Banner news first: two days into the 10th annual True/False Film Festival, Columbia, Missouri’s immensely likable documentary/hybrid-friendly showcase, the marquee title of the six films I’ve seen so far from the slate (three of which I saw before arriving) is Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq’s These Birds Walk. The starting point is Abdul Sattar Edhi, a Pakistani humanitarian and founder of a number of shelters, rehab centers and other faculties for the dispossessed. As he washes naked runaway children, some pitifully scrawny, he says his philanthropic reputation and prominence mean nothing; to understand his work you have to understand common […]
Jean-Claude Brisseau’s The Girl From Nowhere is an auteur work of relatively low-profile interest to the broader public, one of several such items in Lincoln Center’s annual Rendez-Vous With French Cinema series, which starts today. Brisseau’s career is firmly bifurcated, the second part beginning with 2002’s Secret Things — overheated soft-core with classical allusions — led to lawsuits and sentencing for sexual harassment of auditioning actresses. After two more films in this humid vein, The Girl From Nowhere stars Brisseau himself in an adamantly chaste mood. A man-mountain with a body somewhere between latter-day Gerard Depardieu and NFL coach Rob […]
It was announced this afternoon that the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival will open on April 17 with Mistaken for Strangers, a documentary about Brooklyn indie heroes The National. The film, exec produced by Oscar-nominated documentarian Marshall Curry, is directed by Tom Berninger, the brother of The National’s lead singer Matt Berninger, who is a producer on the film along with his wife, Carin Besser, and Craig Charland. The film, which has previously had working titles including Summer Lovin’ Torture Party and For Those About to Weep, documents the band’s tour supporting their 2010 album High Violet. Its current title is taken from one […]
First things first – Texas’s Thin Line Film Fest does not take place in Austin, nor in March, nor does it accept indie narratives, nor any fiction films at all. In fact, this six-year-old event, which plays a month prior to SXSW, smartly doesn’t define itself in relation to that cinematic elephant in the Lone Star State. Which is its strength. Texas’s only fest devoted strictly to docs – from local to international – Thin Line (the name inspired by its founders’ desire to explore that space between fact and fiction) does take over Denton, Texas, for 10 days in […]
In what may be an indicator of the direction tonight’s Oscars will take, David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook dominated the proceedings at yesterday’s Independent Spirit Awards. The film, which was Filmmaker‘s cover movie for the magazine’s Fall 2012 issue, won big in the major categories, taking Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actress (for Jennifer Lawrence). The awards show was ultimately a rather curious affair. Best First Feature was won by Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which is actually Chbosky’s second film as director. Derek Connolly, screenwriter of Safety Not Guaranteed, won Best First Screenplay and then proceeded to give an […]
The current class of “25 New Faces” continues to make headlines, this time bagging opening and closing night spots at the upcoming New Directors/New Films being works by 2012 alums. Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye‘s archival doc Our Nixon kicks off the MoMA/FSLC-housed festival, while Alexandre Moors‘ Beltway sniper drama Blue Caprice closes the event. Other U.S. indies at the 2013 edition of ND/NF include Joshua Oppenheimer’s buzz doc The Act of Killing, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and Shannon Plumb’s Towheads, while additional standouts include festival favorites like Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking and Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell. The […]
If you follow Michael Moore on Twitter, you’ll be aware that 5 Broken Cameras’ Palestinian director Emad Burnat was detained by immigration officers on his arrival at LAX airport. Burnat is in Los Angeles for Sunday’s Academy Awards, where the film he made with Israeli director Guy Davidi is nominated for Best Documentary. In response to this incident, Burnat just released the following statement through the film’s distributor, Kino Lorber: Last night, on my way from Turkey to Los Angeles, CA, my family and I were held at US immigration for about an hour and questioned about the purpose of […]
John Singleton was raised on silent movies. The 45-year-old director of Boyz in the Hood and the Shaft remake grew up next to the Century Drive-In in Inglewood, California. As a boy, he’d literally peek out his window and watch his heroes Bruce Lee and Billy Jack‘s Tom Laughlin battle on-screen without sound. “The first breast I saw was Pam Grier’s,” Singleton confessed to a rapt audience at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox Tuesday night, hosted by director Clement Virgo as part of the city’s Black History Month celebrations. “Every time I see Pam Grier I tell her, ‘You made me want […]
The SXSW Film Festival today announced a further round of films that have been programmed for this year’s festival, including Sundance favorites such as James Ponsoldt’s The Spectacular Now, Zal Batmanglij’s The East, Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin’s Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer and Lucy Walker’s The Crash Reel. Among the other films also added are Ramin Bahrani’s At Any Price, which bowed at Venice last year, and a film shot entirely by Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne on his iPhone, entitled A Year in the Life of Wayne’s Phone. A full list of the new titles is below: […]
Cinekink NYC has announced the line-up for its 2013, tenth anniversary edition, which runs February 26 – March 3, 2013. Presented by Cinekink, “an organization dedicated to the recognition and encouragement of sex-positive and kink-friendly depictions in film and television,” the festival has historically mixed documentary, fiction and experimental work, drawing from the festival circuit, the art world, and adult production. Here’s the line-up, and further information can be found at the festival’s site. (The festival’s closing-night film is a restoration of Radley Metzger’s ’70s porno-chic hit, The Opening of Misty Beethoven. Read our interview 1997 interview with Metzger here.) […]