Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Organizing the First Sindh International Film Festival
Launching a film festival is no easy feat, and it’s even harder when you’re doing it in an area with little film industry infrastructure, plenty of political and social instability and a global reputation as a haven for Islamic extremists. But those odds against a strong festival in the southeastern Pakistani province of Sindh, which includes Karachi, actually make it all the more urgent for its organizers to create a successful event. Assad Zulfiqar Khan, an independent filmmaker who studied at the London Film School in the U.K., is among those spearheading the festival, and he spoke with me about […]
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Win a Trip to the Sundance Film Festival
It’s officially January, which means it’s officially almost time for Sundance. General Assembly, purveyor of programs and workshops for the budding technophile, is doing their part by giving away an all expenses paid package for two to this year’s festival. Beyond airfare and accommodations, the prize includes complimentary membership to the Sundance Institute and access to exclusive Park City screenings, panels, parties and so forth. To enter to win, simply fill in your email address at the link. The contest is open till January 6.
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Sundance Institute Announces 12 Projects for Screenwriters Lab
This afternoon the Sundance Institute unveiled the 12 projects that will be participating next month in its Screenwriters Lab. Among the filmmakers whose scripts were chosen are documentarian Jeremiah Zagar (In a Dream), whose first narrative script We the Animals (based on a book by Justin Torres) was also in IFP’s Emerging Storytellers, while another alum of that program (from 2011) selected here is Ryan Koo, with his project Manchild. Other notable participants this year imclude Jordana Spiro, the former TV actress whose short Skin played at Sundance 2012; uber inventive and wacky pop promo directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert […]
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Things Fall Apart: Alexander Carver and Daniel Schmidt’s The Unity of All Things at BAM’s Migrating Forms
The Unity of All Things, the first feature by artist Alexander Carver and filmmaker Daniel Schmidt, is an erotic queer sci-fi with an experimental narrative that combines particle physics, critique of global capitalism, various existential quandaries, and playfully perverse digressions into gender politics. It’s an unclassifiable micro-budget film shot on Super 16 and Super 8 in locations ranging from China, Switzerland, Chicago, and the Arizona desert, and has dialogue in at least three different languages. As its title might imply, the film’s ambition is undercut by a generous serving of self-aware humor. The film receives its New York premiere tonight […]
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“The Line Blurs:” Morals of Filmmaking
“Anything that happens in front of the camera is some kind of performance,” said experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs at the top of Tuesday’s “The Line Blurs: Shifting Narratives in Filmmaking” panel. Sachs, along with Caveh Zahedi, Josephine Decker, Keith Miller and moderator Nathan Silver, spent an hour debating the division between narrative and documentary forms at DCTV. The evening was chockfull of quotable quotes as the participants reflected on their own work with equal doses of humor and candor. Zahedi, for starters, admitted that he initially considered documentaries to be “the autistic younger brother of cinema,” and only labels his […]
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Marrakech International Film Festival 2013
In his role as Jury President of the Marrakech International Film Festival, Martin Scorsese described the method that he and his fellow jurors would apply when watching films: “We will not be like critics,” he said. “We love films too much.” The stars were out in full force at the Marrakech International Film Festival. The names accompanying The Wolf of Wall Street director on judging duty would have graced Cannes. The list included actresses Marion Cotillard, Patricia Clarkson and Golshifteh Farahani and directors Paolo Sorrentino, Fatih Akin, Park Chan-Wook, Amat Escalante, Narjiss Nejjar and Anurag Kashyap. The prize for best film went […]
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Leah Meyerhoff Receives IFP Labs Director’s Grant
IFP and the Adrienne Shelly Foundation announced yesterday that its 7th Annual IFP Labs Director’s Grant was awarded to Leah Meyerhoff and her film I Believe In Unicorns. The grant is open to female directors who are either alumni or current participants of the IFP Narrative Independent Filmmaker Lab. I Believe in Unicorns was a member of the 2012 edition, a recent finalist for the Gotham Awards Live the Dream Grant, as well as a selection in Tribeca’s All Access and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Emerging Visions programs. I Believe in Unicorns follows Davina (Natalia Dyer) who escapes her obligations to her […]
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Kristoffer Gansing on transmediale 2014
In 1988, VideoFilmFest launched as part of the Berlinale. It gradually evolved until it was rechristened the transmediale in 1998, and today it’s one of the premier festivals for film, art, video, and digital work. Kristoffer Gansing has been the festival’s artistic director since 2011, and for this year’s theme he’s selected the “afterglow,” an exploration of how media technologies and practices are turned into trash. As the festival’s website explains, “As media technologies have now become completely integrated into everyday life, they function similarly to natural resources, producing physical and immaterial waste products that get appropriated in such diverse contexts […]
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Sundance Unveils Shorts Lineup
The final piece of the Sundance puzzle emerges today in the shape of the shorts lineup, with that broken down into U.S. narrative, international narrative, doc and animation. With U.S. narrative, as ever there are a handful of directors already with features under their belts who are returning to the festival, such as Musa Syeed (The Big House), Todd Rohal (Rat Pack Rat) and Dustin Guy Defa (Person to Person ). There are also few directors with new work who have distinguished themselves already in shorts, such as The Strange Ones‘ co-director Christopher Radcliff (Jonathan’s Chest) and Boneshaker‘s Frances Bodomo (Afronauts), plus a handful […]
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Takeaways From Dogfish Accelerator’s Demo Day
Back in October, Filmmaker spoke with a few of the driving forces behind Dogfish Pictures’ Accelerator Program, which seeks to bring the start-up financing model to independent film production. I’m pleased to report that James Belfer and Company’s months of hard work culminated in a successful Demo Day at the Microsoft Technology Center in midtown Manhattan last Friday. For myself, and a few others in the audience who aren’t necessarily of the tech-ilk, it was our first brush with this sort of presentation marathon, where one or two representatives from each team take to the floor for with a Powerpoint pitch before […]
