Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
-
Curator Miriam Bale on New York’s La Di Da Film Festival
New York may have a film festival for every neighborhood, but La Di Da, the brainchild of programmer and critic Miriam Bale, has carved a niche for itself that feels more temporal than geographical. Now in its second year, the festival, whose title is a tip of the cap to Annie Hall’s choice refrain, has expanded upon its foundations as a communal haven for filmmakers creating aesthetically timeless, genre-friendly, and narratively experimental work. In doubling the selection, Bale deepens her exploration of films that, despite being very much of the here and now, feel as though they’ve been unearthed from […]
-
Filmmaker Conference Chat with IFP’s Rose Vincelli Gustine
IFP’s cornerstone event, Independent Film Week, is less than a week away. The event is made up of Project Forum, which showcases in-progress projects from emerging filmmakers, and the Filmmaker Conference, which stages numerous panels and events to help filmmakers with myriad aspects of their work. In anticipation of Film Week, Filmmaker spoke with IFP’s Producer and Program Manager, who oversees the Conference, about what it has to offer this year. N.B. Filmmaker magazine readers can use the code 13Friends13 to get a special discounted price for tickets to the Filmmaker Conference. Filmmaker: First up, can you tell me about […]
-
TIFF: Nathaniel Dorsky’s Song and Spring and Peter Hutton’s Three Landscapes
Through my late teens, my Sunday mass of choice was the 1pm. I was lucky to belong to Catholic parish that was built in the turn of the century; I loved the dark wood, red velvet, shadowy vibe and how it contrasted to the sunny bustle out on the street. Later in life, as I gained the courage to face reality without a dogmatic crutch, I still longed for that peaceful hour spent in quiet reflection in the middle of the day. At 1pm this Sunday, a TIFF 150-seat theater was filled with a festival audience that remained totally still […]
-
Mark Peranson on his Apocalyptic The Last Movie Homage, La última película
Appearing in the Wavelengths section of the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival is La última película, an experimental comedy about filmmaking and the apocalypse by two directors joined in collaboration by CPH:DOX’s DOX:LAB program. Filipino director Raya Martin (Independencia) collaborates with Canadian critic and filmmaker Mark Peranson on a crazily cinephilic conceit: remaking Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie as, literally, the last movie. The Color Wheel‘s Alex Ross Perry stars as a “disillusioned and delusional” filmmaker traveling to the Yucatan to make a psychedelic Western in the days leading up to the Mayan Apocalypse. Nicolás Pereda star Gabino Rodriguez plays […]
-
CRIME: The Animated Series Hits Toronto
Documentarian, director, visual artist, and author Alix Lambert has yet another new project making its way around the world. CRIME: The Animated Series — directed in partnership with award-winning animator Sam Chou — debuted as part of MOCAtv in Los Angeles back in July (here’s Filmmaker’s post about that event). One of these animated tales, CRIME: Joe Loya — The Beirut Bandit, is playing the Toronto International Film Festival this week (click here for dates and times) and is sure to have audiences talking about just more than it being the shortest film to screen at TIFF. In the two-minute short, […]
-
Dear Irrfan Khan, I Love You
I fell in love this week at Toronto. It started as an attraction during In Treatment, when he was depressed, and took four minutes of screen time to roll a cigarette. It grew during The Namesake. And then when I watched Life of Pi on an airplane and he made me cry – even more than how much I normally cry when watching movies on planes – I started feeling feelings. As I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of a sleeping passenger beside me, I knew what was happening: I had an actor crush. But during an 8AM screening of […]
-
Writer/director John Ridley Talks about his Hendrix Pic, All is By My Side
With so many overstuffed biographical dramas barreling from cradle to grave, the creative possibilities of the intimate biopic, one focused on a formative and often little known period in a subject’s life, are often neglected by writers and directors. Thankfully, though, that’s the approach taken by screenwriter and second-time director John Ridley to one of the most iconic and fan-obsessed-over cultural figures of the 20th century, Jimi Hendrix. Starring André Benjamin (Outkast’s André 3000) as the iconic singer and guitarist, All Is By My Side focuses on a year or so in Hendrix’s life and how a song written for […]
-
12 Steps to Avoid Going Broke Applying to Film Festivals
The author of this guest essay is a filmmaker whose most recent film is Between Us. He is also the co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival. — Editor I recently wrote an article about 12 Steps to a Saner Festival Plan in which I suggested the volume-method of festivals: Get your film into as many festivals as you can, and build momentum from one to the next. Unfortunately, a lot of people read that article. And the one consistent question I’m getting is if we’re broke filmmakers, how can we afford to apply to so many festivals? Chances are you […]
-
We are the Visitors: On Godfrey Reggio’s Masterwork
The Toronto International Film Festival this year permitted me to look back and remember the first independent movie I ever saw when I was 15 years old, Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law. That film made me want to run away from home and make movies, and I did. This year I saw his new film, Only Lovers Left Alive, as well as another film by a director whose work was formative for me. The same year I saw Down By Law I was listening to cassette tapes of Philip Glass, music I had taped from vinyl albums belonging to people […]
-
Venice 2013 Critic’s Notebook: A Means of Escape — African Cinema on the Lido.
At this year’s Venice Film Festival, there was a conspicuously sparse showing in the programme for native African and African-themed cinema. However, although the majority of these slim pickings were tucked away toward the end of the festival when attendance had thinned considerably (many journalists had either headed home or departed to Toronto), their quality was largely impressive. To varying degrees, these films broached an historically enduring theme in African cinema: the attempts of young people to escape straitened circumstances. The only sub-Saharan representative at the festival — and the most harrowing film I saw overall — was Berlin-based Israeli […]
