Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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A Hidden Gem in Eastern Oregon
La Grande, Oregon, is the country’s largest fully enclosed valley and the second largest in the world. The geographical term for this is a continental depression, but there is absolutely nothing depressing about the incredible mountain views that dominate just about every conceivable vantage point in this quintessentially Western town. The same could be said for La Grande’s extraordinary Eastern Oregon Film Festival, which unspooled its fourth event in five years this past weekend. Captained by Christopher Jennings, who unlike many ambitious young locals has stayed in this former gold-mining, sugar-processing and lumber mill town of just over 13,000, the […]
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Tribeca’s Spotlight, Midnight, Storyscapes and Special Screenings Announced
Today the Tribeca Film Festival announced the second half of its feature slate for 2013, and it’s shaping up to be the most robust and exciting lineup the festival has had in recent years. In the Spotlight section, there are a fair number of titles notable for their marquee names, some recent festival favorites but also a number of intriguing world premieres, such as the addiction drama Bottled Up, starring Melissa Leo and Marin Ireland; Christina Voros’ Gucci doc The Director; Josh Fox’s Gasland Part II, the sequel to his Oscar-nominated fracking doc; Adam Bhala Lough’s skateboarding doc The Motivation; Marina Zenovich’s latest biographical […]
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25 Picks for the SXSW Film and Interactive Festivals
SXSW is a festival of contradictions. (Or, “Spring Break for filmmakers,” as Ti West posted on his Twitter stream last night.) Its film program feels homey, intimate, with Janet Pierson and her team evincing a real sense of enthusiasm as well as curatorial play. There are, of course, types of films that are expected and do well at SXSW: cutting-edge genre titles, hip mainstream features, music- and technology-themed documentaries, and low-budget, youth-oriented relationship tales. But within and even outside of those categories, SXSW always turns up some real discoveries. (Last year there were several — Sean Baker’s Starlet, Andrew Neel’s […]
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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 […]
