Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Five Views of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2015
On the basis of the five films I sampled in the 20th edition of Lincoln Center’s annual “Rendez-Vous with French Cinema” series, I’m not inclined to make any diagnoses of either the state of French cinema or even this year’s edition. All five were worth seeing but only one skirted essential status, so let’s start there. Inelegantly labeled 40-Love in English (the French title, Terre batue, translates as “clay court”), Stéphane Demoustier’s first feature grows logically from his documentary short Fille du calvaire, a look at the long and difficult path awaiting young men training to be tennis pros. 40-Love initially appears to […]
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Tribeca Film Festival Announces 2015 Spotlight and Midnight Sections
Rounding out this week’s program announcement for the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival are the Spotlight and Midnight Sections, along with a handful of Special Screenings and Works-in-Progress. The Spotlight selection includes several world premieres, such as Tim Blake Nelson’s Anesthesia; Thought Crimes, directed by Erin Lee Carr, daughter of the late, great David; David Gelb’s A Faster Horse; as well as Sundance banner titles Sleeping With Other People, Cartel Land, The Overnight, Slow West, Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead, and more. The festival is also presenting a Special Screenings section, full of “eventized” affairs, like the world premiere of Mary J. Blige – The London Sessions, followed by […]
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Previewing the 2015 True/False Film Festival
I’m an unabashed partisan for the True/False Film Festival (this will be my sixth consecutive year attending), which kicks off tomorrow and runs through Sunday. There are 37 features in this year’s line-up, plus four shorts programs, the first five episodes of Andrew Jarecki’s HBO mini-series The Jinx, and another five “secret screenings” — films identified in the program only by color, shown here prior to their official world premieres elsewhere. This is also the third year of the Neither/Nor sidebar, and this year’s edition is especially ambitious, a plunge into the largely underknown world of Polish documentary, complete with […]
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Tribeca Film Festival Announces 2015 World Narrative, Documentary Competition and Viewpoints Selections
The Tribeca Film Festival today announced the first half of its 2015 slate — 51 of the 97 films, including both its World Narrative and Documentary competitions. Nearly one quarter of this year’s festival directors are women, including quite a few directors with titles anticipated by Filmmaker readers. These include cinematographer Reed Morano’s directorial debut, Meadowland; Pamela Romanowsky’s adaptation of Stephen Elliot’s true-crime memoir, The Adderall Diaries; Rikki Stern and Annie Sundberg’s latest, In My Father’s House; Vanessa Hope’s look at China’s role on the world stage through the story of former Utah governor Jon Huntsman and his adopted daughter, […]
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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 […]
