Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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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. […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Tribeca Film Festival Announces First Titles From Narrative, Documentary and Viewpoints Sections
On the heels of their Time Is Illmatic opening night announcement, Tribeca has released the first 47 of its 89 feature-length titles in the World Narrative and Documentary Competitions, as well as the non-competitive Viewpoints. Gabriel, the debut film from 25 New Face Lou Howe, which I can’t recommend enough, will open the Narrative section, with Dior and I and Onur Turkel’s Summer of Blood kicking off the Docs and Viewpoints, respectively. Other notable titles include Keith Miller’s latest, Five Star; Junebug scribe Angus MacLachlan’s directorial debut Goodbye to All That; d.p. Jody Lee Lipes’s Ballet 422; the Golden Bear-winning Black Coal, Thin Ice; Sundance hit The Overnighters and British prison drama Starred Up. Find the full list below. […]
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2014 Academy Award Winners
By this point, you’re probably well aware of who has a new golden figurine on his/her most prized mantelpiece this morning, but here’s the full list. I found the show relatively painless — in large thanks to Ellen DeGeneres and the show-stopping Adele Dazeem — with the predictable loss of The Act of Killing and its fellow “issue” docs to 20 Feet From Stardom a cynic’s microcosm for the affair. More curious was the passive agressive beef between 12 Years a Slave’s John Ridley and Steve McQueen, who seemed to go out of their way not to acknowledge one another in their respective […]
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True/False Diary 1: Approaching The Elephant, Demonstration, Sacro GRA
Halfway through, it’s too early to take the overall temperature of True/False 2014 in its 11th year (my fifth attending, each year with the hotel paid; full disclosure). All smooth so far, though it’s early going, so let’s forego atmospherics at this point and jump into one of the festival’s world premieres, Approaching The Elephant. (“Thanks for everyone being here for basically the highlight of my life,” director Amanda Rose Wilder said in her introduction.) The subject is “free schools”: further left on the continuum than Montessori, and (at least as practiced by the subject school’s founder Alex Khost) an […]
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Medieval Masterwork: Marketa Lazarova at BAM
In memory of Elliott Stein, the purest film maven I’ve ever known and the friend who first drew my attention to this film. The most familiar films of the Czech New Wave in the U.S. are most likely the dry dark comedies of Milos Forman and Ivan Passer; the diverse works of Jiri Menzel, Jan Kadar, Vera Chytilova and Juraj Jakubisko are recognized in more specialized circles. For Eastern and Central European cinephiles, however, the modernist historical drama Marketa Lazarova (1967), never lumped together with the movement, is not only the masterpiece of the era but also one of the […]
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True/False: A Place for World Premieres?
Despite its stated policy about not announcing a film’s premiere status, is the True/False Film Fest the new place to launch your documentary? In part one of a three part series, filmmaker and writer Robert Greene will chronicle the fortunes of five films that will world premiere at the 2014 True/False Film Festival, including his own, Actress. No film festival has meant more to me than True/False. My last two films (Kati with an I and Fake It So Real) began their lives in Columbia, MO — in front of the festival’s famously engaged crowds, amidst its street parades and […]
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Tribeca Film Festival’s #6SecFilms Competition Now Open
What happens when you distill filmmaking to its barebones, limiting runtime to six seconds, and the recording apparatus to a cell phone? Judging from last year’s winners of Tribeca’s #6SecFilms Vine competition, the answer is some pretty inventive stuff. Animators and genre fans alike can submit their Vines to the competition through March 27, using the #6SecFilms hashtag, along with the appropriate category: #drama, #comedy, #animation and #genre. The winners will receive a meeting with GrapeStory, a mobile marketing agency and production house. Last year’s winners and short-listers went on to be featured in the Super Bowl Budweiser ads and currently […]
