Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Moonrise Kingdom Takes Best Picture at the IFP Gotham Awards; Beasts’ Zeitlin Wins Two
Wes Anderson’s ’60s-set ode to childhood imagination and romance, Moonrise Kingdom, picked up the Best Picture Award at the IFP Gotham Awards Monday night at Cipriani’s in New York. Winning two awards was Beasts of the Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin, who won both the Breakthrough Director Award as well as a newly inaugurated Bingham Ray Award, for “filmmakers who bring a distinctive vision to the world.” The latter award came with $10,000 and $60,000 worth of equipment rental from Panavision. The Breakthrough Actor award went to Emayatzy Corinealdi for her portrayal of a convict’s faithful wife in Ava DuVernay’s […]
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How to Watch (and Read) Tonight’s Gotham Awards
It’s the Gotham Independent Film Awards tonight, IFP’s annual celebration of the best in independent film. For all thos unlucky enough not to be attending, you can keep track of the happenings by watching a live stream of the show on the Gothams website here. Also, look out for a recap of the night in this space tomorrow a.m. In the meantime, while we gear up for the show, here’s a full list of Filmmaker’s coverage of the films and individuals being honored tonight: Beasts of the Southern Wild Storm Song: Beasts of the Southern Wild and Tchoupitoulas Bernie […]
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Hearing Central Pitches at the IDFA Forum
So, I am in Amsterdam, attending my first IDFA, a fest I’ve been dreaming of attending since I first started working in documentary. IFP has 11 films in the fest, and four works in progress in the Forum, so I’m here for moral support, promotion of IFP, and reconnaissance. What is happening in documentary in the rest of the world? In advance of my arrival, I was most anticipating being a part of the Forum, “IDFA’s international co-financing and production market, Europe’s most important breeding ground for new documentary work.” The Forum presents works in progress to the international funding […]
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The Blue Velvet Project Goes to Mar Del Plata
Some of the best writing we’ve ever published has been Nicholas Rombes’ Blue Velvet Project, a year-long survey of David Lynch’s classic, done solely through the examination of single frames spaced at 47 second intervals. The series wrapped up a couple of months ago, and I’ve been missing it. The Project carries on, however, landing this week at the 27th Mar Del Plata Festival in Argentina. Each year, the festival publishes one book about cinema, and this year’s is, you guessed it, El Proyecto Terciopelo Azul. In the photo above, Rombes signs copies for festival attendees. I’m excited for him […]
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“Best Film Not Playing…” Nominees Screen at MOMA
If you’re in New York this weekend head over to the Museum of Modern Art for the museum and Filmmaker‘s annual screenings of the nominees for our “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” Gotham Award. Playing are Terence Nance’s wildly inventive doc/fiction relationship deconstruction, An Oversimplification of her Beauty (pictured); Amy Seimetz’s psycho-noir romance, Sun Don’t Shine; Alex Karpovsky’s real-life filmmaker comedy, Red Flag; the Zellner Brothers darkly humorous metaphysical exploration, Kid-Thing; and Frank V. Ross’s subtle and affecting relationship drama, Tiger Tail in Blue. I’ll be joining Nick Dawson, Alicia Van Couvering, MoMA’s Josh Siegel and […]
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Rome Film Festival 2012
Everyone knows Rome wasn’t built in a day. So to expect the former Venice Film Festival artistic director Marco Mueller to transform the fortunes of Rome’s film fest within eight months of taking the job would have been unfair. The event this year was about building foundation stones for the future, shaping an event and identity that would have the film world believing that all roads lead to Rome. It’s the seventh year that the Eternal City has been hosting a film festival and the hope that it would become the leading festival in Europe’s packed autumn festival season has […]
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Debating the Future of Hybrid Films at CPH:DOX
“Let’s start before we kill the term,” joked Jakob Hogel during the opening moments of “The Future of Hybrid Films,” a panel that took place last week at Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX. Preempting musty debate about the so-called hybrid genre, where various forms — usually documentary and fiction — are combined in single works, Hogel said, “We should be beyond the point of whether hybrid films exist, are dubious or morally wrong. They exist and who cares?” Hogel’s dismissal of hybrid handwringing doesn’t mean that the issues posed by such films aren’t being debated in the film industry. It’s just these debates […]
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Destroying 17,000 Islands at CPH:DOX
While at CPH:DOX I attended a seminar titled “An Interactive Audience” spotlighting new works in transmedia. One of the projects discussed was 17,000 Islands, a work commissioned by the festival’s own DOX:LAB, directed by Indonesia’s Edwin (Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly) and Norwegian transmedia doc director Thomas Ostbye, and produced by interactive producer Paramita Nath. The project, in which Edwin (pictured) and Ostbye make a film that is then “destroyed” by its viewers over the internet, sounded fascinating, so afterwards I pulled Edwin aside to learn more. First, here’s the description of the project from the CPH:DOX catalog: 17000 […]
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Bill Morrison Hands You the Remote
Bill Morrison’s newest film The Shooting Gallery has just finished playing a mere handful of screenings at the BAM Fisher Fishman Space as part of the 30th Next Wave Festival. It represents a new step in Morrison’s oeuvre because it introduces—as far as I’m aware—the concept of interactivity into his work, with audience members each receiving a laser pointer which they used as a remote control to select video and audio clips throughout the screening. The result—with music by Richard Einhorn, design by Jim Findlay, and interactive programming by Ryan Holsopple—is vintage Morrison but also something completely new. Morrison is […]
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The Act of Killing Takes Top Prize at CPH:DOX
The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn and Anonymous’s jaw-dropping tale of war crimes, guilt and moviemaking, took the top prize at CPH:DOX here in Copenhagen Friday night. The film, pictured above, boasts Werner Herzog and Errol Morris as executive producers and follows a group of former death squad leaders as they make Hollywood-style movies based on their murders of communists, ethnic Chinese and intellectuals following Indonesia’s military coup in 1965. Director Edwin (Postcards from the Zoo) presented the award and read the jury’s statement: “The Jury would like to award a film for its ability to show the […]
