Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Sundance 2012: Sex, Drugs and Falling Apart
Snow is pounding Park City; people are hidden under hoods and hats, the snow burying everything under a deep pile of grey and white. This is perfect weather for introspection and so far, the narrative films at Sundance have done little to break the mood. I couldn’t be happier. Early on, Sundance has featured films united by loss, by the end of relationships, by heartbreak and the assertion of possibility. I am no glutton for sadness, but there is something about the dark skies and looming mountains that make the melancholy almost comforting. If you look hard enough, every festival unveils a thematic strain, and […]
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2011 ZURICH FILM FESTIVAL
A few years back, the Zurich Film Festival burst onto the map, but for all the wrong reasons. In 2009, Roman Polanski, en route to the festival to receive a lifetime achievement award, was apprehended shortly after landing on Swiss soil. He was never extradited to the United States to stand trial for his mid ’70s sexual escapades with the then underaged Samatha Geimer in Jack Nicholson’s Hollywood Hills home, and now he’s free, having returned for the seventh edition of Zurich’s increasingly important film festival. He screened his “film memoir,” which I simply loathed for its canned, staged quality, […]
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PAIRING FILMS AT IDFA 2011
The Jack the Ripper weather that blanketed part of the 24th International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam this year seemed poetically apropos. Rushing from P&I screenings, to public showings, to private viewing booths I often felt like I was lost in a heavy fog of docs. In addition I took great advantage of the many behind-the-scenes and inside-scoop events — most free to the public — that gives this biggest doc fest in Europe its accessible community vibe. I watched a Talk Show with tabloid-deep Nick Broomfield discussing his Sarah Palin: You Betcha! over a live Internet feed. I attended in […]
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Gerard Ravel and the Super 8 Festival that Launched J.J. Abrams
In Super 8, writer/director J.J. Abrams (pictured) tells the story of a group of adolescent filmmakers in a small Ohio town whose big dream is to get their film into the fictional Cleveland International Super 8 Film Festival. The film never shows us if their movie makes it — the kids are sidetracked by an alien invasion, after all — but in real life Abrams was part of a real life band of teen filmmakers showcased at a festival titled “The Best Teen Super 8mm Films of ’81.” Held at L.A.’s Nuart Theater in March 1982, it helped launch the […]
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Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd Talks The Hurt Locker
Cinematographer Barry Ackroyd has shot almost 50 features with numerous directors, but when it comes time to discuss his work on Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, his collaborations with two other helmers need to be referenced. The first is Ken Loach, the director Ackroyd is most associated with. The Manchester, England-born d.p. has shot many of Loach’s films, including Raining Stones, Ladybird Ladybird, Land and Freedom, the Palme d’Or-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and his upcoming Looking for Eric. In these films he developed an unadorned, naturalistic camera and lighting style that gave them an almost doc-like verisimilitude. […]
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DOC NYC: Interview with Festival Directors Thom Powers & Raphaela Neihausen
The living room-sized lobby of the IFC Center was teeming with people over the past two weeks as DOC NYC concluded its second year. With more days, more films, more panels and more filmmakers in attendance, the festival was a veritable feast of documentaries. Among the faces passing through the crowd — including Albert Maysles, Werner Herzog, D.A. Pennebaker and Barbara Kopple — were those of festival directors Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen. Wearing the titles of artistic director and executive director, respectively, the husband and wife team conceived DOC NYC from their Manhattan apartment. Though involved in their own […]
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HAWAII AWARD WINNERS AND A STANDOUT WORK
The Hawaii International Film Festival fittingly wrapped up its 31st edition last week with Alexander Payne’s Hawaii-set-and-shot comedy/drama The Descendants, with a gracious Payne in town for the screening (no George Clooney, alas, though a life-sized Clooney cardboard cut-out was certainly a massive hit in the lobby). “Wine always tastes the best in the region it was grown and made,” noted Payne to an appreciative audience. “I hope that this film plays best in Hawaii.” Judging from audience response, Payne got his wish; the film (to be released nationally November 15) won the festival’s Audience Award for Narrative Feature, with […]
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DOC NYC: Directors Nara Garber & Betsy Nagler on Flat Daddy
In the corpus of documentaries that have come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve seen a gradual progression from the outward to the inward — immersive forays into the battlefield giving way to subtler studies of the wartime psyche. Yet the majority of them have focused on the soldier’s experience of war. Flat Daddy, premiering at DOC NYC this Sunday at 4PM and screening again on Nov. 8th at 1:30, sets itself apart by focusing on the people who feel war perhaps the deepest: military families put on hold or torn apart by the absence of their […]
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PREVIEWING DOC NYC
Since I’ve never attended the Toronto International Film Festival, or the long-running doc series Stranger Than Fiction, I was shamefully late to discover the curatorial wizard behind-the-curtain by the name of Thom Powers. But ever since Powers’s programming became, for me, the highlight of this year’s Miami International Film Festival he’s been firmly on my cine-radar. So when I noticed he’d be returning as artistic director of DOC NYC (which runs Nov. 2-10) I thought, “Oh, no.” I didn’t have time to cover DOC NYC right before I flew to Amsterdam to tackle the mother of all nonfiction fests IDFA! […]
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TO PITCH OR NOT TO PITCH: THAT IS NOT A QUESTION AT THE AUSTIN FILM FESTIVAL
The writer of Con Air and the writer of The Fighter walk into a bar and take a seat next to an aspiring writer with no credits, no agent, no manager and no connections. The aspiring writer strikes up a conversation. This is neither the set up for a cruel joke nor a channel surfing induced fever dream – it’s just one of the many scenes I witnessed at the Austin Film Festival & Conference, one of the few festivals dedicated to celebrating the screenwriter both fledgling and legendary. In addition to its film competition, Austin holds a contest for unproduced writers, […]
