Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
-
Kieślowski, WarGames and the ’80s: Carleton Ranney on Jackrabbit
Set in the not-too-distant future, Carleton Ranney’s debut feature Jackrabbit observes two young hackers living in City Six, a dystopian urban environment still recovering from The Reset, an event which caused the city to literally go back to square one. Interacting with the outside world via computers and video game systems that go back to user-friendly technology’s infancy (we’re talking pre-Pong), Simon and Max attempt to uncover the secret of a mutual friend’s murder, while fighting to escape City Six and the police/surveillance state they’ve grown accustomed to. An Orwellian fable, Jackrabbit is steeped in political paranoia and a fascination with the impersonal implications of a corporatized America. […]
-
The Power of Story: Previewing the 2015 Tribeca Film Festival
Story. Storytelling. Experience. Community. Story, story, story! Talk to the heads of the Tribeca Film Festival and its programmers, and you’ll soon pick up on the event’s messaging this year. A festival that, as Robert DeNiro said at yesterday’s press lunch, was originally intended to be a “one-time thing” is now something of a New York institution. But it continues to evolve. At a sit down earlier in the week, Festival Director Geoff Gilmore, Tribeca Enterprises Executive V.P. Paula Weinstein and senior programmer Cara Cusamano spoke of today’s film viewing and festival landscape — how we are in, as Tribeca […]
-
Cannes Announces 2015 Competition Lineup
Below you’ll find the as-of-now lineup for the Cannes Film Festival, which takes this play this year from May 13 to 24. A few notes: there will be more titles added to competition soon (fingers crossed for the new Apichatpong Weerasethakul), and this isn’t the full extent of the festival. Next week will see the announcement of the Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week sections, and there are other less prominent parts of the festival (such as the ACID sidebar) that also have yet to be unveiled. A special shout-out to Roberto Minervini, whose excellent Stop the Pounding Heart debuted at Cannes […]
-
Camera Lucida: Edgardo Cozarinsky on Letter to a Father
“I have often wondered what makes us keep things that we know are bound to disappear,” states the narrator of the film Letter to a Father (2013). The voice belongs to Letter’s filmmaker, Edgardo Cozarinsky, who was born in Buenos Aires in 1939 and has spent much of his life in Paris. The things he has kept over time include items pertaining to his father, Mirón Cozarinsky, a naval officer he barely knew who passed away when he was 20 years old. In the Argentinian director’s most recent feature-length film, he visits his father’s hometown of Clara (located in the central Entre Ríos province) for the first time. […]
-
Counter-Brogramming: The 39th Atlanta Film Festival
Atlanta Film Festival falls right on the heels of SXSW, and its penchant for women directors and strong female leads is refreshing after Austin, where lesser Indiewood bro-coms go to die and where this year even some of my favorite films veered into man-child territory. Kristy Breneman and Christina Humphrey, the two young programmers behind Atlanta’s welcome change of pace, have inherited the 39-year-old festival and are crafting an earnestly community-minded identity in the midst of a rapidly changing city. Its growth is in part due to the fact that tax incentives have enticed more productions from Hollywood to Atlanta […]
-
Anything Can Happen: True/False’s Sidebar Neither/Nor 2015 Investigated Polish Documentary Traditions
Now in its third year, the Neither/Nor sidebar of the annual True/False Film Festival has quickly become both a fundamental facet and essential rejoinder to the curatorial ideal of the program proper. Free of categorical imperatives, the festival’s binary brand has become over time a kind of shorthand for an often uncategorizable strain of filmmaking in which the ethos of nonfiction is consistently complicated by the visual language of fiction. The idea behind Neither/Nor is the reconstruction of a continuum between past and present iterations of this method, teasing out parallels between classic and contemporary storytelling modes while contextualizing the […]
-
In Conversation: The Second Annual Treefort Film Festival
About halfway through my viewing at the Treefort Film Festival – predominately spent lounging on burlap sacks and church pews, repurposed for the inside of a tent – an anomalous, entirely welcome, framework began to take shape. At most regional festivals, the program tends to be a rather mixed bag, with titles culled from disparate, big name destinations, void of the necessary context for a non-industry crowd. But at the Boise-based, 2nd annual Treefort, the relatively compact, thoughtful selection of shorts and features appeared to be in constant dialogue with one another. Take, for instance, the standing-room-only double feature of Scott Cummings’ Buffalo […]
-
The Tyranny of Interconnection: Two SXSW Films Tackle the Social Technology Present/Future
In a half empty hotel ballroom in Austin last week, Brian Schuster — a porn entrepreneur giving a lecture on the future of the adult industry — introduced the concept of “the social singularity,” the idea that the difference between our networked relationships and our IRL ones will eventually become indistinguishable. With texts, tweets, Skype, and FaceTime, we’re already getting pretty close to that futuristic premise, something a lot of films still struggle to incorporate into their storytelling. But two of the best films this year at SXSW, Ben Dickinson’s Creative Control and Eugene Kotlyarenko’s A Wonderful Cloud, updated familiar […]
-
“Everyone Wants to Think Their Child could be President”: Morgan Krantz on Babysitter
Writer/director Morgan Krantz’s first feature Babysitter was accepted into SXSW as a work in progress, so Krantz was working on it until the very week it premiered. “It was hot off the presses, and suddenly it was on the big screen at the Ritz,” he says. Babysitter revolves around a teenage boy and his relationships with the women in his life: his Wiccan babysitter, his mom who’s using him as a pawn in her divorce from his father, and the druggie girl he has a crush on in school. As an indie drama that invites conversation about topics like feminism […]
-
Words and All: New Directors/New Films (II)
Hej hej JJ If doomsday scenarios compromised by persistent protagonists were the common denominator among the finest in week one of the back-loaded New Directors/New Films, the second week’s standouts hail successful rebounds. Entropy, smugness, resignation, and delusional security make way for palpable commitment, be it political, psychological, or emotional. The shared backdrop is the guarded, mine-ridden sphere of male bonding, more often than not inside restrictive institutions — a pair of bromances that take place within military bases and their outposts; a boy-gang dystopic chiller that revises the conventional sleepaway-school movie — but also within the split psyche of a […]
