Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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TIFF Announces 2015 Gala and Special Presentations Lineup
Hot on the heels off NYFF announcing Steve Jobs as their centerpiece film yesterday comes the Gala and Special Presentations lineup from TIFF. There are the expected Cannes holdovers, and a handful of world premieres from Julie Delpy, Ridley Scott, Michael Moore, Terence Davies, Rebecca Miller and more. The full list is below. OPENING NIGHT FILM “Demolition” Jean-Marc Vallee, USA (World Premiere) GALAS “Beeba Boys” Deepa Mehta, Canada (World Premiere) “Eye in the Sky” Gavin Hood, United Kingdom (World Premiere) “Forsaken” Jon Cassar, Canada (World Premiere) “Freeheld” Peter Sollett, USA (World Premiere) “Hyena Road” (“Hyena Road: Le Chemin du Combat”) Paul Gross, Canada (World […]
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A Worthy Kickstarter to Show the Shuttered Beijing Independent Film Festival’s Selections in the US
With 20 days to go, the Kickstarter launched by producer/distributor Karin Chien, critic/curator Shelly Kraicer, and filmmaker/anthropologist J.P. Sniadecki has already hit its initial target goal for the purpose of organizing a series showcasing some of the best films shown at the Beijing Independent Film Festival. These works — including People’s Park, a personal favorite film of the last few years co-directed by Sniadecki and Libbie Cohn — were all once screened at the Festival, which was shut down completely last year by Chinese authorities. (You can read more about that here.) The initial funding goals focused on bringing over […]
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Medium-Length Highs Over Fragmented Landscapes: FIDMarseille
Diversity’s the aim of every city’s game, but Marseilles really does have everything. Greek in origin, Roman by design, Arabic in flavor, French in architecture and Mediterranean in climate: this encouragingly rough-edged melting pot is an appropriate setting for a film festival like FIDMarseille. Eschewing the standard but arbitrary practice of dividing films based upon format or duration, FID throws all of its selections together: fictional shorts, feature-length documentaries, mid-length essay-films and just about every hybridized bastard form in between. At a time when festivals are increasingly wary of upsetting sponsors and other funding bodies, appealing where they can to […]
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Christopher Makoto Yogi at the Sundance Directors Lab
Hawai’i-born director Christopher Makoto Yogi is at the Sundance Directors Lab with his feature, I Was a Simple Man. “Like marionettes on a toy stage, the ghosts of Seiichi’s past haunt the countryside in this tale of a Hawai’i family facing the imminent death of their eldest,” is how its described by the Sundance Institute. Below, Yoti describes leaving the Labs and finding quiet time — but missing the experience. Read Part One of Yogi’s diary here. The final night of the Directors and Screenwriters Labs went something like this: fellows, advisors and staff roved up to a mountain house […]
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Livi Newman on Shooting Successful Sex Scenes at the Sundance Directors Lab
Olivia Newman is at the Sundance Directors Lab with her feature First Match, the tale of “a teenage girl from Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood [who] decides that joining the all-boys high school wrestling team is the only way back to her estranged father.” She is also eight months pregnant. Below, she writes about shooting sex scenes. Read Part One of her Sundance Diary here. “Shoot every scene like a sex scene and you’ll be wildly successful.” That’s what James Mangold said to me. I was sitting in a circle with the Week Three Creative Advisors who had all just watched the […]
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Finding Soul at U.S. in Progress at the Champs-Élysées Film Festival
Bonjouring my way down the Champs-Élysées, I arrive at Ladurée, a Parisian bakery nearly as iconic as the Arc de Triomphe. I sit among film distributors and we are presented with food almost too pretty to eat. We are in Paris for U.S. in Progress, a joint program between Black Rabbit Film and the Champs-Élysées Film Festival. The purpose is to expose U.S. indie films in post-production to European buyers and distributors and introduce the American filmmakers to the European market. The three-day event is organized bi-annually, first during the Champs-Élysées Film Festival and again during the American Film Festival […]
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Cult, Underground and Independent in Flux: The Oak Cliff Film Festival
I arrived in Dallas for the Oak Cliff Film Festival and got picked up in a car along with Nick Zedd, the storied New York underground filmmaker who relocated to Mexico several years back. The first thing Zedd, whose own work is marked by a tongue-in-cheek fetish for violence, asked our driver about was the Kennedy assassination. Over the next few days, it became clear that Dallas, with its own mythology of Oswald conspiracy theories and Bonnie and Clyde’s, grave sites was the perfect city for a festival that had a thread of cult films and figures running through its […]
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Deep Pockets, High Ambitions and In-Development Projects at the Riviera Maya Film Festival
The Riviera Maya Film Festival (RMFF), which takes place throughout Mexico’s beautiful, tourist-ridden state of Quintana Roo, seems to have unfathomably deep pockets at its disposal. I was flown in for its fourth edition as a representative of the True/False Film Fest and housed, along with several dozen other industry delegates, in Hotel Cacao, the poshest place I’ve ever slept. Over the course of a few days, I was relieved to discover that the festival wasn’t just blowing resources on lavish guest accommodations. Its organizers seem ambitious, practical and equally committed to serving two communities: those who reside in Quintana Roo […]
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Chronicle of a Dream Foretold: BAMcinemaFest 2015
“Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy,” comments one of the tenuously overlapping characters in Richard Linklater’s 1991 game-changer Slacker. The word itself, fairly recent at the time of production, is a moniker the speaker fully embraces. The branding may sound tactless, if not downright pejorative, but it’s not at all: It implies enough empathy and humanity to seek out options to offset destructive disinterest in matters tangible, ethical, or both. In the creative sphere, the shift in course can lead to an untried M.O. and the models it might generate — if the stars are properly aligned, […]
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From Family-Friendly Sheep to the Greek Weird Wave: The 2015 Seattle International Film Festival
The 41st Seattle International Film Festival ran for 24 days. To put that in context, it began one day after Cannes and remained in full effect for two weeks after the red carpet was rolled up on the Croisette. Arriving to such a long-running event for the closing weekend had the effect of making me feel like a cinephile-come-lately, an outsider there to scavenge the crumbs of a very elaborate cake. It also made writing a summation of the nearly month-long affair feel like a fool’s errand: 450 films comprised SIFF’s program this year; I saw approximately 1% of them. […]
