Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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25 Picks for the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival
In the world of film festivals, “12” isn’t a particularly notable number. “Ten” — connoting if not institutional status than at least permanent residence — has come and gone. So too the after party of “11.” “Twelve” should just be rolling along, business as usual, dependent more on the quality of that year’s cinema than anything else. So, while it would be a stretch to say that Tribeca has reinvented itself for its twelfth edition, which opens today, I can’t help but note that something seems pleasantly different. Maybe it’s the lack of celebrity bloat — gone are the tin-ear […]
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2013 Cannes Film Festival Lineup Announced
Yesterday, a relatively convincing hoax lineup was “leaked” to a few websites, which presented a tantalizing vision of what Cannes 2013 had to offer. This morning, however, the real slate has been unveiled and its actually even more stacked with big name directors and exciting films. In competition, there are the new titles from U.S. directors Steven Soderbergh (his HBO “non-film” on Liberace), Alexander Payne, James Gray and the Coen brothers, with Europe represented by films from auteurs such as Paolo Sorrentino, François Ozon, Arnaud Desplechin, Abdellatif Kechiche (The Secret of the Grain), Nicolas Winding Refn, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi and Roman Polanski. From […]
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Big Shot Movie Club Launches a “How To” Series at Spectacle
Our friends at the Big Shot Movie Club are in the midst of a screening series close to our hearts at Spectacle in Williamsburg. Titled “How To,” it’s a series of “practical films…. Films that teach us skills and examine the process of how things are made. In this series, we learn how to make ends meet, how to feed ourselves, and how people persist, day in and day out, in this complex world.” The films include the Maysles Brothers’ Salesman (April 17 and 27); Agnes Varda’s Daguerreotypes (April 17); and Jiayin Liu’s Oxhide II (April 27). Check out the […]
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The Full Frame Film Festival, Part Three
Several of the films from this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival dealt with themes of community. Two films in particular that focused on question of community were Patrick Creadon’s If You Build It and Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman’s Remote Area Medical. In both cases, we are introduced to both the pleasures and the complexities of providing resources — medical or educational — to rural communities that have been neglected in recent years. If You Build It depicts the efforts of Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller to introduce a design-oriented curriculum to rural Bertie County, North Carolina, and to […]
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The Full Frame Film Festival, 2013: Part Two
A number of films at this year’s Full Frame raised questions for me about issues related to memory, identity, and storytelling. As Amir Bar-Lev reminds us, in Full Frame’s programming notes, that documentary is a “strange and problematic medium where journalism and art meet,” and many of this year’s films reflect overtly or more subtly about the role of storytelling and its relationship to memory, identity, and in some cases, politics. Patrick Reed’s Fight Like Soldiers, Die Like Children, which had its North American premiere at Full Frame, depicts the efforts of Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, a witness to the Rwanda […]
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The Full Frame Film Festival 2013, Part One
The opening day of this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has once again provided attendees with an eclectic offering of choices, including a number of timely films that touch on important political issues and a curated series organized by Amir Bar-Lev, Stories About Stories, that focuses on documentaries who engage with the question of narrative itself, as well as a tribute to the innovative documentary storyteller, Jessica Yu. But this variety of choices speaks to the vibrant work being done by documentary filmmakers and the programmers who organized this year’s festival, not to mention the vital questions that documentary […]
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Filmmaker Celebrates 20 Year Anniversary at MoMA, April 4 – 15
This is Filmmaker‘s 20th Anniversary Year, and I’m very honored to have curated a MoMA Carte Blanche series, opening tomorrow and running through April 15, of films from the magazine’s history. I’ve posted the complete schedule below, and will be on hand tomorrow night to introduce the series and its first film, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi. And each day for the duration of the series I’ll be posting on the site old interviews and articles from the magazine featuring the films and filmmakers presented. I’m showing 11 features in addition two programs highlighting short work from our “25 New Faces” series, […]
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Festival Cinematography Notes – At Berlin, Back to Black
Back in February, I had the privilege of giving two workshops, “Intro to Large-sensor Digital Cinema Cameras” and “Large-sensor Digital Cinema Cameras in Detail” at the 11th edition of the Berlinale Talent Campus. For those not acquainted with this Berlin Film Festival initiative: the Talent Campus each year invites 300 directors, producers, editors, and cinematographers – “talented emerging filmmakers in the first years of their career” – each with a film or two under their belts. Most seem to be in their late 20s. This year over 4,400 applied from 137 countries. Clearly a hot ticket. The 300 lucky ones […]
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Rear-Ended: New Directors/New Films
If brave new fiction dominated the first week of New Directors/New Films, a cluster of divergent docs owns the second. Some of the docmakers aim for the intimate and personal (Stories We Tell, Anton’s Right Here); others, the extroverted and novel (Our Nixon, People’s Park). For the most part, grasp equals reach. The directors merge form and content in ways appropriate for both subject and audience. The one standout feature fits nicely with the docs. The Interval is a study in doc-like realism, and Italian director Leonardo Di Costanzo is a veteran of documentaries. The film has a light poetic feel as well — […]
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Second Sun Valley Fest Wraps a Strong Edition
A place of unbelievable beauty that maintains a rustic, unassuming vibe, Sun Valley, Idaho, has long been a hideaway for the rich and famous, from the Shah of Iran to generations megawatt movie stars. Arnold Schwartznegger and Clint Eastwood have homes there; Bruce Willis and Demi Moore apparently split much of the surrounding area in their divorce. First brought to attention by Ernest Hemingway — who lauded it as prime fall hunting lands in the 30s, long frequenting the place with his buddy Gary Cooper and finishing his legendary For Whom the Bell Tolls in a second story suite in its signature […]
