Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Animate Objects: The 24th Aspen Shortsfest
With its “bodegas” serving $35 seafood entrees and cobble stone streets lined with Prada, Burberry, and every other Madison Avenue ready boutique a yuppie mom could think up, Aspen may seem like an odd location for the country’s preeminent shorts festival. The grungiest thing about the stunningly well-preserved 19th century Wheeler Opera House — the festival’s screening and conversation locus — are the $4 yellow bullet tall boys tucked behind the bar amid top shelf malts. But despite the slightly stuffy portents, audiences seemed game for whatever co-directors Laura Thielen and George Eldred threw their way: dry comedies, 40-minute docs, atmospheric animations, and gutting dramas […]
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Tribeca 2015 Critic’s Notebook: Live from New York, Ludacris, The Survivalist, Crocodile Gennadiy and More
The Tribeca Film Festival isn’t going away. The 47 people who care about the lives and deaths of film festivals ask the same question every year: Is this brash upstart turned middle-aged guy relevant? The national news media seems, well, not to care. In the film media, all anyone talked about the day after opening night was the unveiling of the Star Wars trailer and the Cannes lineup. But while Tribeca will never represent the pinnacle of Hollywood commerce or European high art in the way the Star Wars and Cannes brands do, its selections and sensibilities do their best […]
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Director Ronni Thomas on Walter Potter: The Man Who Married Kittens
If you’re a fan of Victorian anthropomorphic tableaux then Walter Potter needs no introduction. For those not in the know (and in NYC), head over to this year’s Tribeca Film Festival where Walter Potter: The Man Who Married Kittens screens starting April 18th. This fascinating documentary short is the brainchild of Brooklyn filmmaker (and connoisseur of the strange) Ronni Thomas, who tackles his titular subject – an English taxidermist who died nearly a century ago after founding a museum dedicated to his whimsical and unsettling dioramas – via five modern-day Potter enthusiasts. From taxidermied cats having a tea and croquet […]
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Kieślowski, WarGames and the ’80s: Carleton Ranney on Jackrabbit
Set in the not-too-distant future, Carleton Ranney’s debut feature Jackrabbit observes two young hackers living in City Six, a dystopian urban environment still recovering from The Reset, an event which caused the city to literally go back to square one. Interacting with the outside world via computers and video game systems that go back to user-friendly technology’s infancy (we’re talking pre-Pong), Simon and Max attempt to uncover the secret of a mutual friend’s murder, while fighting to escape City Six and the police/surveillance state they’ve grown accustomed to. An Orwellian fable, Jackrabbit is steeped in political paranoia and a fascination with the impersonal implications of a corporatized America. […]
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The Power of Story: Previewing the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival
Story. Storytelling. Experience. Community. Story, story, story! Talk to the heads of the Tribeca Film Festival and its programmers, and you’ll soon pick up on the event’s messaging this year. A festival that, as Robert DeNiro said at yesterday’s press lunch, was originally intended to be a “one-time thing” is now something of a New York institution. But it continues to evolve. At a sit down earlier in the week, Festival Director Geoff Gilmore, Tribeca Enterprises Executive V.P. Paula Weinstein and senior programmer Cara Cusamano spoke of today’s film viewing and festival landscape — how we are in, as Tribeca […]
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Cannes Announces 2015 Competition Lineup
Below you’ll find the as-of-now lineup for the Cannes Film Festival, which takes this play this year from May 13 to 24. A few notes: there will be more titles added to competition soon (fingers crossed for the new Apichatpong Weerasethakul), and this isn’t the full extent of the festival. Next week will see the announcement of the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week sections, and there are other less prominent parts of the festival (such as the ACID sidebar) that also have yet to be unveiled. A special shout-out to Roberto Minervini, whose excellent Stop the Pounding Heart debuted at Cannes […]
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Camera Lucida: Edgardo Cozarinsky on Letter to a Father
“I have often wondered what makes us keep things that we know are bound to disappear,” states the narrator of the film Letter to a Father (2013). The voice belongs to Letter’s filmmaker, Edgardo Cozarinsky, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1939 and has spent much of his life in Paris. The things he has kept over time include items pertaining to his father, Mirón Cozarinsky, a naval officer he barely knew who passed away when he was 20 years old. In the Argentinian director’s most recent feature-length film, he visits his father’s hometown of Clara (located in the central Entre Ríos province) for the first time. […]
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Counter-Brogramming: The 39th Atlanta Film Festival
Atlanta Film Festival falls right on the heels of SXSW, and its penchant for women directors and strong female leads is refreshing after Austin, where lesser Indiewood bro-coms go to die and where this year even some of my favorite films veered into man-child territory. Kristy Breneman and Christina Humphrey, the two young programmers behind Atlanta’s welcome change of pace, have inherited the 39-year-old festival and are crafting an earnestly community-minded identity in the midst of a rapidly changing city. Its growth is in part due to the fact that tax incentives have enticed more productions from Hollywood to Atlanta […]
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Anything Can Happen: True/False’s Sidebar Neither/Nor 2015 Investigated Polish Documentary Traditions
Now in its third year, the Neither/Nor sidebar of the annual True/False Film Festival has quickly become both a fundamental facet and essential rejoinder to the curatorial ideal of the program proper. Free of categorical imperatives, the festival’s binary brand has become over time a kind of shorthand for an often uncategorizable strain of filmmaking in which the ethos of nonfiction is consistently complicated by the visual language of fiction. The idea behind Neither/Nor is the reconstruction of a continuum between past and present iterations of this method, teasing out parallels between classic and contemporary storytelling modes while contextualizing the […]
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In Conversation: The Second Annual Treefort Film Festival
About halfway through my viewing at the Treefort Film Festival – predominately spent lounging on burlap sacks and church pews, repurposed for the inside of a tent – an anomalous, entirely welcome, framework began to take shape. At most regional festivals, the program tends to be a rather mixed bag, with titles culled from disparate, big name destinations, void of the necessary context for a non-industry crowd. But at the Boise-based, 2nd annual Treefort, the relatively compact, thoughtful selection of shorts and features appeared to be in constant dialogue with one another. Take, for instance, the standing-room-only double feature of Scott Cummings’ Buffalo […]
