Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Vice City: The 31st Miami International Film Festival
Like many so-called “regional” film festivals, the Miami International Film Festival might not be on the tip of every rising filmmaker’s tongue when figuring out where they ought to submit. Struggles to get attention from the film world at large aren’t new for festivals taking place in non-media hub cities that happen to be events where movies aren’t bought and sold, just shown. Regardless of whether they’re “regional” or not, such festivals often get stuck with that half derogatory term. Such is the case with Miami even though it’s in a major city, is over 30 years old and has improved […]
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Club Med: New Directors/New Films (II)
Coincidence or zeitgeist? Three of the four outstanding films in the second, slightly shorter segment of ND/NF feature swarthy, sensuously handsome male protagonists who live and act out their dramas in sweltering countries with edges that kiss the cool yet uncomforting Mediterranean. And no, this is neither a projection nor an implication of selectors. Violence, be it palpable or discreetly off-screen, is a powerful element in all four. New Directors ends March 30; Part I of this review appeared last week. Four of 10 viewed (I missed centerpiece Obvious Child and closing nighter 20,000 Days on Earth)? A respectable proportion, […]
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Sundance Institute Launches TV-Based Lab Program
It was only a matter of time. With quality, funds and star power funneling into television, the Sundance Institute is the latest name to hop on board the medium, in announcing their first ever Episodics Story Lab to be held in the Fall of 2014. Designed for TV and online serial writers, the six day lab will pair the chosen few with accomplished mentors who will aid in script development as they also impart wisdom on the production and distribution landscape. Cary Fukunaga, Louis CK and Lena Dunham are among Sundance’s Screenwriters Lab alumni who enjoyed breakouts through their television […]
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Pieces of Eight: New Directors/New Films (I)
Spring is a always a godsend, especially so after a harsh winter. For discerning cinephiles, it marks an end and a beginning. The exhausting awards season is over. It is followed in New York by a celebratory spring cleaning, a shift in priorities to some of the finest emerging directors from all over the world in the prestigious and prophetic New Directors/New Films, now in its 43rd edition (March 19-30). Not only do the principal artistic creators get their due, but, unlike the U.S.-centric January-to-March hyperamas, the pool of pictures is fiercely international. How does ND/NF’s focus on the filmmaker […]
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Cinereach Offers “Artist Appreciation Gifts” to Moviegoers
Cinereach, the not-for-profit film support and production company, is offering moviegoers who see at least two of the four Cinereach-supported pictures in theaters this month special, one-of-a-kind artist gifts. The films — all of which are very good, by the way — are Matt Wolf’s Teenage, Tom Gilroy’s The Cold Lands, Eliza Hittman’s It Felt Like Love and Daniel Carbone’s Hide Your Smiling Faces. (The first two are at the IFC Center in New York now; It Felt Like Love opens next week and Hide Your Smiling Faces on the 28th). Here is info from Cinereach: Why? Indie releases unite! […]
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ornana’s Jim Cummings On How To Combat The Digital Recession and Lessons To Learn From “South Park”
“Our degrees cost us about $90,000 a piece, and in the last five years of making movies, the three of us together have made about $5,000 from our work.” That’s ornana producer Jim Cummings speaking at his Future 15s New Media talk at SXSW last Sunday. Drawing from his article series over at Ted Hope’s Truly Free Film, Cummings gave a micro-keynote on what he calls “The Digital Recession,” the supersaturation of content and what can be done to effectively combat the glut. Cummings made the common observation that nowadays, any old person is encouraged by “camera companies, film festivals, and arts […]
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Full Frame Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup
The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival today announced its lineup for the festival to be held April 3-6 in Durham. Along with the full list of feature and short documentaries are a Full Frame Tribute to veteran documentarian Steve James and the titles in the Thematic Program, which this year is called “Approaches to Character” and is under the curation of Lucy Walker. In a response to the honor of a retrospective, James said, “I’m excited to have so many of my films play again in front of the appreciative audiences at Full Frame. It will give me a rare opportunity […]
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Sarasota Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup
The 2014 Sarasota Film Festival lineup looks — as ever — to be a nice mix of Sundance, SXSW and international titles, with a few discoveries to be had as well. The 16th edition is set to open with Rory Kennedy’s Last Days in Vietnam, and close with Charlie McDowell’s The One I Love. John Slattery’s God’s Pocket and John Rossi’s Ivory Tower mark the Centerpiece films. Other Sundance standouts are Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter; Frank; Rich Hill; Wetlands; Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart and Blue Ruin, which has seemingly made every imaginable stop on the major festival circuit. Major auteurs — Tsai Ming-Liang, Corneliu Porumboiu, Pawel Pawlikowski — dot the lineup alongside […]
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SXSW Dispatch: She’s Lost Control, Wetlands, Frank
“I thought I was really onto something,” smiled director Anja Marquardt during the Q&A for She’s Lost Control. “I’d never even heard of The Sessions.” Peculiar profession aside, Marquardt can rest easy: the two films have little to nothing in common. Much more than a narrative quirk, Marquardt uses the untraditional avenue of sex surrogacy to explore the contradiction at the crux of her character study. Our subject here is not John Hawkes in an iron lung, but Ronah, a woman, a graduate student and a sex surrogate on the verge, played with disquieting charisma by high-waisted pant aficionado Brooke Bloom. More alone than […]
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Fort Tilden, The Great Invisible Take Top Prizes at SXSW
Beating back chilly, sub-normal temperatures, the season finale of True Detective and the myriad distractions of its surrounding program — referencing the new SXSports category, one independent film stalwart snarled to me, “Don’t try to tell me that sports are now creative” — SXSW Film put a capper on its 2014 edition by awarding Sarah-Violet Bliss & Charles Rogers’ Brooklyn beach comedy Fort Tilden and Margaret Brown’s Deepwater Horizon doc, The Great Invisible, its top prizes. Other awards included a “special jury award for courage in storytelling to the lead actor and screenwriter of Collin Schiffli’s Animals, David Dastmalchian. (The […]
