Tomorrow, May 6, through Sunday May 9 runs the Maryland Film Festival, which includes this year a one-day conference on Friday entitled “Filmmakers Taking Charge.” The festival itself has a pretty excellent schedule and then there is the conference, which is described like this: This intimate event is a daylong set of case study roundtables and networking opportunities focused on identifying methods to connect audiences and filmmakers in an increasingly overpopulated (and tech-savvy) market. The conference will bring visiting and local filmmakers together with a variety of distributors, critics, and exhibitors in a spirit of mutual support and cooperation that […]
Another sad casualty of the current recession: Gen Art is shutting down. Most film programmers worry about how to cultivate new audiences. Gen Art never had that problem. Indeed, “Who are these people?” was always the operative phrase among film industry folk attending Gen Art screenings, which were always packed with hip and enthusiastic twentysomething viewers. Gen Art’s programming was always interesting and their model and audience outreach downright enviable. I’m sorry to see them go. From Gen Art’s website: It is with an extremely heavy heart that we are are posting this. After struggling for the past 18 months […]
It may be hard to imagine, but there was a time when documentaries about off-brand sporting events and competitions were a rare thing. In this pre-Spellbound era, Pin Gods managed to make a small bowling-ball sized splash at the Toronto festival, only to fall through the cracks of the distribution system (a fact bemoaned last night by one of Pin Gods’ biggest fans, Stranger Than Fiction programmer Thom Powers). A film about what its director Larry Locke calls, “the small dream,” Pin Gods is an endearingly humane look at four men, each one trying to make a life out of professional […]
Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids are All Right will open the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival, which announced its line-up today. The Focus Features release, due out in July, stars Annette Benning, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Mia Wasikowska in a story of a lesbian couple and their children, who search for their sperm donor father. The closing night film will be Despicable Me, a 3D comedy-fantasy directed by Chris Renaud and Pierre Coffin. The festival, organized by Film Independent, will be the first held in downtown L.A.’s L.A. Live complex. Rebecca Yeldham is the Director of the festival and David […]
With Tribeca wrapping up this weekend I thought this would be the right time to give some of my highlights from what I saw this year. Sadly, I didn’t get out to as many movies as I would have liked (but Howard Feinstein did, and he writes about some of them in his preview and at the half way point) but here’s some notes from my vantage point. Best Performance Melissa Leo in The Space Between. Leo plays a grumpy airline stewardess who after her flight is grounded on 9/11 has to watch over one of her passengers, a Pakistani-American […]
The winners of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival were announced tonight. Feo Aladag‘s When We Leave received the fest’s top honor, the Founders Award for Best Narrative. The film follows a woman and her son as they try to escape her husband’s abuse and finds shelter with a family in Berlin. Best Documentary went to Alexandra Codina‘s Monica & David, which highlights a couple living with Down syndrome. Other winners include Dana Adam Shaprio‘s Monogamy taking home the New York Competition category and the outlandish comedy Spork won the first ever Best Feature in the Tribeca Film Festival Virtual category. […]
Despite being born and bred on our shores, Mormonism is still something of a fringe religion. For a lot of Americans, there’s something vaguely worrying about its army of clean-cut, nametag wearing missionaries. Neither Hollywood nor the independent film scene have helped the Mormon case for normalcy – their portrayals tend to fixate on the church’s checkered history with polygamy. Last night’s Stranger Than Fiction featured Cleanflix, a sympathetic look at the more mainstream side of Mormon culture. Directed by Andrew James and Joshua Ligairi, two filmmakers who grew up in the tradition (James is no longer practicing, but Ligairi […]
Some good, or at least interesting, films surfaced at Tribeca this year—I’ll get to a few a couple of paragraphs down, and I wrote about others here last week—almost in spite of the umbrella organization itself. You can’t help but wonder: What is the template for this festival, which has been struggling to find its identity since its inception? Toronto, Sundance, Cannes, Berlin? San Francisco, Denver? Answer: It’s not cast from a festival mold at all, in spite of the invaluable input of former artistic director Peter Scarlet and David Kwok, as far as I can tell the only current […]
Today the Sundance Institute announced the 13 projects selected for this year’s Director and Screenwriting Labs. Talking place in Park City, Utah June 1-25, the Labs will be filled with many familiar names to Filmmaker readers. 2008 25 New Faces alum Myna Joseph will be attending; as will Ondi Timoner, whose doc We Live In Public won the doc Grand Prize at Sundance in 2009; Ry Russo-Young, who was awarded our Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award for You Wont Miss Me at last year’s Gothams, will be attending with her latest screenplay; and ’09 25 […]
Now in its 13th year, the documentary-only Full Frame Film Festival (April 8-11) takes place in my hometown of Durham, North Carolina. The city of Durham is historically a tobacco town, moving slowly but steadily towards an uncertain future: while its tobacco warehouses are being converted to swank lofts, downtown office space is readily available with a seemingly high vacancy rate. The festival is very much a cultural cornerstone for the city, and as a result Full Frame means a lot to Durham. As of late, however, Durham also means a lot to Full Frame: while in previous years the […]