Festivals & Events

BROOKLYN INTERNATIONAL FILM FEST ANNOUNCES TITLES

The 13th annual Brooklyn International Film Festival (BiFF) will be held June 4th-13th at indieScreen and the Brooklyn Heights Cinema. This year’s BiFF will feature over 100 premieres from 92 countries, including a record 16 films made by Brooklyn filmmakers on Brooklyn sets. For more information, please visit: www.brooklynfilmfestival.org. Some of the feature films to be shown: Gabi on the Roof in July | NY Premiere Director: Lawrence Michael Levine Narrative Feature / United States, 2010 99 min An edgy character-driven ensemble comedy about ex-girlfriends, sibling rivalry and whipped cream set in a city that’s constantly in flux. Bad Day […]

By Jaimie Stettin on May 19, 2010 Festivals & Events
NANTUCKET FILM FEST CELEBRATES 15th ANNIVERSARY WITH STARS AND “TOY STORY 3”

In celebration of its 15th anniversary, The Nantucket Film Festival (NFF) is expanding its program to include more special guests and events. This year, NFF will present an All-Star Comedy Roundtable presented and moderated by Ben Stiller and featuring Sarah Silverman and Zach Galifianakis. Its annual Screenwriting Tribute will honor a trinity of Academy Award winning writers, including Barry Levinson (Diner), Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3), and Davis Guggenheim (Waiting for “Superman”). And the fest will screen Toy Story 3 for it’s opening night. See full list of films below. For passes and more detailed information, please visit: www.nantucketfilmfestival.org. Ticket […]

By Jaimie Stettin on May 19, 2010 Festivals & Events
“MY PERESTROIKA” AT STRANGER THAN FICTION

Like history itself, historical documentaries tend to be written by the winners – experts whose “greatest hits” style approach is as comforting as the muzak that plays underneath their interviews. Last night’s Stranger Than Fiction featured director Robin Hessman’s My Perestroika, a documentary so good at breaking the rules of historical docs that it makes you question why anyone ever follows them. Hessman focuses on the Meyersons, an ordinary Moscow couple who teach history at the same school they attended as children. Struggling to articulate what it meant to grow up Soviet to a group of students that did not, […]

By Mary Anderson Casavant on May 19, 2010 Festivals & Events
“BIUTIFUL” SHINES AT CANNES

I ran into another New York film critic last night. I said that this doesn’t seem to be a very good Cannes. Her answer was, “No masterpieces so far.” The closest is, according to many journalists here, Mike Leigh’s Another Year. Not for me, however. It’s fine, filming a middle-class family (with working-class roots) against four distinct seasons. The problem is that Leigh’s renowned “rehearsal method,” in which actors develop their characters over time, before a script is written, backfired a bit. The usually dependable Leslie Manville channels Brenda Blethyn in Secrets & Lies, but overdoes the tics and drunken […]

By Howard Feinstein on May 17, 2010 Festivals & Events
‘LIFE 2.0? AT STRANGER THAN FICTION

For enthusiasts of Second Life, a 3-D virtual world that enables users to interact with each other through avatars, all the hype surrounding Avatar must have seemed kind of overblown. After all, they’d been living their own science fiction fantasies for years, and their virtual world reflects the fantasies of millions of people, not just Mr. Cameron’s. Last night, Stranger Than Fiction featured a screening of Life 2.0, a dreamy documentary that explores what happens when people start living a Second Life. Director Jason Spingarn-Koff explores the phenomena from the inside – his filmmaker avatar straps on a digital camera and […]

By Mary Anderson Casavant on May 12, 2010 Festivals & Events
FILMMAKERS TAKE CHARGE AT THE MARYLAND FILM FESTIVAL

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 […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 5, 2010 Festivals & Events
GEN ART SHUTS DOWN

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 […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 5, 2010 Festivals & Events
“PIN GODS” AT STF

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 […]

By Mary Anderson Casavant on May 5, 2010 Festivals & Events
“KIDS” OPENS L.A. FILM FEST; LINE-UP ANNOUNCED

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 […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 4, 2010 Festivals & Events
NOTES FROM TRIBECA

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 […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Apr 30, 2010 Festivals & Events

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