Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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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 […]
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Previewing IFP’s Filmmaker Conference Series
Affiliation bias aside, it’s a bit tricky to offer a succinct preview of IFP’s Filmmaker Conference during the upcoming Film Week, as all five days of programming are chock-full of essentials. The annual event runs at Lincoln Center from September 14 – 18, with panels, keynotes, pitches, case studies and roundtables from every corner of the industry. Find more than a few highlights below, and be sure to view the full schedule of offerings here. September 14: New Narratives As a filmmaker, it’s almost impossible not to take a festival rejection letter personally, but programmers weigh more than just preference, they also […]
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12 Picks for the SXSW PanelPicker
Not five months after the mammoth festival wraps, SXSW opens up their PanelPicker site, an online forum which aggregates all industry and filmmaker programming pitches for their next conference. Last year, I went through the offerings and highlighted 15 that piqued my interest; this year, the stakes are higher, and I’m down to 12 from the 183 listed. You have till September 5 to vote on your favorites. How “High Maintenance” Is Redefining Storytelling I fondly recall the day former Managing Editor Nick Dawson sent me a link to an episode of High Maintenance some 18 months back. Since then, Ben Sinclair and […]
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Blackmagic Does Manhattan
On August 13 the disruptive Australian company Blackmagic Design took over the Grand Ballroom at the historic New Yorker Hotel at 8th & 34th to showcase their growing stable of switchers, signal converters, encoders, routers, and test equipment along with their latest unorthodox production products: cameras, monitors, disk recorders, and grading/NLE software. Plus a new scanner for film transfer. Call it a make-up day for Northeast media makers who missed out on Blackmagic’s crowded NAB booth this year. Since few companies boast the range of products Blackmagic now produces, no less their erosive pricing, it made good marketing sense to also […]
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Rotterdam International Film Festival Co-signs Solidarity Statement over Beijing Independent Film Festival Shutdown
You may have read over the weekend about the Chinese government shutting down the Beijing Independent Film Festival. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened: the Associated Press’ Didi Tang has a solid overview of this year’s events and past context here. As writer/critic/curator Shelley Kraicer pointed out on Twitter, the shutdown also included a raid on the Li Xianting Film Fund, the festival host which “has (had?) likely the most comprehensive collection of independent Chinese films.” A statement co-signed by the heads of the Rotterdam International Film Festival and heads of other major fests including the […]
