Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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“Intersex People Don’t Need To Be Fixed”: Grace Hughes-Hallett on The Secret of Me
A seemingly breakthrough medical innovation from the ’60s set off a still-ongoing worldwide trend of surgeries performed on “atypical” babies. Those surgeries were celebrated in the context of the gender equality movements of the 70s, but over the long tail of history, the trauma inflicted by this innovation revealed those marginalized by the results: a largely hidden and, per the stats, sizable community of people worldwide assembled under the queer umbrella. Premiering at SXSW 2025, The Secret of Me is British director Grace Hughes-Hallett’s directorial debut, but you may already know her as the producer of 2018’s Three Identical Strangers. The main […]
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“Miami is the City of Hustle”: Jing Ai Ng on SXSW 2025 Premiere Forge
Common associations audiences might have with Miami: cruise lines, café con leche, beach parties, plastic surgery, Art Basel, Dexter, Scarface, a diverse and predominantly Latino and Caribbean population. AFI Conservatory graduate Jing Ai Ng wants to turn some of those tropes around with her debut feature Forge, premiering in the Narrative Spotlight section of SXSW 2025. The Malaysian-born filmmaker grew up shuttling between Southeast Asia and Miami and wanted to honor the Florida city she knew—that of first and second gen Asian subcultures, rare dim sum restaurants and a particular vein of white collar crime: art forgery. After first exploring […]
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“I’ve Been Trying to Coin the Phrase ‘Hangout Horror'”: Alexander Ullom on SXSW 2025 Premiere It Ends
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19 Films We’re Anticipating at the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival
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Dreams, Memory, Resistance: True/False 2025
True False Film Festival, nestled in college town Columbia, MO, is a festival for documentarians and people who love documentaries—which is a lot of people in that part of the world, it turns out. Boosting the intellectual substance is a pre-filmfest conference, “Based on a True Story,” at the renowned journalism school at University of Missouri. Rounding out the cultural experience, buskers come from throughout the Midwest to play before shows, and every business with a corner of space turns into an art gallery. And then there’s a Mardi Gras-style party and parade to complete the community atmosphere. It’s an […]
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Trailer Watch: Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2025
The forthcoming edition of the annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series, taking place this year at Film at Lincoln Center, will be the 30th anniversary of the series. The lineup this year includes two underrated films from last year’s Cannes, Patricia Mazuy’s Visiting Hours and the late Sophie Fillières’ final film, This Life of Mine. Watch the trailer above for the series, which will take place from March 6 to 16.
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“I Feel Like the World is Literally on Fire”: Lemohang Mosese on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Ancestral Visions of the Future
Following its premiere in Venice’s 2019 Biennale College Cinema section and North American launch at Sundance 2020, Lemohang Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection became a noteworthy arthouse success, scoring wide international distribution and eventually gaining a place in the Criterion Collection. Now six years later, Mosese has premiered his follow-up feature Ancestral Visions of the Future, shifting to a poetic, hybrid documentary form while retaining his previous work’s expressive tempo and eye-searingly colourful outdoor cinematography. Whilst Burial was concerned with the maintenance of longterm dynastic communities in Lesotho, the landlocked country of his birth fully enclosed […]
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Anora, Didi and Baby Reindeer Are Multiple 2025 Film Independent Spirit Award Winners
Sean Baker’s Anora was the big winner at the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards, held yesterday at California’s Santa Monica beach. The film, about a stripper’s ill-fated marriage to a Russian oligarch’s son, picked up prizes for Best Film, Best Director and, for Mikey Madison’s lead performance, Best Lead Performance. Other films and TV shows picking up multiple wins were A Real Pain (Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Performance), Didi (Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay) and Baby Reindeer (Best Breakthrough Performance in a New Scripted Series, Best Lead Performance in a New Scripted Series, Best Ensemble Cast in […]
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Mirror Mirror: Lucile Hadžihalilović on Berlinale 2025 Premiere The Ice Tower
We didn’t have to wait too long after Earwig (2021) for Lucile Hadžihalilović’s enigmatic new offering, The Ice Tower. The whistling sounds of mountain winds announce the arrival of the Snow Queen (Marion Cotillard), both to the set of a film she’s leading in 1970s France and in the life of 16-year-old runaway orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini). Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” the script—co-written by Hadžihalilović together with Geoff Cox—explores the subterranean tensions of loneliness and womanhood in various shapes and forms. While it may as well be considered the most “legible” Hadžihalilović film […]
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Slamdance Co-Founder Peter Baxter and Fest Director Taylor Miller on Moving to Los Angeles
Los Angeles is a city in constant renewal. When the Arclight Cinemas closed during COVID in 2021, the initial despair was lessened as a host of repertory options sprang up in its aftermath, including Quentin Tarantino’s revamped Vista Theatre, the Academy Museum and Micah Gottlieb’s Mezzanine series. On the festival side, when L.A. Film Festival and OutFest both shut down a few years apart, much discussion centered around why this city has such difficulty sustaining a film festival, especially when on the opposite coast, the New York Film Festival thrives. (This line of questioning largely overlooks the long-running, can’t-miss AFI […]
