Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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FILM FEST KNOX Announces Inaugural American Regional Film Competition Selections
The inaugural edition of FILM FEST KNOX, set to take place in Knoxville this year from November 9 to 12, has announced the six titles that will be featured in its American Regional Film Competition section, designed to highlight work produced outside of New York and Los Angeles, including the sophomore directorial feature by 25 New Face of Film Graham Swon. From the press release: An Evening Song (for three voices) (Dir. Graham Swon) 86 minutes – Drama In the 1930s a former child-prodigy writer moves to the countryside with her pulp-fiction scribe husband where they become entwined in a love […]
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TIFF 2023: Wavelengths, Arthur & Diana
“You’re here for an experimental shorts program, so you know,” said filmmaker Shambhavi Kaul. “You know.” Her latest was premiering as part of the second Wavelengths shorts program of TIFF 2023, the section-within-a-section of the festival I value most—once a rejuvenating four sessions when I started attending TIFF in 2016, subsequently pared down to two in a smaller auditorium and back to three in this year’s edition. In his overview of this year’s Wavelengths, Michael Sicinski walks through its history and how, over the years, it’s enfolded other, more fleeting sections for adventurous work; now, there can only be one, […]
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Trailer Watch: Pedro Costa’s Viennale Trailer
Pedro Costa has made the latest in a long line of festival trailers commissioned by the Viennale from leading auteurs. This one stars Elizabeth Pinard, star of his newest short, The Daughters of Fire, singing a Brecht song. This year’s Viennale runs from October 19 to 30.
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TIFF 2023: Flipside, Nowhere Near
Introducing his third feature, Nowhere Near, Miko Revereza said that his first, the train travelogue No Data Plan, was shot in three days and edited in about a month, fooling him into thinking every movie would be as easy. Instead, Nowhere Near took seven years and five or six entirely different cuts to compose itself. Similarly contemplating a mountain of longitudinally acquired footage, Chris Wilcha’s Flipside is assembled from work shot over nearly three decades. Their approaches and intentions are entirely different, but the two films work well together. Wilcha is the maker of 2000’s The Target Shoots First, an immaculate workplace comedy about his mid-’90s […]
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Venice Film Festival 2023: What is a Festival?
Nothing I heard or saw at the 80th Venice Film Festival felt more momentous than the news that came from Berlin after four days of screenings. On September 2, Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian announced he’d step down after next year’s edition, citing issues with the new management structure proposed by Germany’s minister for culture and media Claudia Roth. His premature departure will mark the end of a five-year journey that turned the festival into an event miles away from the tacky extravaganza of its Dieter Kosslick era. Shepherded by Chatrian and executive director Mariëtte Rissenbeek, the Berlinale had found […]
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TIFF 2023: The Holdovers, Hit Man
In terms of acquisitions, the most financially significant screening of last year’s TIFF was an industry-only one of The Holdovers, a Miramax-developed title whose worldwide rights promptly sold for $30 million to Focus Features; this year, it returned for press and public inspection following its Telluride premiere. It is, as previously announced, a crowdpleaser directed by Alexander Payne, designed for career rejuvenation after the ambitious, unwieldy and expensive commercial failure of 2017’s Downsizing, and effectively written under his instruction by sitcom writer-producer David Hemingson. He cannibalized what was initially written as a prep school-set pilot by, among other things, following Payne’s directive to […]
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TIFF 2023: Evil Does Not Exist, I Don’t Know Who You Are
Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s Evil Does Not Exist begins by removing every element that might be reasonably expected from his work by now. Instead of long group dialogue sessions and theatrical/ therapeutic role-play, Evil starts with a generously prolonged, people-free dolly shot through a forest, the camera pointed straight up at the sky as it’s broken up by branches passing overhead. With a higher-resolution camera and some fancy post work, the forest could be a formalist spectacle—tree limbs overlapping and dissolving, the lattices created in the process, etc. But visual high definition has never been one of Hamaguchi’s priorities, as his movies remain oddly […]
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21 Films to Watch During TIFF 2023
The Toronto International Film Festival is fully underway beginning today, and while the vibe will certainly be different without as many Hollywood stars on the red carpet — a number of films have qualified for SAG-AFTRA interim agreements while probably at least as many either were not able to or decided not to try — there’s as always a strong lineup of films to look forward to. Below, Filmmaker‘s editors have compiled a list of 20 films to watch out for, many of which ones that have premiered at other festivals along with several world premieres we are hearing particularly […]
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Film at Lincoln Center Announces 2023 Artists and Critics Academy Participants
Film at Lincoln Center announces exclusively via Filmmaker this year’s participants for both the Artists Academy and Critics Academy, which will take place during the 61st annual New York Film Festival. Led by filmmaker Stacey Marbrey, the 2023 Artists Academy will entail a three-day workshop that will feature insight from working filmmakers, industry professionals and Artist Academy alumni. Specifically, some of the 2023 Academy mentors are film executive and former president of IFC Films Arianna Bocco and Emmy Award-winning producer Liz Nord. Per a press release, this year’s Artists Academy will include “panels, case studies, roundtable discussions, and networking opportunities […]
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Venice Film Festival 2023: Poor Things
Initially, Poor Things seems like it might be a Yorgos Lanthimos provocation about the value of provocation, a suspicion prompted when medical student Max McCandless (Ramy Youssef) first sees Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) and, awestruck, describes her as a “very pretty retard.” Given the film’s steampunk trappings, the 19th-century setting doesn’t offer “period verisimilitude” as a cover for vocabulary that feels suspiciously like a Red Scare shout-out. Bella is seen naked for the first time while unconscious; depending on how you want to take this visual language, the viewer could be aligned with a non-consensual gaze. Learning through transgression turns out to […]
