Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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10 Lessons from the Film Festival Circuit
I just got back from eight film festivals in less than four weeks with my first feature, The Discoverers. We’ve been fortunate to win a few awards, get great press and meet new friends this past month. I’m sharing a few things I’ve learned to hopefully help fellow filmmakers on their own unique journeys. 1. Embrace your audience Festivals can be a lot of things: a market where distributors see your film, or an opportunity to get press, but they are also your first time to connect with an audience. Embrace the experience of sharing your work in a theater […]
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Full Frame Film Festival 2013
Nestled in downtown Durham, in the heart of North Carolina’s Research Triangle, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is one of the region’s most engaging—and enjoyable—cinematic events. Full Frame has delivered an outstanding slate of documentary films to the local community every spring for well over a decade, but the festival thrives in part due to its friendly, relaxed atmosphere and involved audiences. Given the presence of three major universities—the University of North Carolina, North Carolina State University and Duke University (a festival sponsor)—the festival invariably attracts large crowds of highly educated viewers. But as a leading documentary festival, it […]
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Beyond: Two Souls at the Tribeca Film Festival
The distance between video games and cinema has been shrinking for years. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the presentation of Beyond: Two Souls last Saturday during the Tribeca Film Festival’s closing weekend, an event billed as the first time a video game has ever been shown in a film festival. Certainly in the packed SVA theater, past the red carpet for actors like Elliot Page and after the enthusiastic introduction by Tribeca’s Chief Creative Officer Geoffrey Gilmore, it felt like a convergence of the two media that we haven’t seen before. This isn’t a game based on a […]
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Scorsese, De Niro, Lewis and Bernhard Recall The King of Comedy
“Look at this world we’re living in,” a videotaped Sandra Bernhard said Sunday at the Borough of Manhattan Community Center Theater. “It’s a shit show! Whatever we presented in The King of Comedy went so far beyond our wildest expectations that [the movie] seems almost homespun.” The occasion was the closing night of the 12th Tribeca Film Festival and its screening of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy, restored in luscious 4K and attended by the director, star (and Tribeca co-founder) Robert De Niro, and, in a surprise appearance, Jerry Lewis, who plays the film’s aggrieved and assaulted late-night talk […]
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Anita and the Value of Our Voices
Anita Hill received standing ovations at last weekend’s two screenings of Anita at Hot Docs — perhaps 22 years overdue. In 1991, Anita Hill was a law professor from Oklahoma when she appeared at a U.S. Senate hearing and accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment. Ironically, Thomas was Hill’s boss at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission a few years earlier. Hill accused Thomas of talking about things like pubic hairs on Coke cans and the girth of his manhood. A panel of 14 male politicians challenged Hill, painting her as […]
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Slurping Docs at Tribeca
The 12th annual Tribeca Film Festival is finis, but not its films. They will live, often for years, particularly documentaries which historically are Tribeca’s strongest category — one of the few things New York festivalgoers agree upon. This year’s crop of wide-ranging docs had me ping-ponging fast and furious, doc slurping from gruesome war to ballroom dancing to stoned hillbillies to weird couple to profound icon to stunningly gorgeous. Maturity seems to be catching up to Tribeca, and in a good way. Certainly for the docs. The Kill Team After a decade of U.S. fighting in Afghanistan and after screening […]
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2nd Julien Dubuque International Film Festival
At its by turns lavish and kitschy second edition, the Julien Dubuque International Film Festival unspooled 67 films earlier this month. With or without its film festival, Dubuque is a surprisingly memorable locale, a fast-growing place which, like the best Midwest cities, is a universe unto itself. One of the first European settlements west of the Mississippi River, upon the muddy banks of which it still rests, Iowa’s ninth largest city (pop. 60,000), which like the festival is named after a French Quebecois who settled the area and later befriended and made love to Indians, is known both for its […]
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Tribeca 2013 Critic’s Notebook #2: Black (Out)Rage
So I’ll get right to it — the only truly great film I’ve seen at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival is Jason Osder’s searing Let the Fire Burn. A found-footage marvel with no narration and sparse title cards, it dives into the maelstrom that was the Philadelphia police’s tragic raid on the black separatist group MOVE’s West Philadelphia compound in 1985, during which the home, where 13 men, women and children lived, was fired upon 10,000 times, doused with unspeakable amounts of water and then finally firebombed, an event which led to nearly 70 other homes in the surrounding working […]
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Tribeca 2013 Critic’s Notebook #1: Sea Change
It’s easy to get a bad rap in New York. It’s a town that holds grudges, where easy assumptions die hard and critical whispers ricochet from person to person. For a long time it was difficult for the Tribeca Film Festival to escape the stigma of its early years, when it remained spiritually connected to the aftermath of 9/11 and its original purpose while not having yet evolved into a truly satisfying event. Back then it was brash, unwieldy and overlong, its ambitions outstripping necessity and good taste. These qualities often overshadowed what it did well, and even as the festival […]
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The Rocket, The Kill Team Nab Top Awards at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival
Kim Mourdant’s The Rocket and Dan Krauss’s The Kill Team picked up the top World Narrative and World Documentary prizes at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival’s closing ceremonies tonight at downtown’s Conrad Hotel. Both awards come with a $25,000 cash prize. Among the other awards, Whitewash director Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais won Best New Narrative Director while Oxyana‘s Sean Dunne picked up the Best New Documentary Director award. Sam Fleischner’s New York-shot, Sandy-set Stand Clear of the Closing Doors was given a Special Jury Mention, as was Dunne’s Oxyana. Another Sandy-themed project, Sandy Stories, won a new Bombay Sapphire-sponsored award for transmedia […]
