Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Things Fall Apart: Alexander Carver and Daniel Schmidt’s The Unity of All Things at BAM’s Migrating Forms
The Unity of All Things, the first feature by artist Alexander Carver and filmmaker Daniel Schmidt, is an erotic queer sci-fi with an experimental narrative that combines particle physics, critique of global capitalism, various existential quandaries, and playfully perverse digressions into gender politics. It’s an unclassifiable micro-budget film shot on Super 16 and Super 8 in locations ranging from China, Switzerland, Chicago, and the Arizona desert, and has dialogue in at least three different languages. As its title might imply, the film’s ambition is undercut by a generous serving of self-aware humor. The film receives its New York premiere tonight […]
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“The Line Blurs:” Morals of Filmmaking
“Anything that happens in front of the camera is some kind of performance,” said experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs at the top of Tuesday’s “The Line Blurs: Shifting Narratives in Filmmaking” panel. Sachs, along with Caveh Zahedi, Josephine Decker, Keith Miller and moderator Nathan Silver, spent an hour debating the division between narrative and documentary forms at DCTV. The evening was chockfull of quotable quotes as the participants reflected on their own work with equal doses of humor and candor. Zahedi, for starters, admitted that he initially considered documentaries to be “the autistic younger brother of cinema,” and only labels his […]
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Marrakech International Film Festival 2013
In his role as Jury President of the Marrakech International Film Festival, Martin Scorsese described the method that he and his fellow jurors would apply when watching films: “We will not be like critics,” he said. “We love films too much.” The stars were out in full force at the Marrakech International Film Festival. The names accompanying The Wolf of Wall Street director on judging duty would have graced Cannes. The list included actresses Marion Cotillard, Patricia Clarkson and Golshifteh Farahani and directors Paolo Sorrentino, Fatih Akin, Park Chan-Wook, Amat Escalante, Narjiss Nejjar and Anurag Kashyap. The prize for best film went […]
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Leah Meyerhoff Receives IFP Labs Director’s Grant
IFP and the Adrienne Shelly Foundation announced yesterday that its 7th Annual IFP Labs Director’s Grant was awarded to Leah Meyerhoff and her film I Believe In Unicorns. The grant is open to female directors who are either alumni or current participants of the IFP Narrative Independent Filmmaker Lab. I Believe in Unicorns was a member of the 2012 edition, a recent finalist for the Gotham Awards Live the Dream Grant, as well as a selection in Tribeca’s All Access and the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Emerging Visions programs. I Believe in Unicorns follows Davina (Natalia Dyer) who escapes her obligations to her […]
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Kristoffer Gansing on transmediale 2014
In 1988, VideoFilmFest launched as part of the Berlinale. It gradually evolved until it was rechristened the transmediale in 1998, and today it’s one of the premier festivals for film, art, video, and digital work. Kristoffer Gansing has been the festival’s artistic director since 2011, and for this year’s theme he’s selected the “afterglow,” an exploration of how media technologies and practices are turned into trash. As the festival’s website explains, “As media technologies have now become completely integrated into everyday life, they function similarly to natural resources, producing physical and immaterial waste products that get appropriated in such diverse contexts […]
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Sundance Unveils Shorts Lineup
The final piece of the Sundance puzzle emerges today in the shape of the shorts lineup, with that broken down into U.S. narrative, international narrative, doc and animation. With U.S. narrative, as ever there are a handful of directors already with features under their belts who are returning to the festival, such as Musa Syeed (The Big House), Todd Rohal (Rat Pack Rat) and Dustin Guy Defa (Person to Person ). There are also few directors with new work who have distinguished themselves already in shorts, such as The Strange Ones‘ co-director Christopher Radcliff (Jonathan’s Chest) and Boneshaker‘s Frances Bodomo (Afronauts), plus a handful […]
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Takeaways From Dogfish Accelerator’s Demo Day
Back in October, Filmmaker spoke with a few of the driving forces behind Dogfish Pictures’ Accelerator Program, which seeks to bring the start-up financing model to independent film production. I’m pleased to report that James Belfer and Company’s months of hard work culminated in a successful Demo Day at the Microsoft Technology Center in midtown Manhattan last Friday. For myself, and a few others in the audience who aren’t necessarily of the tech-ilk, it was our first brush with this sort of presentation marathon, where one or two representatives from each team take to the floor for with a Powerpoint pitch before […]
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Sundance Announces Premieres and Doc Premieres Strands
Traditionally, the Premieres section at Sundance is a bit of a mixed bag, with some films by good directors but with a premium put on star power over actual quality. The 2014 Premieres lineup announced today is, however, packed with movies that, at least on paper, are genuinely exciting. There’s Calvary, the latest from The Guard‘s writer/director John Michael McDonagh, Ira Sachs’ Love is Strange, starring Alfred Molina and John Lithgow as longtime lovers who finally tie the knot, and Mike Cahill’s followup to Another Earth, the sci-fi I Origins. “25 New Face” Sara Colangelo’s debut feature Little Accidents (starring […]
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“The Line Blurs” at DCTV
Tomorrow evening at 7:30 pm, DCTV will be hosting “The Line Blurs: Shifting Narratives in Filmmaking,” a panel on the increasingly ambiguous division between fiction and nonfiction in filmmaking. It is a timely discussion, one that will probe questions as to whether or not a delineation between the two forms has ever existed, and why viewers and critics alike are bent on categorization. The panel will feature filmmakers Josephine Decker, Keith Miller, Lynne Sachs and Caveh Zahedi, with Nathan Silver in the moderator’s chair. Silver, director of Soft In The Head and Exit Elena, shoots without a script, mining the people […]
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Sundance Announce Spotlight, Midnight, Kids and New Frontier Titles
Yesterday Sundance released its initial slate and today the second burst of titles emerges. In Spotlight, which houses fest favorites (many by alumni of the festival and/or the labs), there’s only one title that’s new to me, namely R100, Hitoshi Matsumoto’s wild erotic comedy about a “mild-mannered family man with a secret taste for S&M” who “finds himself pursued by a gang of ruthless dominatrices—each with a unique talent.” That’s definitely one to check out. In the Midnight section, new films from Adam Wingard and Taika Waititi (who reunites with his Eagle vs Shark star Jemaine Clement in a vampire mockumentary) are definitely […]
