Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Five Picks for the 2015 Northside Film Festival
Clocking in at just three days, the Northside Film Festival still provides enough breadth in programming to rival an event three times its size. In addition to the centerpiece DIY Competition and short programs, the fest has added an episodics sidebar this year, featuring Doron Max Hagay’s Monica web series, among others. Due to pre-screener availability, the following recommendations are features only, but that scarcely means you shouldn’t keep any eye on the other sections. Northside runs from today through Wednesday at UnionDocs, Nitehawk, Videology and the Wythe Hotel. Tired Moonlight If you missed Britni West’s Slamdance Grand Jury Prize winner at New Directors/New Films, […]
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A Festival is its City: Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival 2015
Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, is a big city, at least for me: I live in another capital, Santiago de Chile, but can’t compare how big the two are. That’s especially true when one starts to ask around what’s actually part of Buenos Aires: if the “Conurbano” (poor suburbs surrounding the capital) is included, if here or there is or isn’t part of this “autonomous city.” It’s the same when one starts asking about the importance of the BAFICI (the Spanish acronym for the festival, “Buenos Aires Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente”) or how it has changed with time: you get many responses, […]
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“This is Not a Keynote”: Amy Dotson’s SIFF Catalyst Speech
IFP Deputy Director and Head of Programming Amy Dotson gives a keynote (or not!) speech today at the Seattle International Film Festival’s Catalyst brunch. She has kindly provided the text to Filmmaker, which we are printing below. You are not a filmmaker. “The Treachery of Images” was a painting by Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. The picture he painted was simply of a pipe, with a rally cry of a scrawl below it reading: “This is not a pipe.” His paintings were an attempt to understand the impossibility of reconciling words, images and objects and challenged the very notion of what […]
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Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan Wins the Cannes Palme d’Or; Son of Saul, The Assassin, Rooney Mara Score Other Top Prizes
A jury headed by Joel and Ethan Coen awarded the Palme d’Or to Jacques Audiard’s immigrant drama Dheepan at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, which concludes today. The film tells the story of a Tamil fighter fleeing the Sri Lankan civil war who improvises a family — a wife and daughter — in order to better seek asylum in what turns out to be an inhospitable France. The award was something of a surprise, with most English-language journalists pegging either Laszlo Nemes’ Holocaust drama Son of Saul or The Assassin, a period martial-arts picture from Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-Hsien for […]
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Cannes 2015: Five Questions For Tale of Tales Star Salma Hayek
Salma Hayek rarely picks up her cell phone when the number is unlisted. But one day she did so while driving around Los Angeles, and the man on the other end was Italian director Matteo Garrone. Having been introduced to modern Italian cinema by her friend Valeria Golina, Hayek was flabbergasted. Garrone’s films Gomorrah and Reality were two of her favorite recent pictures. Not only that, but Garrone was offering her the role in a period film bringing to life the tales of 17th century Neapolitan scribe Giambattista Basile. She would play the role of a Spanish queen, the film would […]
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Cannes 2015: Five Questions For Tale of Tales‘ Vincent Cassel
He’s played a troubled youth in the Paris ghettos in La Haine, a vengeful husband in Irreversible, and an abusive ballet company director in Black Swan. One pattern is clear with French actor Vincent Cassel: he works with directors of a special breed who can’t be boxed up neatly within a genre. His latest Cannes film is no exception. Cassel partnered with Italian director Matteo Garrone to play the role of a casanova Medieval king who’s always on the search for his next sexual conquest in Tale of Tales. Based upon the stories of Giambattista Basile, Europe’s original fairytale scribe, […]
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“I’m Going Back to My Horror Film Roots”: Abel Ferrara Launches Siberia at Cannes 2015
Indie maestro Abel Ferrara launched his latest film project in Cannes this week with his first ever foray into Kickstarter. Siberia, a new film with Willem Dafoe, explores the language of dreams, using the subconscious as a form of language. “There’s nothing more horrific than your own dreams and nightmares,” Ferrara promised the crowd of assembled journalists gathered on the top of the Silencio club in Cannes. “I’m going back to that kind of filmmaking, to my horror film roots.” He’s hoping to raise half a million dollars to begin financing for the new film. “This is Willem being Willem,” […]
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Win a Pass to IFP’s Class Series “The Where of Storytelling: Creating the Location Based Experience”
“The Where of Storytelling: Creating the Location Based Experience” is a class series conceived by the Made in NY Media Center by IFP exploring site-specific storytelling – from interactive film to experiential design for commercial clients, location adds a new level of experience to media projects. The program consists of a Case Study and overview of locative storytelling featuring interactive filmmaker Lance Weiler and Jake Barton, founder of award-winning museum experience designers Local Projects (June 9); a Writing Workshop: draft a location-based story & refine your project through inspiring design exercises and peer critiques (June 13, 14 & 27); and a Beacon Tech Workshop: install a location-specific experience & work with developers to learn to […]
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Cannes 2015 Critics’ Notebook 2: Love and Youth
Quick, try to describe Irreversible and Enter the Void writer-director Gaspar Noé without relying on the words “controversial,” “provocateur,” “bad boy” (or, more Gallically put, “enfant terrible“) or “transgressive.” Noé’s latest potential scandal-maker, Love — hotly anticipated after smutty publicity materials teased it as a 3D art-house porno, complete with semen-sticky title treatment — was surprisingly softer and less shocking than anyone expected from last night’s midnight premiere. It’s also callow, shallow and numbingly insipid, despite its explicit mélange of blowjobs, threesomes and orgies. (Seriously, how does one make hardcore fucking more vanilla than Fifty Shades of Grey?) In a two-hour-plus scrapbook of flashbacks and time jumps forward, a […]
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IFP Partners With Film London To Bring UK Producers to Film Week
IFP has announced a partnership with Film London to bring two UK-based producers to Independent Film Week to partake in the No-Borders International Co-Production Market. Each year during Film Week, 35 producers with projects that have at least 20% funding in place participate in the No-Borders section to network with buyers, sales agents and financiers, in order to get their films off the ground. No-Borders has previously partnered with the likes of the Berlinale, Venice Biennale, and TorinoFilmLab, to allow international producers to partake in the US-based market. This is Film London’s first US partnership designed to benefit and foster UK producers. […]
