Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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21 Films I’m Anticipating at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival
These lists get harder and harder. You know more filmmakers, you hear more buzz and honing in on pre-festival favorites with any kind of concision becomes more an act of exclusion than a celebration of possibility. (In other words, this list’s length is more determined by the pokiness of Delta’s on-flight wi-fi and the festival opening-day deadline than my enthusiasms for the selections of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.) Below are 21 festival picks, beginning with a favorite project I’ve been wanting to see realized for years. As you’ll note, I’ve paid particular attention to folks from our 25 New […]
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Tastemade Offers Video Previews of Sundance Restaurants
I have many pieces of advice for filmmakers, but here’s one I have for everyone attending the Sundance and Slamdance festivals this week: sit down and have a meal. Really. I mean, it’s ridiculously easy to subsist on hors d’oeuvres for a week, or to grab microwave burritos at the 7/11, or to nibble from the Albertsons/Fresh Market supply you loaded your refrigerator up with on the first day. But, such a dietary regime will make you feel bad, and you’ll probably get sick too. In addition, you’ll have better conversations with your friends over dinner at a real restaurant […]
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New Directors/New Films Announces First Titles in 2014 Lineup
Perhaps my favorite festival of the year, The Film Society’s New Directors/New Films has just announced its first seven titles for the 2014 edition. Immediate notables include Richard Ayoade’s The Double, which bows at Sundance this week following its well-received Toronto premiere, and Albert Serra’s Locarno Golden Leopard prize winner, Story of My Death. (Death was recently the cover story in a strongly recommended issue of Cinema-Scope.) As ever, there are still obscure debuts to be found in Of Horses and Men and Trap Street, ensuring the festival’s spirit of discovery is alive and well. This year’s ND/NF is set for March 19-30 at Lincoln Center, and […]
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The Sundance Queer Preview — 2014 Edition
The most exciting film festival in America gets underway next week. The prestigious Sundance Film Festival will unspool more than 120 new features, shorts, documentaries and innovative media projects in Park City, Utah from January 16th to 26th — showcasing, as always, a hefty slate of LGBT films for the edification of the citizens of Utah and the visiting masses. With the Sundance stamp of approval chances are good that you’ll be seeing many of these have some kind of release in 2014 (whether at your own local LGBT film fest, art house theater, digital platform or else on DVD). […]
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Sundance Adds Richard Linklater’s Boyhood to 2014 Slate
Sundance has snuck in a few late additions to its slate (Clerks, Wish I Was Here, Lambert & Stamp) and now comes the final of these, which is also arguably the most exciting: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. The film, also known as “The Twelve Year Project,” was shot over a dozen years (2002 to 2013) with a small cast and covers the progression from youth to adulthood of a family and, principally, the children Mason (Ellar Coltrane) and Samantha (Lorelei Linklater). The parents are played by Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette. Linklater has for some time insisted that Boyhood would not remain the […]
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Hawaii International Film Festival 2013
Bryan Cranston as a Polish gangster; Chuuk immigrants in Guam; a Japanese superhero dressed only in women’s panties; Honolulu transit controversies; a home run-hitting gorilla; and filmmaking initiatives from the Cook Islands — all these and more were on display during last month’s Hawaii International Film Festival. New films by Jia Zhang-ke, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Hayao Miyazaki, Brillante Mendoza and Dante Lam dominated the festival’s solid Asian lineup, while emerging talents such as Tze Chun and Steven J. Kung led its selection of American work. Casting its nets far closer to shore, the festival also highlighted local Hawaiian and Pacific Islander […]
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The Long and the Short of the Cinema Eye Honors 2014
The Cinema Eye Honors is always one of the most enjoyable and lively awards shows of the year, and arguably the most intimate; at no other awards show is there such a sense of an entire community coming together. This year, the short film that prefaced the awards — which was compromised of pictures of all the nominees — ended with the words, “We are Cinema Eye. We are on each other’s team.” And that sense of unity and people pulling together was underlined in the opening words of AJ Schnack, who called on the filmmakers present to stand together […]
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RIDM 2013
Montreal is a city lousy with festivals — even the harsh winter temperatures can’t seem to keep them away. Upon landing in town to attend Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal (RIDM) this November, two music festivals had representatives waiting at the airport, eager to claim me as one of their own. The documentary film festival, founded in 1998 just a few years after the birth of that other, perhaps better-known Canadian nonfiction extravaganza Hot Docs, has carved out a niche for itself, developing an audience eager for documentaries in the vein of their Toronto counterparts. Screenings and panels were […]
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Sundance Offers 2014 Artist Merch, Including Miranda July Scarf
At Filmmaker we are lousy with merch. We used to have t-shirts and tote bags, and they sold okay. But supplies dwindled, they were discontinued, and a more ambitious array of Filmmaker-branded collectibles is just another item on our escalating to-do list. (Filmmaker, by the way, is not alone in our merchandizing malaise. Elsewhere on this site, Sarah Salovaara notes the scarcity of indie film consumer swag in general.) Perhaps when we do get our merch store together we’ll look to Sundance for inspiration. The Sundance Film Festival’s Artist Editions line includes Shirin Neshat t-shirts, Susan Sarandon dessert plates, and […]
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How Jewish Is It: Best of the NYJFF
Today it’s fairly easy to order films with Jewish subject matter from Eastern European countries — but think back 22 years. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a number of so-called Jewish films began production in the former Soviet Union and its satellites. In 1990 the huge San Francisco Jewish Film Festival successfully tested the waters of glasnost by holding the event in Moscow. As a result Wanda Bershen, then director of the broadcast archive at New York’s Jewish Museum, approached Richard Pena, who was at that time program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. […]
