Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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The Outlaw Pleasures of Escape from Tomorrow
Children have no conception of copyright. The words “intellectual property” mean nothing to them. There is just the world, the people and places and things in front of them, and the imprint these things make on their young minds. But as adults, we realize that we don’t own these things that have imprinted themselves on our brains. That’s okay, though. When it comes to the totems of childhood fantasy, we can pay to experience them again — or, more accurately, pay to experience them vicariously through our children. The Walt Disney Corporation has made such a cross-generational feedback loop into […]
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A Young Producer’s Sundance Photo Diary, Day One
I don’t have a film premiering at Sundance this year, though not for the lack of trying. I don’t have an awesome, all inclusive ticket package or badge, and my name doesn’t pop up on guest lists at premiere parties. I am a young producer hustling my way through the arduous independent film landscape and lucky to be at the Sundance Film Festival. I’m here with my film collective, The Spirit Farm, and with a few projects on my slate. I’ve decided to catalog my time at Sundance bouncing between movies and meetings, cocktail parties (that I can squeeze my way […]
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Gay Film Auteur Travis Mathews Talks Interior. Leather Bar.
San Francisco-based gay filmmaker Travis Mathews built his reputation as one of the leading figures in the latest new wave of gay independent cinema on the back of a series of award-winning intimate, confessional documentary films about young homosexual men, In their Room. His first narrative feature, I Want Your Love, explored gay friends negotiating their way towards and through sexual relationships and featured unsimulated sex. His new film, Interior. Leather Bar, co-directed with the actor James Franco, is just as honest in its depictions. This film within a film begins with a re-imagining of the lost 40 minutes of […]
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Five Questions with The Spectacular Now Director James Ponsoldt
James Ponsoldt is no stranger to the Sundance Film Festival. His last two feature films, Smashed and Off the Black, both premiered in Park City, with Smashed winning a Special Jury Prize in 2012. The Spectacular Now, Ponsoldt’s third film, premieres today. Working from the novel by Tim Tharp of the same name, (500) Days of Summer‘s screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber adapted the story about a popular high school boy with an emerging drinking problem who finds himself drawn to a girl of a lesser social status. Miles Teller (Project X) and Shailene Woodley (The Descendants) star […]
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The 24th Annual Palm Springs International Film Festival: 4 Days, 3 Greats, 2 Duds
Palm Springs, California blossomed in the 1930s when Hollywood royalty started calling this Coachella Valley city, a couple hours drive from L.A., (second) home. It still has a sort of old-timey vibe, evidenced by the hundreds of names engraved in its downtown Walk of Stars, the majority of which faded from the collective celebrity conscious decades ago. And though the Palm Springs International Film Festival has only been around for 24 years – actually a ripe old age for an American film fest – it too feels like a throwback to another era, one in which the term “kick starter” […]
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“Dis/Oriented”: Arguing with Chung Kuo China Through Dance
Ten minutes before Yin Mei’s “Dis/Oriented: Antonioni In China” kicked off at New York’s Asia Society on Sunday, a woman two seats to the right of me pulled out a hard-boiled egg and ate it as sustenance for the long journey ahead. “I wanted to see the film,” the egg eater complained to her friend, explaining why she’d bought a confused ticket without realizing the nature of the event, “but now it’s too late.” I had to wonder how many people had shown up thinking they were going to see the film rather than “a dance theater ‘conversation’ with the […]
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Unknown Pleasures: Viewing U.S. Indie Cinema From Afar
Catering to virtually every niche, Berlin offers some 70 film festivals each year. Since 2009, the first on the calendar has been the Unknown Pleasures Festival. Held during the first two weeks of January at the historic Babylon Cinema in former East Berlin, it is a work of love run entirely by three enthusiasts of US independent cinema, providing a sorely needed platform for recent American arthouse films. This year’s edition opened on a disappointing note with the German premiere of Michel Gondry’s The We and the I. Typically saccharine and contrived, Gondry’s latest portrays a group of Bronx teens […]
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The 2013 Art House Convergence | Upstream Color Offers A Unique Case Study
This past Monday night, as temperatures dipped well below zero, film curators and programmers from America’s art house cinemas gathered in a screening room in Midway, Utah, for a unique screening opportunity at the annual Art House Convergence. Shane Carruth, the Sundance award winning director of Primer, brought his new film, the highly anticipated Upstream Color, to the conference to show the film directly to art house cinema programmers a full week before the film’s World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. And while writers (like I) have been asked to embargo our thoughts on the film itself until the […]
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25 Films I’m Anticipating at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival
Here’s the secret to compiling a list of films to see at a festival: go through the catalog and figure out what excites you. And then write down those anticipations. That’s all I’ve done here — given the catalog one pass and pulled out 25 films that will be at the top of my list. A number of these films are ones I’ve known of before, including quite a few from filmmakers who made our “25 New Faces” lists as well as those in the IFP Narrative Lab, where I’m a mentor. But there are others from promising young filmmakers […]
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Sundance Festival Director John Cooper Previews the 2013 Fest
It’s a ritual here at Filmmaker — a pre-festival chat with Sundance Festival Director John Cooper about the films, filmmakers and what the annual Park City event might have to say about the big picture of independent film. Our style at Filmmaker is to refer to people by their last names, but in the case of Cooper, that’s doubly appropriate — that’s what everyone calls him. In our talk he was his usual unflappable self, seeming to have lost known of the palpable enthusiasm he evinced at the 2010 edition, the first after he and his Programming Director Trevor Groth […]
