The particular focus of this year’s Viennale might have been Chile—the main retrospective, dedicated to Raúl Ruiz, was paired with a program exploring the country’s cinema in the half century since the 1973 coup—but its neighbor Argentina was also very well-represented. More than a specific curatorial inclination, this reflected the fact that it’s been a terrific year for Argentine film. Alongside such festival-circuit hits as Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka, Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3 and Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents, the Viennale screened more modestly scaled and below-the-radar films, including Martín Shanly’s About Thirty, Martín Rejtman’s The Practice and Puan by […]
If there’s one thing that indie filmmakers, especially first-timers, can generally agree on, it’s that applying to film festivals can be a mystifying process. What type of films are film programmers looking for? Does running time matter? “Demystifying Film Festivals,” a panel at the recent 20th BendFilm Festival in Bend, Oregon (October 12-15, 2023) attempted to answer some of those questions. Open to the public and held at Somewhere That’s Green, a plant store and community space, the free panel was moderated by Selin Sevinç, director of programming at BendFilm and featured veteran programmers Joanne Feinberg (BendFilm, Big Sky), John […]
The following guest post was submitted by Brittany Franklin, founder and president of Minorities in Film (MiFILM). Franklin and MiFilm participated in the recent The Gotham Week Expo, a program of Filmmaker‘s publisher, The Gotham. — Editor The energy was palpable at The Gotham Week Expo Sessions on October 4th and 5th, as filmmakers and industry visionaries converged to exchange ideas, share insights and forge connections. Among the many enlightening sessions, Minorities in Film (MiFILM) had the pleasure to present two panels: “Amplifying Your Independent Film: Effective Marketing Techniques for Targeted Audience Engagement” and “Advocacy for the Independent Filmmaker Through […]
UFO (Untitled Film Organization) today announced the four filmmakers selected for its inaugural Short Film Lab. Bren Wyona, Kevin Xian Ming Yu, Brydie O’Connor and Tahiel Jimenez Medina will participate in an 18-month program “designed to help early-career directors advance and refine their voice and craft, while receiving project financial support, mentorship, professional development, and industry connections as part of a collaborative community.” In-person workshops will take place at Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the four will receive support and feedback from UFO co-directors, guest mentors and each other. The program supports these filmmakers through every stage of the process […]
Opening today in 20 markets across the United States is Tracy Droz Tragos’s Plan C, a documentary about social scientist Francine Coeytaux and her team’s work on expanding access to abortion pills online. With Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul opening today, and New York’s IFC Center run beginning October 13, we are reposting the director’s answer to our annual Sundance Question about the various challenges she faced while making the film. — Editor Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, […]
There’s something fittingly appropriate about the way that The Spirit Of The Beehive director Victor Erice became the first Basque director to receive a lifetime achievement Donostia Award at the 71st San Sebastian Festival, while the Golden Shell for Best Film also went to San Sebastian-born Jaione Camborda for The Rye Horn, which is scripted in Galician and Portuguese. It encapsulates not just the way that the old meets the new at the festival but how, under José Luis Rebordinos’s directorship since 2011, it has continued to champion home-grown voices and non-hegemonic languages. Erice brought Close Your Eyes, his first film […]
Neither high winds nor power failures could throw the Camden International Film Festival far off course this year, as the annual nonfiction showcase executed a nimble pivot to accommodate a late-arriving guest: Hurricane Lee, which had weakened to become a post-tropical storm by the time it reached north coastal Maine halfway through its 19th edition. “We’ve been right in the middle of hurricane season for our very existence, but for a tropical storm to get as far north as it did and make landfall as close as it did was unique,” said Ben Fowlie, CIFF founder and artistic director. The […]
With the opening night of the 61st New York Film Festival upon us, Filmmaker would like to recommend 18 titles to catch during the 17-day engagement, which runs from September 29 through October 15. Over the course of our previous festival coverage from this year—including Sundance, Cannes, Venice and TIFF—many of these films have been featured on our site in critical dispatches and reviews. Below, we share links and edited excerpts from these director interviews and festival dispatches. Anatomy of a Fall Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner is more straightforward and more detour-prone than its courtroom drama premise—even if a […]
The inaugural edition of FILM FEST KNOX, set to take place in Knoxville this year from November 9 to 12, has announced the six titles that will be featured in its American Regional Film Competition section, designed to highlight work produced outside of New York and Los Angeles, including the sophomore directorial feature by 25 New Face of Film Graham Swon. From the press release: An Evening Song (for three voices) (Dir. Graham Swon) 86 minutes – Drama In the 1930s a former child-prodigy writer moves to the countryside with her pulp-fiction scribe husband where they become entwined in a love […]
“You’re here for an experimental shorts program, so you know,” said filmmaker Shambhavi Kaul. “You know.” Her latest was premiering as part of the second Wavelengths shorts program of TIFF 2023, the section-within-a-section of the festival I value most—once a rejuvenating four sessions when I started attending TIFF in 2016, subsequently pared down to two in a smaller auditorium and back to three in this year’s edition. In his overview of this year’s Wavelengths, Michael Sicinski walks through its history and how, over the years, it’s enfolded other, more fleeting sections for adventurous work; now, there can only be one, […]