Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Documentary Shortlist Announced for 2013 Academy Awards
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences today announced the shortlist of 15 films from the five nominees for Best Documentary will be chosen. That announcement comes on January 16, but until then we can pore over a pretty strong list, featuring Gotham winner The Act of Killing plus new films from such vets as Alex Gibney, Alan Berliner, Lucy Walker and Jehane Noujaim plus crowd favorites from newcomers such as Zachary Heinzerling (Cutie and the Boxer) and Gabriela Cowperthwaite (Blackfish). There are also inevitably a number of notable absentees, such as Lana Wilson and Martha Shane’s After Tiller, […]
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Slamdance 2014 Lineup Announced
The main competition lineup for the 2014 Slamdance Film Festival was announced today for the event which runs, parallel to Sundance, in Park City between January 17 and 23. The two titles two particularly catch my eye in the Narrative section are Copenhagen by Mark Raso, and Jay Alvarez’s I Play With The Phrase Each Other. Raso, a Student Academy Award winner in 2012, blogged for Filmmaker during the making of his low-budget feature debut (you can read those posts here), while Alvarez — also a first-time director — has ambitiously crafted a black-and-white film which is made up entirely […]
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The Other Moments of the 2013 Gotham Awards
Almost a decade ago, I was assigned to cover an LA-based awards show by The London Times. I was attending as the guest of an employee of the organization which put on the show and so was afforded access that a journalist might not get. I remember sitting up in the gods, watching the show, getting the same experience one would get watching on television, except from a great distance. During the second commercial break, after watching the usually hilarious host stumble through some mostly unfunny material, I realized that I had literally nothing to write about and that the […]
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Inside Llewyn Davis, Fruitvale Station Take Top Prizes at the Gotham Awards
Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coen Brothers’ sly fable of the artist’s life set in the ’60s Greenwich Village folk scene, was awarded the Best Feature prize at last night’s IFP Gotham Awards, held at Cipriani Wall Street. The film was something of a surprise winner, with many predicting Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave to take the top prize. Also scoring at the Gothams was Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, which won the Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director and Breakthrough Actor for Coogler and Michael B. Jordan, respectively. The Best Documentary Award went to Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn and Anonymous’s The Act […]
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Your Reading List for the 2013 Gotham Independent Film Awards
The 2013 Gotham Independent Film Awards take place tonight. The show is live-streaming here, but to complement your viewing experience you can also read extensively about the nominated films tonight. Below is a full reading list of articles on the Filmmaker website on the movies in contention. Good luck to all involved, and good reading! 12 Years a Slave Screenwriter John Ridley Talks 12 Years a Slave The Act of Killing Caught on Film Errol Morris Let’s Loose on The Act of Killing Controversy Joshua Oppenheimer on How Limitations Shaped The Act of Killing The Act of Killing Takes Top Prize at CPH:DOX Afternoon Delight Sundance Responses: Afternoon […]
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Shored Up, Opening Today in N.Y., Tackles Rising Tides and Coastal Development
Opening today at Cinema Village in New York is Ben Kalina’s Shored Up, a documentary tackling the issue of rising tides and coastal development. From the film’s website: Our beaches and coastline are a national treasure, a shared resource, a beacon of sanity in a world of constant change…and they’re disappearing in front of us. Shored Up is a documentary that asks tough questions about our coastal communities and our relationship to the land. What will a rising sea do to our homes, our businesses, and the survival of our communities? Can we afford to pile enough sand on our […]
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Cinematography, Transmedia Classes at the Made in NY Media Center
The new Made in NY Media Center by IFP has announced a round of classes and presentations for December and is offering Filmmaker subscribers a discount for the two involving transmedia. On December 7, one of today’s great cinematographers, Declan Quinn, will present a five-hour master class in the shooting of Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas. “In this Master Class, Quinn will deconstruct Leaving Las Vegas, scene-by- scene, while discussing his process, choices, obstacles, challenges – what worked and what didn’t,” reads the promo copy. Presented in partnership with Local 600, the day begins at 10:00 AM with a screening […]
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Gael García Bernal on Documentaries
“Let’s go back to the time when there was VHS,” says Gael García Bernal at the RIDM (Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal or the Montreal International Documentary Festival). “In those days to see a documentary in Mexico your friend would buy a movie in New York or Amsterdam or wherever [and] they would come up to you and say, ‘If you want to see this…’” Inevitably, a documentary fell into the young García Bernal’s hands. “I don’t remember which one it was, but I remember feeling there was something beyond an investigation, that it had a bigger scope, a […]
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The 21st CamerImage International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography
On the festival circuit, technicians generally get the short shrift. They work long, hard hours for weeks on end, often for less money than they ought to get rewarded with, towards a film that will ultimately have someone else’s name above the title or next to the “a film by” credit on the poster. Sure, they might get a shout out from a director while standing on stage at the closing night awards ceremony to go along with their fee, but glory is usually reserved for others. Not so at the CamerImage International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography […]
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12 Years a Slave Tops 2014 Independent Spirit Awards Nominations
This afternoon, Film Independent announced their nominees for the 2014 Independent Spirit Awards in Los Angeles, California. Designed as an opportunity to recognize the niche films that are muscled out of the circuit by Hollywood headliners, the show has in recent years become increasingly Academy friendly. Though 12 Years a Slave unsurprisingly leads the pack with seven nominations, it’s nice to see a handful of wild cards getting their due. A couple of notable deviations: the ISA’s first award for Best Editing — perhaps my favorite category, with essential nominations for Upstream Color and Museum Hours — and six, instead […]
