Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
-
Sarasota Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup
The 2014 Sarasota Film Festival lineup looks — as ever — to be a nice mix of Sundance, SXSW and international titles, with a few discoveries to be had as well. The 16th edition is set to open with Rory Kennedy’s Last Days in Vietnam, and close with Charlie McDowell’s The One I Love. John Slattery’s God’s Pocket and John Rossi’s Ivory Tower mark the Centerpiece films. Other Sundance standouts are Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter; Frank; Rich Hill; Wetlands; Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart and Blue Ruin, which has seemingly made every imaginable stop on the major festival circuit. Major auteurs — Tsai Ming-Liang, Corneliu Porumboiu, Pawel Pawlikowski — dot the lineup alongside […]
-
SXSW Dispatch: She’s Lost Control, Wetlands, Frank
“I thought I was really onto something,” smiled director Anja Marquardt during the Q&A for She’s Lost Control. “I’d never even heard of The Sessions.” Peculiar profession aside, Marquardt can rest easy: the two films have little to nothing in common. Much more than a narrative quirk, Marquardt uses the untraditional avenue of sex surrogacy to explore the contradiction at the crux of her character study. Our subject here is not John Hawkes in an iron lung, but Ronah, a woman, a graduate student and a sex surrogate on the verge, played with disquieting charisma by high-waisted pant aficionado Brooke Bloom. More alone than […]
-
Fort Tilden, The Great Invisible Take Top Prizes at SXSW
Beating back chilly, sub-normal temperatures, the season finale of True Detective and the myriad distractions of its surrounding program — referencing the new SXSports category, one independent film stalwart snarled to me, “Don’t try to tell me that sports are now creative” — SXSW Film put a capper on its 2014 edition by awarding Sarah-Violet Bliss & Charles Rogers’ Brooklyn beach comedy Fort Tilden and Margaret Brown’s Deepwater Horizon doc, The Great Invisible, its top prizes. Other awards included a “special jury award for courage in storytelling to the lead actor and screenwriter of Collin Schiffli’s Animals, David Dastmalchian. (The […]
-
Lena Dunham’s Strong SXSW Keynote Indirectly Highlights Competition’s Homogeny
Shortly after 11 o’clock this morning, Lena Dunham offered the Austin Convention Center’s Vimeo Theater a holistic timeline of her rise from hostess-who-lived-with-her-parents to independent cinema’s most overanalyzed success story. Fresh from SNL and somehow running on fumes with the utmost effervescence (she claimed to have written her speech at 3 am), Dunham recounted her days as an aspiring filmmaker with candor and self-effacement. Even if, on the set of Tiny Furniture precursor “Delusional Downtown Divas,” she was “struggling how to turn on the camera,” it’s clear her preternatural drive has always been intact. A tireless maker and unabashed experimenter, Dunham consistently stressed the importance of […]
-
Rendez-Vous With French Cinema 2014: Age Of Panic and Others
Let’s start with the most urgent recommendation and work down: out of the eight films I sampled from this year’s installment of Lincoln Center’s self-explanatorily-titled annual series “Rendez-vous with French Cinema,” Justine Triet’s currently undistributed Age Of Panic is the big must-see. That (English only) title’s no joke: Triet’s first feature builds on her documentary background, embedding a palpitation-inducing family drama within the real street gatherings and celebrations on the day of François Hollande’s election to presidential office. TV reporter Laetitia (Laetitia Dosch) has to cover the man-on-the-street reactions on Rue de Solférino; babysitter (Marc-Antoine Vaugeois) is forced to join […]
-
Lost in Translation: Public Hearing
If you want to make a movie, you need a good script. Or, at least that’s what they tell you. A script gets the talent, which gets the financing (the two are really synonymous). The other thing you’ll need, of course, is luck. First-time filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins can thank Google for both (not the money part though). While cruising the Internet in 2007, Wilkins came across a transcript of a public hearing on a town hall website. It described in detail a well-attended public hearing in Allegany, New York, population 8,000. At issue was a proposal to replace […]
-
25 Picks for the 2014 SXSW Film and Interactive Festivals
Airline fares entered the stratosphere weeks ago, hotels were booked months ago, and SXSW begins today. As always, I’m interested in film and tech. Regarding the latter, Jenna Wortham at the New York Times checked in with a number of the big companies that launched in Austin in the past and found that many, like Foursquare, are skipping it. In their place are tech start-ups from Africa, South Korea and Brazil. Scanning the program, I see fewer rock star speakers (is Chelsea Clinton a rock star speaker?) and many folks from on-the-horizon tech like personal health management and computing wearables. […]
-
Secret Cinema: The Eastern Oregon Film Festival’s Remarkable 5th Edition
Unlike nearly everywhere else in the culture, bigger is not necessarily better at the Eastern Oregon Film Festival. It’s a slender event in a small town. Eleven features and 21 shorts across three days and two venues. Still, they don’t call this stretch of fully enclosed valley “La Grande” for nothing. Despite only containing about 12,000 souls, this mountainous hamlet, like Ian Clark and Benjamin Morgan’s program, leaves you plenty of room to explore. The festival opened on a Thursday night in late February, commencing with a dinner for its supporting members in the town’s recently renovated arts center. Over beer, […]
-
Tribeca Film Festival Announces Spotlight, Midnight, Storyscapes and Special Screenings Sections
The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival is rounding out its features line-up with the Spotlight, Midnight, Storyscapes and Special Screenings selections. Heavy hitters in the Spotlight category include Roman Polanski, Kelly Reichardt, Ira Sachs, Jon Favreau and Paul Haggis, with script ventures from Nicole Holofcener and Joss Whedon, as well as Chris Messina and Courtney Cox’s directorial debuts. Among the Special Screenings are new works from Tsai Ming Liang and Remote Area Medical directors Jeff Reichart and Farihah Zaman. Add in the transmedia Storyscapes and the chupacabra-featuring Midnights, and it’s shaping up to be a solid slate. The full synopses are below. SPOTLIGHT […]
-
True/False Diary 2: Actress, Killing Time, Boyhood
Full disclosure: I consider the industrious Robert Greene a friend, but that makes me no less cautious in deeming his new film Actress a big deal. This collaborative psychodrama follows and subjectively sculpts his friend/neighbor Brandy Burre’s attempt to simultaneously separate from her longtime boyfriend and return to the acting world she left for suburban motherhood. (Greene’s written for Filmmaker about deciding to premiere his fourth feature at this year’s True/False.) Burre is introduced in a bright red dress standing before a kitchen sink, moving in ambiguously charged slow-mo. Is it true that, as she muses, “I tend to break […]
