Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Tribeca Film Festival Announces “Innovation Week”
The Tribeca Film Festival has made significant strides to transform their trend-buoyed cachet into a boundary pushing enterprise. Last year, TFF introduced Storyscapes, a transmedia installation that probed the intersection of technology, interactivity and installation art, and this year, De Niro and Co. are extrapolating from the initiative, launching a full blown “Innovation Week.” From April 21-26, the festival hopes to become ground zero for hackers, screenwriters, engineers and venture capitalists alike, with a program centered around the Fifth Annual Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards (TDIA), Future of Film Live with Aaron Sorkin, Tribeca Hacks <Mobile>, a TFI Interactive summit, the Games […]
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Berlinale 2014: Göran Hugo Olsson on Concerning Violence
After years as a multihyphenate creator of a raft of documentaries (one of which is titled, wonderfully, Fuck You, Fuck You Very Much [1998]), Sweden’s Göran Hugo Olsson has recently come to greater prominence. His documentary on soul singer Billy Paul, Am I Black Enough For You, secured international distribution in 2009, while 2011’s vibrant archive collage The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 took him to another level. Olsson’s new film, like its predecessor, screens in the Panorama Documentary strand of the Berlinale. Concerning Violence is based on Frantz Fanon’s famous 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth, and focuses, in nine discrete chapters, […]
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Fortnight at the Museum: MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight
Most doc venues and festivals serve up collections, films more alike than dissimilar. In fact, the principal variable tends to be content. Now in its 13th edition, Documentary Fortnight: MoMA’s International Festival of Nonfiction Film and Media (February 14-28) is breaking new ground in doc exhibition. I’m not certain that the museum’s honchos recognize what a coup they have in situ (P.S. 1 is another story), a boundary-pushing program where many of those who follow and determine artsy trending might not think to look. It’s taken far too long for documentaries to be considered hip, but to think of them […]
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Slamdance’s Big Footprint in Hollywood: First-time Directors Have Grossed $10.618 Billion
Feeling self-satisfied and/or congested from your annual Sundance winter camp? I’ve got news for you: Hollywood doesn’t care about another head-scratching indie with pigs in it, or an over-hyped VOD deal from a company you’ve never heard of for a film no one will ever see. Nope. Hollywood counts success in dollars, rubles and yuans. The films in Park City may not spin the world’s turnstyles, but the filmmakers who make them most definitely will. At the Slamdance Film Festival, a snowball’s throw across the street from Sundance, we’ve been saying for 20 years that our focus is on discovering […]
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Berlinale 2014: Josephine Decker on Thou Wast Mild and Lovely and Butter on the Latch.
At every festival, there are “did you see that?” moments which create a buzz among audiences and critics. One such early example at this year’s Berlinale came midway through Josephine Decker’s hypnotic, farm-set thriller Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, when the point of view of a violent, ambiguously-rendered sexual encounter suddenly switches to that of a cow, through whose eyes we see the next few scenes. It’s a playful, idiosyncratic touch which recalls the chimp’s flashback in Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, although it would be wrong to attempt to draw obvious comparisons between Thou Wast Mild and Lovely and […]
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True/False Announces Full 2014 Slate
The True/False Film Fest today announced its full 2014 program, just days after grabbing headlines for its innovative Pay the Artists! program.The festival takes place in Columbia MO, between February 27 and March 2. Among the 43 films unveiled are a number of world premieres, including Robert Greene’s Actress, a portrait of Brandy Burre (best known for The Wire) which seems perfect for the fest’s embrace of the blurring of lines between nonfiction and fiction, and Kitty Green’s Ukraine is Not A Brothel, about the radical feminist nudist group Femen. Also playing for the first time are Amanda Wilder’s film […]
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Mohammad Gorjestani’s “25 New Faces” Tour Photo Diary
Last November, three short filmmakers from our 2013 “25 New Faces” hit the road for a special traveling screening series, sponsored by ARRI and Sony Creative, with myself in tow. Anahita Ghazvinizadeh (Needle), Mohammad Gorjestani (Refuge) and Scott Blake (Surveyor) played their films in six Midwest cities across six days, with myself in tow as Q&A moderator/tour manager/nanny. It was a unique and extremely memorable experience to be part of the tour, and you can now get an inkling of what went on at that time by checking out Gorjestani’s just-posted photo diary on Exposure, which is well worth your time.
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Freezing Filmgoing in Tromsø and the Phenomenon of Site-Specific Cinema
The Tromsø International Film Festival has always pushed the boundary when it comes to open-air cinema. The only international film festival that takes place in the Arctic Circle has a Winter Cinema, an open-air cinema with sofas positioned on top of the snow in front of a large screen with picturesque hilltops on the horizon. Most of the program is made up of short films made for children that play in the dark afternoons, but this year Festival Director Martha Otto put on a late-night screening of Dead Snow to boot. It added a new challenge for the audience, to […]
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“I Jumped on a Running Train:” Interim Artistic Director Mart Dominicus on Rotterdam 2014
The Artistic Director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam since 2008, Rutger Wolfson had begun work on this year’s edition of the festival, the 43rd, when fate interceded. In November, Wolfson was hospitalized with a rare autoimmune disease. (Happily, he is expected to make a full recovery.) With the festival two months away from its starting date, Mart Dominicus — a lecturer at the Netherlands Film Academy, a screenplay and editing coach, and a member of the festival’s Supervisory Board since 2010 — stepped in to become Artistic Director for this year’s festival. At the festival’s end, Filmmaker sat down […]
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True/False Film Fest Announces Innovative “Pay the Artists!” Program
Today, the True/False Film Fest‘s Paul Sturtz and David Wilson announced the launch of their organization’s innovative (and highly laudable) “Pay the Artists!” program. The heads of the 10-year-old Columbia, MO-based festival (which runs February 27 – March 2), initiated the patronage program as a way of helping to sustain the documentary film ecosystem, and this year will be offering $450 to the filmmaking teams who attend the festival. (T/F already covers travel, accommodation and food expenses.) It is Sturtz and Wilson’s hope that in the next few years, this amount will increase to $1,000. There has long been a […]
