Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Hive Minds and Solitary Settings: BAMcinemaFest’s Sixth Edition
A carefully curated round-up of the festival circuit’s notable American titles, BAMcinemaFest begins its sixth edition today with the New York premiere of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Though the program is designed to favor nascent talent — Spike Lee, Les Blank and other repertory screenings aside — it’s hard to think of a more exemplary opener than this American independent masterwork. As a narrative experiment, Boyhood is every bit as unparalleled as you’ve heard, elevating its seemingly generic arc with moments of searing veracity. Given the holistic scope, I would wager that any viewer is bound to encounter a mirror image demanding of introspection and a helping side of tears. Not all of the festival’s inclusions scrape […]
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Six Filmmaker Picks for the 2014 Northside Film Festival
The Williamsburg-based Northside Film Festival is in swing this week with its typically eclectic mixture of pictures curated by various local film partners (including IFP, Filmmaker‘s publisher) as well as, for the DIY Competition, their in-house team. Below are seven picks for those on the L train this week. More details on these screenings can be found at the Northside site here. i hate myself :). Any cultural critic namechecking Lana, Lena and Leslie (Jamison) while untangling the limits of autobiography, masochistic self-portrayal and the representation of female sexuality in the pornified internet age should reserve a paragraph or two […]
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Cutting Sports and Spielberg: The “Sight, Sound & Story” Editing Workshop
A not very wise man once reflected that the strongest examples of film editing are the sequences where you don’t notice it. Day-long seminars such as “Sight, Sound & Story,” which took place last Saturday at the Florence Gould Hall in Manhattan, seek to pull back the curtain on the constantly evolving digital tools and techniques in need of demystification. Structured around a series of topical, industry-specific interests, the panels I attended approached the craft (and the difficulties of perfecting it) from a myriad of vantage points, none the least being narrative structure, the identification of theme and post-production sound […]
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Tales from the Emerald City: The 40th Seattle International Film Festival
At film festivals worth their metaphorical salt (or just the free labor the volunteers put into them), there is too much to see, too much to do. Your existential clock gets real prominent: time is going to run out and you’ll inevitably have missed most of the fun. You try to make four screenings a day but make three if you’re lucky and two if you’re acting like a relatively normal human, one who tries to consume food at a pace that doesn’t upset the stomach. That 10 am panel sounds real promising until you get wasted the night before […]
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Cannes 2014: 5 Questions for Wild Tales Director Damián Szifrón
Argentine director Damián Szifrón’s Wild Tales opens with the ultimate revenge fantasy, one that unfolds into a firestorm before the credits finish. The film’s six stories get only more wicked, quickly descending into the depths of the human psyche on the verge of imploding. There is truly never a dull moment, a rarity for the Cannes lineup. A waitress gets help paying back the loan shark who drove her father to suicide. A quick road rage incident unfolds into a searing tale that will warn anyone against yelling at another driver. An explosives engineer fires back against his city’s criminal […]
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Letter to the Editor: A Response from the Richmond International Film Festival
“Kentucker Audley, the Richmond International Film Festival and A Checklist for Avoiding Bad Publicity,” by Lauren Wissot, an article based around contributing editor Wissot’s trip to the Richmond International Film Festival, drew the following response from Heather Waters, the festival’s founder and producer. Aside from editing out email signatures and footers, we are reprinting it in full. Dear Scott, When Lauren Wissot contacted us about covering the Richmond International Film Festival (RIFF) for your magazine, we were excited about the national press (“Kentucker Audley, the Richmond International Film Festival and A Checklist for Avoiding Bad Publicity,” published May 7). However, […]
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Old and New: The 60th Oberhausen International Short Film Festival
Nestled in the industrial Ruhr region and dubbed “Germany’s Detroit” due to its distinction as the most debt-ridden city in the country, Oberhausen may not immediately sound like a great place to host an international film festival. Nevertheless, believe it or not, the 2014 Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen marked the festival’s 60th iteration. This year, Oberhausen featured 61 films from 35 countries in the International Competition, 21 films in the German competition, 12 video production in the North-Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) competition, a themed program curated by Mika Taanila (discussed at length later), four profiled filmmakers receiving one to three individual programs each, […]
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Legendary Producer Marin Karmitz on Great Directors, Producing, and Why Money is Never the Real Problem
Combining taste, business savvy, and enduring idealism for the role cinema can play within the broader culture, legendary producer, distributor, director and exhibitor Marin Karmitz has helped shape the course of world cinema since launching his MK2 Films in the early 1970s. Beginning his career as an assistant director to, among others, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda, Karmitz went on to become one of the most distinguished producers of his generation, with such classics as Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy, Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself and Claude Chabrol’s Ceremonie to his name. But his list of producing credits only tells […]
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Tips on Submitting to Festivals and Crafting Pitches from EYE’s Ido Abram
Don’t chase the wrong festival — that was one of many simple but useful pieces of advice offered by Ido Abram at the recently concluded 33rd Istanbul Film Festival. Abram is currently the Director of Presentation and Communication at EYE, Netherland’s national film institute. In the past, he has been the director of the Binger Filmlab and the International Film Festival Rotterdam’s CineMart, the world’s first “co-production market.” He also serves on the Advisory Board of the prestigious Torino Filmlab. Throughout his career, Abram has listened to hundreds of pitches, trained filmmakers on how to make them, judged dozens of […]
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Fassbinder and His Friends: Ira Sachs
Entering its final weekend, “Fassbinder: Romantic Anarchist” is part one of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s massive survey of the work of the late, great Rainer Werner Fassbinder — a madly prolific, protean figure of the German New Wave. Marrying social commentary with emotional melodrama and, sometimes, genre entertainment, Fassbinder cranked out four and five movies a year, drawing from a repertory group of actors, exploring themes of love and obsession, and building a sustained critique of post-war capitalism that still penetrates today. In 1997, the Museum of Modern Art programmed a Fassbinder retrospective, and we asked several directors […]
