merely an excuse for the filmmaker to delve deeply into the extraordinary lives of some truly groundbreaking women. Among the timelessly sexy inductees is none other than Kitten Natividad, best known as cult director Russ Meyer’s buxom muse. Prior to the film’s Hot Docs premiere, Filmmaker was fortunate enough to catch up with the Beneath […]
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Watch: Cannes Mounts Terrorism Training on the Palais’s Red Carpet
Adding an anxious frisson to the upcoming Cannes Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter reports on the city of Cannes’ terror training exercises in advance of this year’s event. From the Hollywood Reporter: With the world’s biggest film festival only a few weeks away, Cannes made a very public show of force. Last Thursday, the city on the Cote d’Azur staged a dramatic, some would say chilling, test run of what might happen if terrorists target the stars, film industry execs and thousands of fans that descend on the Croisette every year. A video of the exercise, which featured masked gunmen […]
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Tribeca 2016: Five Questions for Keep Quiet Directors Joseph Martin and Sam Blair
A role reversal so outrageous it could only be a work of nonfiction, the story of Csanad Szegedi, an infamous member of Hungary’s conservative Jobbik party, is as preposterously true as they come. A former Holocaust denier and anti-Semite, Szegedi now lives as a practicing Orthodox Jew determined to honor his familial past (his grandparents were Jewish). Fascinated by this turnaround, filmmakers Joseph Martin and Sam Blair created Keep Quiet, an in-depth study of the new life of Szegedi and co-lead Rabbi Boruch Oberlande, as a portrait of internal religious tension and the endless trying struggle to right one’s wrongs. As Keep […]
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Tribeca 2016: Exploring the Virtual Arcade
Tribeca is still a young festival — its fifteenth edition just wrapped last week — and though originally traditional films constituted its entire focus, soon transmedia, interactive work, and then virtual reality gained enough prominence that by 2016 they were as integral a part of the proceedings as the film screenings. This year more VR was on view than ever before at Storyscapes, the Interactive Playground, and the Virtual Arcade that together ran the length of the entire festival. By and large, the breadth and quality of the projects testify to the burgeoning craft of VR artists as the medium continues to […]
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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 […]
