Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Prismatic Ground 2026: Windows and Thresholds
In its sixth year, New York City’s Prismatic Ground festival doesn’t show any signs of rote predictability. Founder and programmer Inney Prakash has used the festival, which most recently took place from April 29 through May 3, to foreground global voices in the contemporary avant-garde. He likens his curatorial process to “conducting a piece of music or slaloming down a mountain,” but otherwise prefers to let the viewer parse threads and connections between the films he programs across four separate waves. It’s a galvanizing approach towards curation that remains surprising, generative, and ultimately grounding in a tumultuous moment for the […]
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Ritual of Care: Screening My Film Inside a Women’s Prison
I was told to wear black. Black is the safe choice. But today, I take a page from formerly incarcerated Sing Sing star Clarence Maclin, who was wearing a galaxy-themed graphic tee when I met him at the 2025 San Quentin Film Festival. My shirt is patterned vividly with dinosaurs and aliens in space. I am embracing my inner child, honoring that goofy kid who made movies in his tiny bedroom just east of East LA. This is my second time visiting prison, my first visiting a women’s prison, and I am on edge. Not because of the twenty-foot barbed-wire […]
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NAB Show 2026 Moves Toward Broadcast, but Cinema Products Still Excite
“NAB has always been the broadcast show,” Paul Hawxhurst, senior technical specialist at Canon USA, told me at the show this year. “For a little while there, it was cinema, cinema, cinema. Right now, it’s going back to broadcast, broadcast, broadcast.” On the floor in Las Vegas, that shift is hard to miss. As I made the rounds on the final day of the show, I asked vendors how business had been, and nearly all described a quieter year. Some companies reduced their footprint or skipped booths altogether, opting instead for smaller presences as a sponsor within NAB’s Cine Central […]
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The Popcorn List: Pop Up Series to Launch Theatrical Series of Films Without Distribution
The Popcorn List, an annual survey completed by festival programmers identifying “fresh, hot” films without wide distribution, presents the second edition of The Popcorn List: Pop Up Series. This sneak-preview screening event will be held at a dozen theaters across the country in July before arriving for an encore presentation during Gotham Week in October. This is the second annual iteration of the Pop Up Series, which was created in 2025 to “deliver an additional window of visibility and audience-building for a number of films on the List” amid an uncertain distribution landscape, per a press release. This year, seven […]
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Work Won’t Love You Back: Greta Rainbow on The Devil Wears Prada 2
If the woman in monogrammed Chanel acid-wash jeans standing on the Regal Times Square escalator had stayed to the right to let me walk past, I might not have missed the first ten minutes of The Devil Wears Prada 2. But fate was such that I was thrust into the sequel of the season without set-up. Settling into the theater’s signature ButtKicker seat, flanked by two of my best girlfriends, I re-met Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) in the familiar bar where Adrian Grenier’s widely loathed “disgruntled boyfriend” character worked in the original movie. Disappointingly, my formative celebrity crush was nowhere […]
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Perfectly Imperfect: A Missive From LAFM 2026
It’s impossible not to glamorize Los Angeles. Or at least this is how I feel every time I visit. The towering palms, seaside breeze, and temperate weather make everything easy to romanticize. This is an impulse that New Yorkers don’t regularly succumb to, what with incessant mass transit delays, post-blizzard poop pile-ups (we can only hope that these dumps were produced by dogs), and whatever environmental ill has been causing the wind to manifest as a city-wide vortex. After experiencing one of the harshest winters in recent memory, donning a light jacket and mini skirt to attend LAFM’s opening night […]
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Los Angeles: The Movie-Watching Capital of the World
Moviegoing in Los Angeles has never been better, at least not in the 13 years I’ve lived in the city. When covering Slamdance’s move from Park City to LA last year, I listed a host of these either new or newly expanded theatrical offerings. In the year since, American Cinematheque, the undisputed king of repertory cinema in the city (at least in terms of scale), has acquired the historic Village theater in Westwood, with plans to re-open it next year. And Kristen Stewart’s recent purchase of the Highland Theatre is particularly exciting, especially considering that it’s located only one mile […]
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“This Rupture of Utopian Horizons”: Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe on Aro berria
Aro berria, the first feature from Spanish Basque filmmaker Irati Gorostidi Agirretxe, is focused on the revolutionary potential of two spaces: a factory floor and a tent. In the former space, Gorostidi restages the working-class unrest of the late 1970s during Spain’s transition to democracy, opening the film with workers in a San Sebastian water meter plant forming a human snake, their comrades silently putting their tools down and joining in a collective mass. When the more radical workers—many of them young people—fail to sway the plant towards continued action, a number of them leave San Sebastian for the Arco […]
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Back Already? The Maryland Film Festival Settles Into Its New Spring Dates
Only five months after its 2025 edition, the Maryland Film Festival hosted its 27th installment from April 8-12. The Parkway Theater on the corner of North & Charles is set to be a permanent home for Baltimore’s longest-running independent film festival, which will now be held annually in the spring. The shakeup caused by the festival going on hiatus in 2023—which caused former MdFF programmer Eric Allen Hatch to launch his own festival, New/Next, which now runs regularly in the fall—is finally starting to settle, leaving Baltimore with two marquee festivals for independent cinema. The 26th MdFF, despite the competition for regional […]
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Genesis House and The Gotham Launch a Fellowship for NYC Short Filmmakers
Genesis House, the Meatpacking District flagship for Korean luxury vehicles and fine dining, and The Gotham Film & Media Institute, Filmmaker’s publisher, announce today the launch of their joint fellowship. This new initiative will support three New York City–based narrative short filmmakers during their films’ final stages of production and/or distribution. The Genesis House x The Gotham Shorts Fellowship will provide a sizable $10,000 grant alongside mentorship sessions, access to exclusive Genesis House programming, and the opportunity to screen for industry professionals during Gotham Week’s 2026 edition. “This fellowship brings together Genesis House’s position as a cultural hub for creative […]
