Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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A Day at the Sundance Shortslab
A few weeks ago I attended the third Sundance ShortsLab, a day-long event about short filmmaking organized and conducted by the folks from Sundance (primarily, from what I could see, from the festival side of the house.) Sundance has previously put on two other Shortslabs, one in LA and one in Chicago. This was their first event in New York, and those of us in attendance spent the day in an auditorium at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as a variety of speakers and panels unfolded, and several short films were shown. The day started with Trevor Groth, Sundance’s director […]
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2ND ANNUAL ARUBA FILM FESTIVAL
A Dutch protectorate tucked near the very bottom of the Caribbean, Aruba is a small, arid, resort powered island that, despite its idiosyncrasies, may feel at times, especially along its sunbather packed eastern shores, like any other tourist satellite (although a particularly intoxicating one it is). Still, woe is he who gets caught in the all too ubiquitous American simulacrum, one of decidedly marked-up Five Guys fries and T.G.I. Friday’s chicken fingers, of cheeseburger “specials” at Hooters with beef that taste like copper. Of course, this is a film festival on a beautiful tourist trap, so there’s a lot of […]
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THE 2011 EDINBURGH FILM FESTIVAL
Spend even the shortest amount of time in the delightful and disturbing Scottish capital and you begin to read native Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a metaphor for the city itself. Edinburgh boasts a warm and welcoming population residing in an atmosphere where an ever-present hint of menace hangs palpably in the air like its famous rainy mist. (This openness is evidenced by the fact that one early afternoon my sister and I were able to pretty much wander in to a Justice Committee hearing of Parliament debating that day’s front page news […]
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Lady Vengeance: 2011 New York Asian Film Festival
Running for nine solid years and organized by the folks over at Subway Cinema, the New York Asian Film Festival is a genre lover’s dream — a carefully curated crop of new films from Korea, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan, and anywhere else on the continent they can get their hands on a good movie, watched in the company of equally discerning fans. The 2011 edition is kicking off on July 1 with the film Milocrorze: A Love Story, a genre-bending samurai romance in the form of a musical variety show, from Yoshimasa Ishibashi. I’m intrigued already. I remember the first time […]
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FROM BROOKLYN TO FINLAND: DOCS OF SUBSTANCE (PART 2)
The recent DocPoint NYC featured 47 Finnish documentaries in celebration of the Helsinki festival’s 10th anniversary. Here, Stuart Nusbaumer considers two in a weekend that bounced him between DocPoint and the Brooklyn Film Festival. Part 2: DocPoint New York City Reindeerspotting: Escape from Santaland Reindeerspotting is set in northern Finland in the town of Rovaniemi, which is not important since a junky is never part of a town. The central character, 19-years-old Jani, is not particularly important since junkies are nearly all young and mostly all alike. The overwhelming importance of their drug addiction makes the junkies overwhelming the same. […]
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THE 2011 KRAKOW FILM FESTIVAL
One of the oldest festivals in Europe, the Krakow Film Festival has a reputation among cinephiles as one of the continent’s most prestigious venues for short filmmaking and one of Eastern Europe’s largest markets for documentaries. Its 51st edition, which came to a close Memorial Day weekend, largely lived up to the hype. Unspooling 87 films of various shapes and sizes during the final week of May, it devoted a significant amount of its program to Polish cinema, with a competition section devoted solely to Polish films regardless or length or type. The shorts programming seems to be the heart […]
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FROM BROOKLYN TO FINLAND: DOCS OF SUBSTANCE
Part I: Brooklyn Film Festival Two film festivals just wrapped-up in New York City, the Brooklyn Film Festival which screened more than 100 narratives and documentaries — 36 by New York City based directors, and over a dozen shot in Brooklyn — and the DocPoint NYC which featured 47 Finnish documentaries in celebration of the Helsinki festival’s 10th anniversary. I ping-ponged between the two festivals, between Brooklyn the mecca of American independent film and Manhattan the site of the Finnish event, Finland being part of Scandinavia a powerhouse of European filmmaking. Good cinematic bloodlines for both fests. First, three films […]
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AN AMERICAN FILMMAKER IN SCOTLAND, OR THE 2011 DEAD BY DAWN FILM FESTIVAL
I’d never heard of the Dead By Dawn Film Festival until I applied. When our short film, Kitty Kitty (pictured above), got accepted, I was pleasantly surprised but then came the big decision: do I travel all the way to Scotland for it or stay home? From their website, the festival looked a little small, but I’d been told it was worth it. 90,000 hard-earned frequent-flyer miles later, I touch down in Edinburgh, Scotland. By the end of the fest, I was so impressed with it I decided to write this review and let other filmmakers know about it. Read […]
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FilmNation’s Glen Basner at Cannes
For the three-year-old FilmNation, the 2011 Cannes Film Festival is a big deal. That’s not just because the company’s market slate is substantial, containing projects by Terrence Malick, John Hillcoat and, as executive producer, James Cameron, but because the young New York-based sales and production company has, for the first time, two films in the festival. The company is repping both Pedro Almodovar’s latest Competition title, The Skin I Live In (pictured above), as well as American indie Jeff Nichol’s Sundance hit, Take Shelter, screening in the Critics Week section. FilmNation was launched by international sales veteran Glen Basner just […]
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SURVEYING THE DOCS AT TRIBECA, PART TWO
The Good Life is not about the good life, but the bad life. Mother Mette and daughter Anne lived a life of wealth and privilege, and then the husband-father died and the inherence dwindled, and finally the money ran out. Today the two survive on the mother’s minuscule pension in a small apartment in Portugal. While the mother seems resigned to her impoverished fate, the daughter is anything but resigned. She views life without wealth and servants as terribly unfair to her. At the age of 56, daughter Anne has never held a job — not one! “Work is still […]
