Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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CRIME: The Animated Series Hits Toronto
Documentarian, director, visual artist, and author Alix Lambert has yet another new project making its way around the world. CRIME: The Animated Series — directed in partnership with award-winning animator Sam Chou — debuted as part of MOCAtv in Los Angeles back in July (here’s Filmmaker’s post about that event). One of these animated tales, CRIME: Joe Loya — The Beirut Bandit, is playing the Toronto International Film Festival this week (click here for dates and times) and is sure to have audiences talking about just more than it being the shortest film to screen at TIFF. In the two-minute short, […]
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Dear Irrfan Khan, I Love You
I fell in love this week at Toronto. It started as an attraction during In Treatment, when he was depressed, and took four minutes of screen time to roll a cigarette. It grew during The Namesake. And then when I watched Life of Pi on an airplane and he made me cry – even more than how much I normally cry when watching movies on planes – I started feeling feelings. As I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of a sleeping passenger beside me, I knew what was happening: I had an actor crush. But during an 8AM screening of […]
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Writer/director John Ridley Talks about his Hendrix Pic, All is By My Side
With so many overstuffed biographical dramas barreling from cradle to grave, the creative possibilities of the intimate biopic, one focused on a formative and often little known period in a subject’s life, are often neglected by writers and directors. Thankfully, though, that’s the approach taken by screenwriter and second-time director John Ridley to one of the most iconic and fan-obsessed-over cultural figures of the 20th century, Jimi Hendrix. Starring André Benjamin (Outkast’s André 3000) as the iconic singer and guitarist, All Is By My Side focuses on a year or so in Hendrix’s life and how a song written for […]
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12 Steps to Avoid Going Broke Applying to Film Festivals
The author of this guest essay is a filmmaker whose most recent film is Between Us. He is also the co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival. — Editor I recently wrote an article about 12 Steps to a Saner Festival Plan in which I suggested the volume-method of festivals: Get your film into as many festivals as you can, and build momentum from one to the next. Unfortunately, a lot of people read that article. And the one consistent question I’m getting is if we’re broke filmmakers, how can we afford to apply to so many festivals? Chances are you […]
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We are the Visitors: On Godfrey Reggio’s Masterwork
The Toronto International Film Festival this year permitted me to look back and remember the first independent movie I ever saw when I was 15 years old, Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law. That film made me want to run away from home and make movies, and I did. This year I saw his new film, Only Lovers Left Alive, as well as another film by a director whose work was formative for me. The same year I saw Down By Law I was listening to cassette tapes of Philip Glass, music I had taped from vinyl albums belonging to people […]
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Venice 2013 Critic’s Notebook: A Means of Escape — African Cinema on the Lido.
At this year’s Venice Film Festival, there was a conspicuously sparse showing in the programme for native African and African-themed cinema. However, although the majority of these slim pickings were tucked away toward the end of the festival when attendance had thinned considerably (many journalists had either headed home or departed to Toronto), their quality was largely impressive. To varying degrees, these films broached an historically enduring theme in African cinema: the attempts of young people to escape straitened circumstances. The only sub-Saharan representative at the festival — and the most harrowing film I saw overall — was Berlin-based Israeli […]
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TIFF 2013: Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
One of the more anticipated films of a very strong Wavelengths section, Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness unspooled Saturday night to a packed house at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall. A true collaborative effort by two major filmmakers, the feature follows a black guitar player, Robert A.A. Lowe, from a northern Finland commune through a solitary journey across a lake into an isolated wilderness to the climactic scene on a stage in Estonia, where he performs with a black metal band. The film is less of a character study than it is the […]
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Thank Heaven for Seven: The Best of NewFest
This year marks the 25th anniversary of NewFest (September 6-11), kissin’ cousin of LA’s OutFest. Before the acronym LGBT became a more inclusive umbrella for groups stigmatized on account of sexual and gender preference, an earlier incarnation of a queer film event, The New York Gay Film Festival (1979-1987), was the only game in town. Founded by Peter Lowy, it took place at the Thalia cinema, then a film-buff paradise on the Upper West Side, and filled a huge gap for many of us. Distributors were fearful of gay-themed films. Of the selection, recurring topics included coming out and of […]
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The Future of Storytelling: Tom Perlmutter on the Evolution of Cinema
The Future of Storytelling has announced the date of its second annual summit — October 3, in New York City. In the interview below, the National Film Board of Canada’s Tom Perlmutter expounds on his belief that new forms of storytelling will change the world. For more, read the press release below and visit the Future of Storytelling website. The Future of StoryTelling (FoST) will host its second annual summit in New York City on Thursday, October 3rd. FoST gathers a community of storytellers across all disciplines—including film, TV, publishing, music, gaming, journalism, adverting, and more—to explore how technology is […]
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Indie Film Truly Underground: The 2013 Toronto Urban Film Festival
TIFF isn’t the only festival opening in Toronto this week. For the last six years, the high-profile screenings along King Street West have been accompanied by a cadre of short silent videos screening on monitors in the city’s underground subway stations. The Toronto Urban Film Festival (TUFF, a nice titular contrast with TIFF) draws submissions from all over the world and — due to its restricted format as much as in spite of it — elicits some of the most innovative filmmaking on show in the city. It’s also seen by thousands more viewers than its above-ground counterpart. This year’s […]
