Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Slamdance Film Festival Competition Lineup Announced
Directly following a week of Sundance announcements, the Slamdance Film Festival, which takes place in Park City between January 18 to 24, has revealed its competition lineup. The narrative competition features films from five different countries — including, interestingly, three from Germany — and the film that I will definitely try to catch from that strand is Nadia Szold’s Joy de V., which stars both Evan Louison (the lead in Filmmaker contributor Brandon Harris’ feature debut Redlegs) and the legendary Claudia Cardinale. In the doc section, Where I Am (whose logline reads, “The courageous story of Gay American writer Robert Drake and his […]
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An Evaluation of Whistler Film Festival 2012
Every November, amidst the onset of ski and snowboard season, the Whistler Film Festival attracts a crowd of producers, filmmakers, journalists, critics and the occasional celebrity (this year the token stars are Daniel Radcliffe and Rashida Jones). Left off that list would be cinephiles — sure, there may be a tiny scattering of hardcore movie buffs, but they’re the exception that proves the rule — as WFF is a deliberately uncinephilic festival composed of accessible indie-ish Canadian cinema and more emphatically put the spotlight on an industry-driven summit. You’re more likely to find a far greater number of people squeezed […]
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2013 Sundance Film Festival Announces Short Film Program
I must admit that I didn’t have any real expectations about the just-announced shorts lineup at the forthcoming Sundance Film Festival, but this slate looks really strong, a good mixture of familiar names (many with feature experience) and emerging talents. Scanning through the selection, I’m excited to see new works by Cat Candler, Nash Edgerton and Spencer Susser, Guillermo Arriaga, Jillian Mayer, Lucas Leyva (from 2012’s “25 New Faces”), Lauren Wolkstein, Goran Dukic and Damien Chazelle in the U.S. narrative section. And kudos to a “25 New Face” from 2010, Robert Machoian, who has two shorts — Movies Made From Home # 6 […]
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Academy Awards Releases Documentary Longlist
The Academy Awards are still a long way off, but the recent Gotham Awards, the Spirit Award nominations, today’s New York Film Critics Circle Awards and now the Oscar doc longlist mean that awards season is truly kicking into gear. The 15 docs still in Academy Award contention are: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Never Sorry LLC Bully, The Bully Project LLC Chasing Ice, Exposure Detropia, Loki Films Ethel, Moxie Firecracker Films 5 Broken Cameras, Guy DVD Films The Gatekeepers, Les Films du Poisson, Dror Moreh Productions, Cinephil The House I Live In, Charlotte Street Films, LLC How to Survive a […]
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Sundance 2013 Premieres and Documentary Premieres Announced
Announced today by the Sundance Film Festival were their robust Premieres and Documentary Premieres sections, which always feature a large number of well-established names both in front of and behind the camera. In the narrative section, Richard Linklater’s trilogy-concluding Before Midnight is bound to get a lot of attention, while there are also welcome returns to the festival for Michael Winterbottom, Rob Epstein, David Gordon Green, Park Chan-wook and Jane Campion. There additionally notable debuts from Joseph Gordon-Levitt from Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (the writers of The Descendants). On the doc side, Lucy Walker, Barbara Kopple, Alex Gibney, Sebastian […]
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War Witch Wins Top Prize at 20th Plus Camerimage
Concluding its latest edition on yet another rainy late fall afternoon in Bydgoszcz, Plus Camerimage awarded its top prize, the Golden Frog, to War Witch, the celebrated story of a sub-Saharan female child-soldier. The film, also a prize winner at Berlin and Tribeca, beat out a list of fest circuit heavyweights such as The Master, Cloud Atlas, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Argo, Laurence Always, Hyde Park on Hudson and Holy Motors, which won the runner up Silver Frog from Joel Schumacher’s main competition jury. Fifteen prizes were handed out at the closing ceremony at Bydgoszcz’s Opera Nova, a 56-year-old modernist opera house which […]
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How to Do a Festival Q&A
The credits roll, there is applause, and not too many people walked out. The festival premiere of your debut film is over. You relax, a year’s worth of stress magically departing your body. Sure, there will be tough times ahead; distribution is difficult. But, for the moment, you congratulate yourself on a job well done. But don’t relax too much, warn a trio of festival heads. Your next big job as a director looms sooner than you think. The audience Q&A you’ll lead in just a minute or two is surprisingly important when it comes to your film’s future life. […]
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Top of the Doc: Toasting 25 Years at IDFA 2012
Once in a blue moon a festival competition film comes along that’s a masterpiece, so flawless it’s inconceivable that it won’t take top prize. This year at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, that film was Alan Berliner’s First Cousin Once Removed (which I actually saw before this year’s 25th edition began), and it did indeed nabb the VPRO IDFA Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary, along with a nice sum of 12,500 euros. Fittingly, my reaction towards Berliner’s breathtaking portrait of his mentor and relative, the acclaimed poet and translator Edwin Honig, as he succumbs to Alzheimer’s disease, mirrors my […]
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Sundance 2013 Spotlight, Park City at Midnight and New Frontiers Titles Unveiled
Today is round two of the Sundance announcements, comprised of Spotlight (notable festival films that premiered in 2012), Park City at Midnight (midnight movies) and New Frontiers, the experimental strand of the fest, which includes both films and installations. We now have a few days to parse the program announcements from the past two days, and the lineups for the Premieres & Documentary Premieres and Shorts sections will be announced Monday and Tuesday of next week. SPOTLIGHT Regardless of where these films have played throughout the world, the Spotlight program is a tribute to the cinema we love. Fill […]
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Sundance 2013 Competition and Next Sections Announced
The line-ups for the U.S. Dramatic, U.S. Documentary, World Dramatic and World Documentary sections, plus NEXT, have just been announced. There’s a lot to take in here — many films from familiar names (including a healthy number by Filmmaker “25 New Faces” and IFP Lab alums) — and also a lot of movies that I have no point of reference for and will have to do some homework on before what will be a very busy January in Park City. (Tomorrow the Spotlight, Park City at Midnight and New Frontier sections will also be announced, with Premieres & Documentary Premieres […]
