Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Take What You Can Carry Director Matthew Porterfield, Producer Zsuzsanna Kiràly and d.p. Jenny Lou Ziegel on Collaborating Outside the System in Germany
With only three features under his belt, Matthew Porterfield has proven himself one of the most original voices in low-budget independent cinema, winning deserved praise from critics and audiences in both the US and Europe. Last year Porterfield made his first short film, the 30-minute Take What You Can Carry, which had its world premiere at the 2015 Berlinale. Inspired by a quote from French author Georges Perec, this self-described meditation on “communication, creativity and physical space” finds the Baltimore native working once more (in a somewhat more abstract mode than his features) with girlfriend Hannah Gross as Lilly, an American in […]
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The Cooler Bandits Screening and Discussion at Columbia University on February 26
Followed by what promises to be an amazing discussion between filmmakers and subjects alike, John Lucas’s documentary The Cooler Bandits will be screened Thursday, February 26 in New York at Columbia University. The event is free and open to the public. For Filmmaker, Alix Lambert wrote about the film and talked to Lucas while The Cooler Bandits was in post-production. An excerpt: The Cooler Bandits is the film’s title as well as the crew consisting of Charlie, Donovan, Frankie, and Poochie, who were all teenagers in 1991 when they spent the better part of the year robbing restaurants. Collectively they […]
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How Do You Take a Meeting? Learn How at the IFP’s Made in New York Media Center
There are resources to help you pitch your screenplay, and even articles for writers and directors on how to behave at a general meeting, but a broader discussion of how producers, directors and anyone else in the film business should play it when work talk moves off email to IRL is strangely absent from our tutorial landscape. Our friends at Tangerine Entertainment, Amy Hobby and Ann Hubbell, aim to change that with their workshop, “How to Take a Meeting,” occurring at the IFP’s Made in New York Media Center on March 3. Full information is below, and note the special […]
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Annie Sprinkle on Reuniting with Golden Era Porn Legends for CineKink’s “A Tribute to Club 90”
It’s splendidly ironic that the birth of Club 90 — “the world’s first porn star support group” — occurred in 1983 at a baby shower, the ultimate celebration of sex positivity. Porn actress Veronica Hart (who may be familiar to viewers of Six Feet Under and Boogie Nights, and is still with her high school sweetheart today) was due, porn star-turned-sexologist/performance artist Annie Sprinkle volunteered her apartment at 90 Lexington, the women of NYC’s adult industry showed up, and the rest, as they say, is kink history. At the urging of the late Gloria Leonard (a feminist porn star who […]
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New Directors/New Films Announce 2015 Program
The first of the “new” modifiers in FSLC and MoMA’s always solid showcase New Directors/New Films has taken on a somewhat amorphous application as of late. A handful of this year’s standouts, for instance, are the fourth (Rick Alverson’s Entertainment) or third (Stephane Lafleur’s Tu Dors Nicole; Bill and Turner Ross’ Western) films from their respective directors, while Nadav Lapid, whose Policeman bowed at NYFF in 2011, seems to be making a reverse trip down the FSLC ladder with his third film, The Kindergarten Teacher, which premiered last May in Cannes. Nevertheless, there’s much to look forward to here, especially the inclusion of Britni West’s Tired Moonlight — a micro-budget, Montana-set film that […]
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Birdman, Boyhood, CITIZENFOUR Top 30th Annual Independent Spirit Awards
Birdman won Best Picture at this afternoon’s 30th annual Independent Spirit Awards. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s film scored two other awards — Best Male Lead and Best Cinematography — while its main Academy competition, Boyhood, won Best Director and Best Supporting Actress. Laura Poitras’s CITIZENFOUR won Best Documentary. Held, as always, a day before the Oscars, Film Independent’s Santa Monica beachside awards ceremony also recognized a number of lower-budgeted independents, including Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (producer Chris Olson won the Piaget Producers Award), H. (directors Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia won the Kiehl’s Someone to Watch Award); Dear White People (Best […]
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Berlinale 2015: Jafar Panahi, Promising Newcomers and the Decline of Terrence Malick
In the weeks leading up to this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the festival’s press office revealed an increasingly enticing succession of titles competing in its main slate, generating very high expectations. Somewhat incredibly, they were met. While the Berlinale’s Competition customarily offers a few good films amongst a lot of mediocrity, the trend was reversed this time around, with easily the most outstanding selection in recent memory. In an equally welcome turn, the prizes awarded by Darren Aronofsky’s jury fully reflected the program’s quality, rewarding the most deserving entries while confirming the Berlinale’s avidly nurtured reputation as the most politically […]
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Miami 2.0: Transmedia at FilmGate Interactive
Part conference, part festival – and packed with live events, workshops, parties, and even a “Tech Playground” – FilmGate Interactive uniquely combines cutting edge storytelling with a laidback Miami Beach vibe. I must admit, after reading my colleague Randy Astle’s fascinating interview with FilmGate Interactive founder and executive director Diliana Alexander, my mind’s bar was set high for this young transmedia fest, but this three-year-old event still managed to exceed my expectations and then some. Along with an enthusiastic grassroots team, producer/programmer Alexander — a world traveling Bulgarian and recent Miami transplant — has an uncanny knack for making FilmGate […]
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The Raisers’ Edge: MoMA’s Transcendent “Documentary Fortnight”
Low and high art come to fruitful blows in the 14th edition of one of New York’s most substantive — and absurdly unsung — cinema exhibitions, the International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media, aka Documentary Fortnight (February 13-27). Low? For 120 years, film has been on the short end of the cultural totem pole, and host venue Museum of Modern Art has never made any bones about the distinction. In this case, however, the medium is infused with accomplished elements from other art forms ranking among the cognoscenti. Long before complementary fora like DOC NYC and the Film Society’s […]
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The 2015 True/False Film Fest Lineup
Here’s the 39-film strong main lineup of this year’s True/False Film Fest, the increasingly-prominent annual documentary festival (with room for what that means) that takes place in Columbia, Missouri. Our coverage begins when the festival does; this year it runs from March 5th-8th. Almost There (Aaron Wickenden, Dan Rybicky) — “Almost There is a coming-of-(old)-age story about 83-year-old Peter Anton, an “outsider” artist living in isolated and crippling conditions whose world changes when two filmmakers discover his work and storied past. Shot over eight years, Almost There documents Anton’s first major exhibition and how the controversy it generates forces him […]
