Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Ground Breaking for DCTV’s New Doc-Only Theater
“Today we’re celebrating the start of a new era,” DCTV’s co-founder and co-executive director Jon Alpert announced to a crowd of several hundred filmmakers, documentary enthusiasts and journalists. In the background stood DCTV’s home since 1979, a striking structure in French Chateau style with steeply pitched hip roof and prominent corner spiral, which contrasted sharply with the surrounding towers of American boxes. This juxtaposition contributed a bit of the surreal to the ceremony. But only a bit. This was not the 16th century, and certainly not the tranquil Loire Valley in France. The honking horns and growling trucks, darting taxis, the […]
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BAMcinemaFest 2013 Lineup Announced
When it replaced BAM’s season of Sundance favorites some years ago, BAMcinemaFest emerged as a stronger and much more Brooklyn-centric event, a true festival rather than just a Park City greatest hits package. This year, it bookends proceedings with festival favorites from two our “25 New Faces” of previous years, David Lowery’s gorgeous period outlaw drama Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and Destin Cretton’s SXSW-winning social worker drama Short Term 12. Michael M. Bilandic’s artworld satire Hellaware — which was featured in our Summer 2012 article “The Shooting Parties” — is the sole world premiere, however the focus here is on local […]
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Solving Storytelling Problems at Tribeca Hacks
Technology-centered hackathons identify real-world problems and then attempt to solve them through rapid prototyping. Artistic hackathons — 48-Hour Playwriting contests and the like — use compressed time periods to stave off creators’ perennial demons (procrastination, usually manifested by a compulsive desire to clean one’s apartment). But hackathons that merge the creative with the artistic pose unique challenges. There’s the artistic element, the technology element and then also the fusion of the two, which is actually a third thing entirely. Storytelling craft, choice of content but also appropriateness and originality of UI and methods of engagement all become the criteria by […]
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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 […]
