Celine Song’s aching tale of ambiguous connection, Past Lives, won Best Feature at last night’s Gotham Awards, held at Cipriani Wall Street. The annual awards, mounted by Filmmaker‘s publisher, The Gotham, bestowed Best Documentary to the hybrid Tunisian picture Four Daughters, directed by Kaouther Ben Hania. Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall won two awards (Best Screenplay and Best International Feature), while A.V. Rockwell won Breakthrough Director for her Sundance Grand Prize winner, A Thousand and One. The complete list of nominees and winners (in bold) is below. Best Feature “Passages” “Past Lives” “Reality” “Showing Up” “A Thousand and One” […]
Introducing Time of the Heathen on day two of the inaugural FILM FEST KNOX, artistic director Darren Hughes teased that “75 minutes from now, you will be among the hundreds—or perhaps thousands—who have seen this movie.” Access to something otherwise difficult to view is at least part of the premise for any film festival; in the case of 1961’s Heathen, Hughes noted that this might be not just the North American premiere of the restoration (following Il Cinema Ritrovato) but possibly of the film itself. Despite its very regional American origins (the performance of Milton Babbitt protege Lejaren A. Hiller […]
Cinema Eye Honors announced its nominations today for the 17th annual awards ceremony, to be held on January 12, 2024 at the New York Academy of Medicine. As the press release notes, “Kokomo City, the debut feature from D. Smith led all nominees with six nominations. Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol, Sam Green’s 32 Sounds and Maite Alberdi’s The Eternal Memory each received five nominations. All four films are nominated for Outstanding Nonfiction Feature, where they are joined by Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters, Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson’s Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project and Davis Guggenheim’s […]
In the opening days of this year’s edition of IDFA, the documentary festival issued two statements on the bombing of Gaza. Following protests at the opening night ceremony where protesters carried banners including the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” the festival issued a first statement that condemned “the hurtful slogan written on a banner by the protestors, for voicing their concerns, expressing the hurt they felt,” before going on to state that “we believe that this slogan should not be used in any way and by anybody anymore.” The Palestine Film Institute condemned that […]
In his first feature, The Target Shoots First, Chris Wilcha documented his tenure at Columbia House, the mail-order music service whose ads famously promised “12 CDs for a penny.” Then a recent NYU philosophy graduate, Wilcha landed the job partly due to his familiarity with “alternative culture,” a burgeoning new market at the time (Nirvana’s In Utero was soon to be released), and brought a sardonic Gen X sensibility to chronicling his time in the company’s marketing department. Part workplace comedy and part personal essay, Target chronicled Wilcha’s anxiety about selling out his personal integrity and punk rock principles by […]
The ninth annual edition of Double Exposure, a festival celebrating investigative journalism, once again brought together an intensely engaged group of journalists, documentarians, lawyers and funders. Washington, D.C., where antennas prick right up when you start talking about how to influence public opinion, is the precise intersection for these different professional groups to find each other. So, it’s not surprising that this is an event where the (three-day) symposium is at least as important as the festival. The topics were tough. What does collaboration look like for newspapers used to honing their competitive edge and maintaining strict distance from “sources”? […]
As the US’s largest university-run fest, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival (October 21-28) smartly caters to an overwhelmingly collegiate audience, which means bringing in loads of celebrities for red carpet events (Kevin Bacon! Ava DuVernay! Eva Longoria!) balanced with veteran Hollywood craftspeople for numerous nuts and bolts panels (this year’s Artisans series included “The Creators of Worlds: The Artisans of Oppenheimer”). Not to mention there’s a puppy dog enthusiasm with which these young industry aspirants gobble up the eight-day “celebration of cinematic excellence.” It’s both contagious and, for someone like me long past their dorm room years, dauntingly exhausting. (FOMO […]
The particular focus of this year’s Viennale might have been Chile—the main retrospective, dedicated to Raúl Ruiz, was paired with a program exploring the country’s cinema in the half century since the 1973 coup—but its neighbor Argentina was also very well-represented. More than a specific curatorial inclination, this reflected the fact that it’s been a terrific year for Argentine film. Alongside such festival-circuit hits as Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka, Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3 and Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents, the Viennale screened more modestly scaled and below-the-radar films, including Martín Shanly’s About Thirty, Martín Rejtman’s The Practice and Puan by […]
If there’s one thing that indie filmmakers, especially first-timers, can generally agree on, it’s that applying to film festivals can be a mystifying process. What type of films are film programmers looking for? Does running time matter? “Demystifying Film Festivals,” a panel at the recent 20th BendFilm Festival in Bend, Oregon (October 12-15, 2023) attempted to answer some of those questions. Open to the public and held at Somewhere That’s Green, a plant store and community space, the free panel was moderated by Selin Sevinç, director of programming at BendFilm and featured veteran programmers Joanne Feinberg (BendFilm, Big Sky), John […]
The following guest post was submitted by Brittany Franklin, founder and president of Minorities in Film (MiFILM). Franklin and MiFilm participated in the recent The Gotham Week Expo, a program of Filmmaker‘s publisher, The Gotham. — Editor The energy was palpable at The Gotham Week Expo Sessions on October 4th and 5th, as filmmakers and industry visionaries converged to exchange ideas, share insights and forge connections. Among the many enlightening sessions, Minorities in Film (MiFILM) had the pleasure to present two panels: “Amplifying Your Independent Film: Effective Marketing Techniques for Targeted Audience Engagement” and “Advocacy for the Independent Filmmaker Through […]