Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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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 […]
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Sundance Announces Premieres and Doc Premieres Strands
Traditionally, the Premieres section at Sundance is a bit of a mixed bag, with some films by good directors but with a premium put on star power over actual quality. The 2014 Premieres lineup announced today is, however, packed with movies that, at least on paper, are genuinely exciting. There’s Calvary, the latest from The Guard‘s writer/director John Michael McDonagh, Ira Sachs’ Love is Strange, starring Alfred Molina and John Lithgow as longtime lovers who finally tie the knot, and Mike Cahill’s followup to Another Earth, the sci-fi I Origins. “25 New Face” Sara Colangelo’s debut feature Little Accidents (starring […]
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“The Line Blurs” at DCTV
Tomorrow evening at 7:30 pm, DCTV will be hosting “The Line Blurs: Shifting Narratives in Filmmaking,” a panel on the increasingly ambiguous division between fiction and nonfiction in filmmaking. It is a timely discussion, one that will probe questions as to whether or not a delineation between the two forms has ever existed, and why viewers and critics alike are bent on categorization. The panel will feature filmmakers Josephine Decker, Keith Miller, Lynne Sachs and Caveh Zahedi, with Nathan Silver in the moderator’s chair. Silver, director of Soft In The Head and Exit Elena, shoots without a script, mining the people […]
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Sundance Announce Spotlight, Midnight, Kids and New Frontier Titles
Yesterday Sundance released its initial slate and today the second burst of titles emerges. In Spotlight, which houses fest favorites (many by alumni of the festival and/or the labs), there’s only one title that’s new to me, namely R100, Hitoshi Matsumoto’s wild erotic comedy about a “mild-mannered family man with a secret taste for S&M” who “finds himself pursued by a gang of ruthless dominatrices—each with a unique talent.” That’s definitely one to check out. In the Midnight section, new films from Adam Wingard and Taika Waititi (who reunites with his Eagle vs Shark star Jemaine Clement in a vampire mockumentary) are definitely […]
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James Gray Blasts Film Critic Peter Bradshaw Over Immigrant Review (and Bradshaw Responds)
At the Marrakech International Film Festival, American director James Gray fired a broadside at British critics who reviewed his new film, The Immigrant, out of the Cannes Film Festival, singling out the much-respected and acclaimed film critic of The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw. Speaking to a group of international journalists on a roundtable he called The Guardian review, “The dumbest review I’ve ever read.” Without referring to Bradshaw by name, but citing the review extensively, he called Bradshaw, “a failure as a critic,” and “corrupt.” Gray turned on British critics when he was asked by Finnish journalist Kalle Kinnunen about the […]
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Sundance 2014 Competition and NEXT Titles Announced
Slamdance was yesterday, and now it’s the Sundance Film Festival who are putting out their initial competition slates. There’s no single opening movie anymore, but instead Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, Todd Miller’s doc Dinosaur 13, Hong Khaou’s narrative feature Lilting and Nadav Schirman’s Israeli doc The Green Prince kick off things on January 16. I’m always excited to see lineups that have a mixture of work by familiar faces and names that are as yet unfamiliar to me, and this is definitely one of those. In the U.S. Dramatic Competition, there are films from Joe Swanberg, Jim Mickle, Craig Johnson, Carter Smith and the Zellner brothers plus debuts […]
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IFP Guest Curates “One Million Square Feet of Culture” in Miami
Alongside Miami’s Art Basel — the international art show that runs through Saturday — IFP has teamed with One Million Square Feet of Culture to guest curate a series of technology-centric events. Installed at the Wynwood Cigar Factory across (more precisely) 3,045 square feet are three programs: Emotional Arcade, The 78 Project, and BlabDroids. Designed by Brent Hoff and Alex Reben, modified EEG headsets are the tricks of the trade in the Emotional Arcade, where unchecked emotions are a game-winning currency. Alex Steyermark and Lavinia Jones Wright view The 78 Project as an opportunity to record today’s music with yesterday’s technology. Using […]
