Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Indie Memphis Prizes Unheralded Indies in 16th Edition
Memphis is the largest city on the Mississippi River and Tennessee’s most populous; funny that more than a few folks visiting from coasts east and west refer to it as a small town. A place well known for violent reckonings with history, the ghosts of more than a few legendary men haunt the streets east of its unassuming downtown, located on the fourth of the chickasaw bluffs stretching from the Wolf River to the Mississippi. The more sordid aspects of the place’s past, both long ago and fairly recent, mingle freely with its great cultural legacies; Sun Studios, where Elvis […]
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Desert Storm: the 7th Abu Dhabi Film Festival
Poor Tobe Hooper. It’s got to be tough to be best known for movies made over 40 years ago and desperate enough for a paycheck to make something like Djinn, the first movie I saw at this year’s Abu Dhabi Film Festival and perhaps the most astoundingly inane motion picture I’ll see all year. “Rosemary’s Baby meets The Shining in an ominously empty residential tower halfway between Dubai and Abu Dhabi” is apparently a pitch that gets you $9 million from ImageNation, the Abu Dhabi-based film finance outfit to make a rote and clumsy and predictable horror movie, with waves […]
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Five Films Announced for 8th Annual Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You Series at MoMA
Filmmaker, Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), and The Museum of Modern Art announce today the five films chosen for the organization’s annual Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You series, running November 15 – 18 in MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2. They are: Eddie Mullins’ Doomsdays; Kevin Jerome Everson’s The Island of St. Matthews; Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love; Aaron Douglas Johnston’s My Sister’s Quinceanera and Benjamin Greené’s Survival Prayer. As always, Filmmaker editors (myself, Nick Dawson, Brandon Harris, Alicia Van Couvering and Ray Pride), the IFP’s Milton Tabbot and, new this year, MoMA’s Sophie Cavoulacos have […]
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“25 New Faces” Tour Kicks Off November 16
Following screenings in Tacoma, Portland, and New York, three of this year’s “25 New Faces” are hitting the road to showcase their short films. Joined by Filmmaker Managing Editor Nick Dawson, Scott Blake (Surveyor), Anahita Ghazvinizadeh (Needle) and Mohammad Gorjestani (Refuge) will travel from Madison to Nashville on a tour sponsored by Sony Creative Software and ARRI. The full stops, as well as descriptions of the films and filmmakers, are listed below. THE 25 NEW FACES OF INDEPENDENT FILM TOUR CALENDAR: Saturday, November 16, 2013 UW-Madison Cinematheque, Madison, WI 3pm (tickets) Sunday November 17, 2013 Cleveland Cinematheque, Cleveland, OH 8pm (tickets) Monday November 18, 2013 […]
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Polish Progress: American Indies in Wroclaw
If any one moment encapsulated the fervor for U.S. independent cinema among the young cinephiles of Wroclaw (pronounced Vrot-swof, by the way), it arrived at around 11:00 PM on my final night of attendance at the 4th edition of the city’s American Film Festival (22-27 Oct, 2013). I was strolling back to my hotel in the company of Killer Films honcho Christine Vachon and Tennessee-based producer Ashley Maynor when a lissome young Polish fellow with rosy cheeks, Kurt Cobain hair, and a T-shirt bearing the legend ‘Hipsters Don’t Wear Frames’ suddenly appeared. With a shallowness of breath that suggested he’d […]
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Nick Kroll to Host 2013 Gotham Independent Film Awards
Comedian and actor Nick Kroll was announced this afternoon as the host of the 2013 Gotham Independent Film Awards, which will take place at Cipriani Wall Street in Manhattan on December 2. Kroll is perhaps best known for playing Ruxin on the FX sitcom The League, and also stars in Kroll Show, which started airing on Comedy Central earlier this year. Commenting on the announcement, IFP’s Executive Director Joana Vicente said, “We are so thrilled that Nick Kroll will be hosting the Gotham Awards this year. Coming off an exciting year with a new Comedy Central series, and winning the […]
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In Transition: Tokyo International Film Festival 2013
The Tokyo International Film Festival is having something of an identity crisis. This year saw the arrival of Yasushi Shiina as the festival’s Director General. He acknowledged that the festival faced a list of problems. Chief amongst them is that despite it being the 26th year of the event, it hardly registers a blip on the overcrowded film festival calendar. “What I think is my job is that we tell the world that the Tokyo Film Festival exists in Japan and we let the world know that,” Shiina said. “We don’t want to be isolated.” He cited a number of problems […]
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Gangsters, Baseball, Bathhouses and Bill: The 22nd Annual Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival
Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Toronto, Sheffield – Hot Springs, Arkansas? When one thinks of big doc fests, the onetime playground of Al Capone – and Bill Clinton’s childhood home – doesn’t immediately spring to mind. Yet this historic spa town, containing 47 natural hot springs and Hot Springs National Park, the oldest federal reserve in the U.S., also hosts the country’s oldest doc fest. Now in its impressive 22nd year, the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival exceeded my expectations and then some, its programmers bringing in high-quality nonfiction fare – not to mention topnotch filmmakers and colorful characters – that perfectly aligned […]
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Jamie Stuart’s NYFF51, Shot on the Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera
Jamie Stuart was back at the New York Film Festival this year, getting up to his usual antics, except this time with a hot new camera, the Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera. (You can read his review of the camera here.) Look out for appearances by a host of film luminaries who graced NYFF this year — Alexander Payne, Spike Jonze, Tom Hanks, the Coen brothers, John Goodman, Tilda Swinton and Rooney Mara — plus cameos from Glenn Kenny and, um, me.
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12 Years a Slave Leads 2013 Gotham Award Nominations
IFP this morning announced the nominations for the 2013 edition of the Gotham Independent Film Awards, with Steve McQueen’s Oscar front-runner 12 Years a Slave leading the pack with nods in three categories, Best Feature, Best Actor and Breakthrough Actor. Receiving two nominations were Alexandre Moors’ Blue Caprice, Stacie Passon’s Concussion, Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station, Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis and Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color. Commenting on today’s release, Joana Vicente, Executive Director of IFP and the Made in NY Media Center, said, “The Gotham Awards celebrate and showcase the very best of the vibrant, entertaining, challenging, and innovative films presented by our community, and help new […]
