Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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43 Takeaways from Sundance Artist Services Day at the IFP Filmmaker Conference
“The most important task is to make great movies,” said Sundance Institute Executive Director Keri Putnam at the start of Thursday’s Artist Services Workshop at IFP’s Filmmaker Conference. “All this talk about audiences is meaningless unless you have something in your heart you want to get out there.” However, Putnam’s comments were not to construe that filmmakers shouldn’t think about the rapidly changing world of distribution, marketing and audience building. As Putnam went on to say, it is “easier, less expensive to make a movie, but no easier to find an audience. There is a volume of movies and a […]
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Eleanor Burke Receives IFP Durga Entertainment Filmmaker Grant
Last Sunday evening at Lincoln Center, Eleanor Burke was awarded the first ever IFP Durga Entertainment Filmmaker Grant, which offers a $20,000 prize to an IFP alum who juggles filmmaking and parenting. Burke attended the 2009 IFP Filmmaker Labs with her debut Stranger Things, and the 2012 No Borders Co-Production Market with Bright as Day, which Burke says is “about an aging anti-social wanderer and a teenage truant who band together to save an abandoned horse.” The script also took part in the Sundance Producing Lab and the Hamptons Screenwriting Lab. Concurrently, Burke is prepping Through and Through, which will participate in the Venice Biennale College Cinema in […]
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Fact or Fiction: The Toronto International Film Festival
If The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) is to be judged on the world premieres it attracts, this edition of the festival was far from vintage. Artistic Director Cameron Bailey signaled a change in policy this year when he declared that no film playing at Telluride would be allowed to debut in Canada until after the all-important first weekend. He even broke with tradition by declaring the exact status of films playing at TIFF, and, since the program is announced before Telluride reveals its line-up, anyone that cared would know many of the films that would be playing at Telluride […]
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IFP Announces its New Theatrical Platform “Screen Forward” and its First Five Theatrical Screenings
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker Magazine‘s parent organization, announced the first five projects to get weeklong theatrical runs at the state of the art Made In NY Media Center’s theater as part of the Screen Forward program. Starting October 17th, the program will give filmmakers in the process of self-distribution the unique opportunity to gain a much-coveted NYC theatrical week-run, with IFP working with each filmmaking team on comprehensive audience engagement and grassroots outreach strategies, publicity support, coverage in Filmmaker Magazine, and a revenue split to all participating filmmakers. The fall slate includes: Josephine Decker’s Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely; Paul Harrill’s Something, […]
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A Place for Research and Discovery: The Venice Film Festival
Even the rain knocked down the Lions. When a storm hit the Lido island around the central-weekend turning point, delegates could be seen gleefully snapping pictures of the overturned statues outside the Casinò, a simplistic metaphor for the Venice Film Festival’s shaky status in recent years. You’d think the bronze lions themselves would be tired of hearing stories about Toronto and the shrinking circuit space for awards-season launchpads. However, with the Toronto/Telluride battle over world premieres turning nasty and some bolder picks than usual from the NYFF, Venice director Alberto Barbera was wise to renounce the star-chasing madness and to […]
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Watch: 17 TIFF Shorts Available on Vimeo
The distribution rollout for short form work remains a tenuous enterprise, at best. Aside from throwing it up on Vimeo or YouTube, and hoping it catches the eye of a curated site like Short of the Week, many filmmakers end up sitting on their shorts for months after their festival premiere. Vimeo is shaking up that paradigm by offering 17 shorts from the Toronto International Film Festival’s Short Cuts program — which the streaming site sponsors — online through September 19. These include the Jury Prize winning A Single Body, which offers insight into an earnest male friendship; the Shane Carruth-starring everything & everything & everything; the sci-fi Entangled, from […]
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Between the Familiar and the Strange: TIFF Wavelengths 2014
Amidst the overwhelming landscape of the Toronto International Film Festival, the Wavelengths program provides a more tightly focused forum for experimental and avant-garde cinema. Until 2012, Wavelengths was primarily a sidebar of sorts for experimental short film programs. Eventually, it absorbed the former Visions program, and, now in its 14th iteration, Wavelengths presents short film programs alongside (or at least in relative conjunction with) domestic and international titles which challenge audiences in unique ways. I had read about Wavelengths for years and knew of its reputation as one of the primary places to see new experimental work. As a first […]
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Laura Poitras’s CITIZENFOUR Will World Premiere at the New York Film Festival
Laura Poitras’s long-anticipated third film in her trilogy dealing with post-9/11 foreign policies and the security state, CITIZENFOUR, will world premiere in the Main Selection of the 2014 New York Film Festival, the Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced. Poitras had been working on the film following her Oscar-nominated The Oath when she was contacted by a mysterious whistleblower, who later revealed himself to be Edward Snowden. That encounter changed the course of her film, to say nothing of our national dialogue concerning the limits of our freedom in the internet age. From the Film Society of Lincoln Center: […]
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Euro-Pudding and Look Books: Takeaways from Day One at IFP’s Filmmaker Conference
After sitting through the majority of the New Narratives presentations on day one of the Filmmaker Conference at IFP Film Week, my brain is almost too awash with content to compile anything but a listicle. From conversations with cinematographers like Reed Morano and producers like Mynette Louie to an Obvious Child case study and Kevin B. Lee’s mini-keynote, here is a handful of the major takeaways I gleaned from yesterday’s Conference. 1. For co-productions, don’t assume hiring local crew is the cheapest option. Arriving to the Icelandic set of Land Ho!, producers Mynette Louie and Sara Murphy realized they were sharing ground with a slightly larger production: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. […]
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Wanting to Like Everything: The Telluride Film Festival
The 41st annual Telluride Film Festival kicked off with a packed screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now featuring Coppola, screenwriter John Milius (still recovering from his debilitating stroke but in great spirits), cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, producer Fred Roos, and editor and sound designer Walter Murch in attendance for a post-film Q&A. It was the kind of event that represents what Telluride does best as a kind of summer camp for movie lovers: presenting a great film impeccably projected before an appreciative crowd in a casual, conversational atmosphere. There’s something about the environment of Telluride — both the gorgeous Colorado […]
