Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Tough Topics in Investigative Journalism: Double Exposure 2023
The ninth annual edition of Double Exposure, a festival celebrating investigative journalism, once again brought together an intensely engaged group of journalists, documentarians, lawyers and funders. Washington, D.C., where antennas prick right up when you start talking about how to influence public opinion, is the precise intersection for these different professional groups to find each other. So, it’s not surprising that this is an event where the (three-day) symposium is at least as important as the festival. The topics were tough. What does collaboration look like for newspapers used to honing their competitive edge and maintaining strict distance from “sources”? […]
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Behind the Lens at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival 2023
As the US’s largest university-run fest, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival (October 21-28) smartly caters to an overwhelmingly collegiate audience, which means bringing in loads of celebrities for red carpet events (Kevin Bacon! Ava DuVernay! Eva Longoria!) balanced with veteran Hollywood craftspeople for numerous nuts and bolts panels (this year’s Artisans series included “The Creators of Worlds: The Artisans of Oppenheimer”). Not to mention there’s a puppy dog enthusiasm with which these young industry aspirants gobble up the eight-day “celebration of cinematic excellence.” It’s both contagious and, for someone like me long past their dorm room years, dauntingly exhausting. (FOMO […]
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Popular and Political Argentinian Cinema at Viennale 2023
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 […]
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BendFilm Festival 2023: What Filmmakers Need to Know Before Applying to Film Festivals
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 […]
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Navigating the New Wave: Insights from Gotham Week Expo 2023
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 […]
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UFO Announces Four Filmmakers Selected for Inaugural Short Film Lab
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 […]
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“Raising Funds for a Film ‘About Abortion’ Is Never Easy” | Tracy Droz Tragos, PLAN C
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, […]
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The Public Experience: San Sebastian International Film Festival 2023
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 […]
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The Night The Lights Went Out in Maine: Camden International Film Festival 2023
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 […]
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18 Films to Watch in 17 Days at NYFF 2023
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 […]
