Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
-
Pieces of Eight: New Directors/New Films (I)
Spring is a always a godsend, especially so after a harsh winter. For discerning cinephiles, it marks an end and a beginning. The exhausting awards season is over. It is followed in New York by a celebratory spring cleaning, a shift in priorities to some of the finest emerging directors from all over the world in the prestigious and prophetic New Directors/New Films, now in its 43rd edition (March 19-30). Not only do the principal artistic creators get their due, but, unlike the U.S.-centric January-to-March hyperamas, the pool of pictures is fiercely international. How does ND/NF’s focus on the filmmaker […]
-
Cinereach Offers “Artist Appreciation Gifts” to Moviegoers
Cinereach, the not-for-profit film support and production company, is offering moviegoers who see at least two of the four Cinereach-supported pictures in theaters this month special, one-of-a-kind artist gifts. The films — all of which are very good, by the way — are Matt Wolf’s Teenage, Tom Gilroy’s The Cold Lands, Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love and Daniel Carbone’s Hide Your Smiling Faces. (The first two are at the IFC Center in New York now; It Felt Like Love opens next week and Hide Your Smiling Faces on the 28th). Here is info from Cinereach: Why? Indie releases unite! […]
-
ornana’s Jim Cummings On How To Combat The Digital Recession and Lessons To Learn From “South Park”
“Our degrees cost us about $90,000 a piece, and in the last five years of making movies, the three of us together have made about $5,000 from our work.” That’s ornana producer Jim Cummings speaking at his Future 15s New Media talk at SXSW last Sunday. Drawing from his article series over at Ted Hope’s Truly Free Film, Cummings gave a micro-keynote on what he calls “The Digital Recession,” the supersaturation of content and what can be done to effectively combat the glut. Cummings made the common observation that nowadays, any old person is encouraged by “camera companies, film festivals, and arts […]
-
Full Frame Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival today announced its lineup for the festival to be held April 3-6 in Durham. Along with the full list of feature and short documentaries are a Full Frame Tribute to veteran documentarian Steve James and the titles in the Thematic Program, which this year is called “Approaches to Character” and is under the curation of Lucy Walker. In a response to the honor of a retrospective, James said, “I’m excited to have so many of my films play again in front of the appreciative audiences at Full Frame. It will give me a rare opportunity […]
-
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 […]
