Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Tribeca Film Festival Announces World Narrative and Doc Competitions, Viewpoints Lineups
The Tribeca Film Festival announced over half of its 2013 edition today, including its World Narrative Feature and Documentary Competitions as well as its Viewpoints section. The festival’s 89 features were selected from a record 6,005 submissions, and titles include a number of eagerly awaited films from American independent filmmakers. Lance Edmands’ Bluebird will open the Narrative Competition while Rachel Boynton’s Big Men opens the Documentary Competition. Previously announced, Tom Berninger’s doc on the band The National, Mistaken for Strangers, will open the overall festival. Playing throughout New York April 17 – 28, the Tribeca Film Festival is programmed by […]
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Sarasota Film Festival Announces Partnership with Factory 25
Today the Sarasota Film Festival announced that it is joining forces with Factory 25 to offer a distribution deal as the prize for one of its competition sections. The winning movie in the Independent Visions strand will get a deal with Matt Grady’s Brooklyn-based boutique label, which has released many Sarasota alumni films from recent years. Here’s the info from the press release: The Sarasota Film Festival today announced that its Independent Visions Award will be presented by Factory 25, heralding a new partnership with Brooklyn-based film distributor. The winner of this prestigious award will also be presented with an unprecedented […]
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True/False 2013 Dispatch #1: These Birds Walk, The Garden Of Eden, The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
Banner news first: two days into the 10th annual True/False Film Festival, Columbia, Missouri’s immensely likable documentary/hybrid-friendly showcase, the marquee title of the six films I’ve seen so far from the slate (three of which I saw before arriving) is Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq’s These Birds Walk. The starting point is Abdul Sattar Edhi, a Pakistani humanitarian and founder of a number of shelters, rehab centers and other faculties for the dispossessed. As he washes naked runaway children, some pitifully scrawny, he says his philanthropic reputation and prominence mean nothing; to understand his work you have to understand common […]
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Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2013
Jean-Claude Brisseau’s The Girl From Nowhere is an auteur work of relatively low-profile interest to the broader public, one of several such items in Lincoln Center’s annual Rendez-Vous With French Cinema series, which starts today. Brisseau’s career is firmly bifurcated, the second part beginning with 2002’s Secret Things — overheated soft-core with classical allusions — led to lawsuits and sentencing for sexual harassment of auditioning actresses. After two more films in this humid vein, The Girl From Nowhere stars Brisseau himself in an adamantly chaste mood. A man-mountain with a body somewhere between latter-day Gerard Depardieu and NFL coach Rob […]
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The National Doc Mistaken For Strangers to Open Tribeca Film Festival
It was announced this afternoon that the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival will open on April 17 with Mistaken for Strangers, a documentary about Brooklyn indie heroes The National. The film, exec produced by Oscar-nominated documentarian Marshall Curry, is directed by Tom Berninger, the brother of The National’s lead singer Matt Berninger, who is a producer on the film along with his wife, Carin Besser, and Craig Charland. The film, which has previously had working titles including Summer Lovin’ Torture Party and For Those About to Weep, documents the band’s tour supporting their 2010 album High Violet. Its current title is taken from one […]
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The 6th Annual Thin Line Film Fest
First things first – Texas’s Thin Line Film Fest does not take place in Austin, nor in March, nor does it accept indie narratives, nor any fiction films at all. In fact, this six-year-old event, which plays a month prior to SXSW, smartly doesn’t define itself in relation to that cinematic elephant in the Lone Star State. Which is its strength. Texas’s only fest devoted strictly to docs – from local to international – Thin Line (the name inspired by its founders’ desire to explore that space between fact and fiction) does take over Denton, Texas, for 10 days in […]
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Silver Linings Dominates Spirit Awards
In what may be an indicator of the direction tonight’s Oscars will take, David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook dominated the proceedings at yesterday’s Independent Spirit Awards. The film, which was Filmmaker‘s cover movie for the magazine’s Fall 2012 issue, won big in the major categories, taking Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actress (for Jennifer Lawrence). The awards show was ultimately a rather curious affair. Best First Feature was won by Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which is actually Chbosky’s second film as director. Derek Connolly, screenwriter of Safety Not Guaranteed, won Best First Screenplay and then proceeded to give an […]
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“25 New Faces” Alums Our Nixon and Blue Caprice Bookend New Directors/New Films
The current class of “25 New Faces” continues to make headlines, this time bagging opening and closing night spots at the upcoming New Directors/New Films being works by 2012 alums. Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye‘s archival doc Our Nixon kicks off the MoMA/FSLC-housed festival, while Alexandre Moors‘ Beltway sniper drama Blue Caprice closes the event. Other U.S. indies at the 2013 edition of ND/NF include Joshua Oppenheimer’s buzz doc The Act of Killing, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and Shannon Plumb’s Towheads, while additional standouts include festival favorites like Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking and Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell. The […]
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5 Broken Cameras Director Emad Burnat’s Statement on His LAX Detention
If you follow Michael Moore on Twitter, you’ll be aware that 5 Broken Cameras’ Palestinian director Emad Burnat was detained by immigration officers on his arrival at LAX airport. Burnat is in Los Angeles for Sunday’s Academy Awards, where the film he made with Israeli director Guy Davidi is nominated for Best Documentary. In response to this incident, Burnat just released the following statement through the film’s distributor, Kino Lorber: Last night, on my way from Turkey to Los Angeles, CA, my family and I were held at US immigration for about an hour and questioned about the purpose of […]
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“Don’t Go Through The System”: John Singleton Talks in Toronto
John Singleton was raised on silent movies. The 45-year-old director of Boyz in the Hood and the Shaft remake grew up next to the Century Drive-In in Inglewood, California. As a boy, he’d literally peek out his window and watch his heroes Bruce Lee and Billy Jack‘s Tom Laughlin battle on-screen without sound. “The first breast I saw was Pam Grier’s,” Singleton confessed to a rapt audience at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox Tuesday night, hosted by director Clement Virgo as part of the city’s Black History Month celebrations. “Every time I see Pam Grier I tell her, ‘You made me want […]
