Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
-
Shorenstein Center Announces Fall 2024 Cohort of Documentary Film Fellows
The Shorenstein Center announced today the Fall 2024 cohort of Documentary Film Fellows. From the press release: The group joins the Center under the auspices of the Documentary Film in the Public Interest Initiative and will spend the semester conducting research and engaging with the HKS community about the challenges facing the field and its impact on civic life. The Documentary Film in the Public Interest Initiative is designed to support new research, analysis, innovation, and provocation around core issues facing the documentary film sector. Through the Fellows’ projects, the Shorenstein Center will engage in examinations of public impact and […]
-
Movies with Sand Under Your Feet: Previewing The Seventh Annual Rockaway Film Festival
“It’s interesting, more filmmakers this year are asking for laurels,” says Sam Fleischner when we spoke just a few days before the opening of the seventh annual Rockaway Film Festival. Fleischner’s the festival’s co-founder and artistic director, Courtney Muller is co-founder and program director, and the two, along with their small team, have grown the festival to the point where the schedule boasts more premieres, U.S. and world, than ever and, with that growth, directors wanting to add the Rockaway selection to their posters and websites. “We never wanted to make a laurel,” admits Fleischner. “So it was like, alright, […]
-
Gotham Awards Adds Best Director & Breakthrough Performer Categories
The Gotham Film & Media Institute, Filmmaker’s publisher, announced today the opening of its 2024 submissions plus the addition of two competitive categories. For the first time, there will be a Best Director award. Returning this year will be a Breakthrough Performer award, which was last presented in 2022. The other categories are: Best Feature, Best Documentary Feature, Best International Feature, Breakthrough Director, Best Screenplay and Outstanding Lead Performance, Outstanding Supporting Performance. Missing this year are the various TV award categories, which will now be presented in a separate Gotham TV Awards ceremony on June 2, 2025. From the press […]
-
The Gotham Announces 2024 Project Market Slate
The Gotham, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the projects and creators accepted into the 2024 Gotham Week Project Market, which takes place in Brooklyn and Manhattan September 30 – October 4. A long-running program of The Gotham, the Project Market introduces projects in development seeking financing or distribution to industry partners, including producers, sales agents and distributors. It returns this year following last year’s break due to the ongoing Writers Guild strikes with 112 projects spanning feature films, documentary and television. Among the projects are Buffalo Stone, which Lily Gladstone co-wrote and produced, with co-writer-directors Daniel Glick and Ivy Macdonald and […]
-
New Films by RaMell Ross, Julia Loktev, Brady Corbet Among 2024 New York Film Festival Lineup
Film at Lincoln Center announced today the Main Slate lineup of the 62nd New York Film Festival. Among the lineup are the latest from David Cronenberg (The Shrouds), Paul Schrader (Oh Canada) and Mike Leigh (Hard Truths) are world premieres by younger American auteurs, including Julia Loktev, who will debut the 332-minute, five-part My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, about the young female independent journalists at Russia’s TV Rain during the first week of the invasion of Ukraine. Robinson Devor (Police Beat, Zoo) world premieres his documentary Suburban Fury, about would-be presidential assassin Sara Jane Moore. […]
-
U.S. in Progress 2024 Submissions Now Open for American Independents Seeking Finishing Funds
U.S. in Progress is now through September 8 accepting submissions from American independent filmmakers with pictures in post-production seeking finishing funds. Accepted filmmakers and projects will attend the in-person event at Wroclaw, Poland’s American Film Festival from November 7 – 9, where they will present the rough cuts of their narrative projects to European buyers and Polish post-production companies providing over $100,000 in post services. Recent and upcoming projects that are alumni of U.S. in Progress include the Venice-bound Familiar Touch, directed by 2023 25 New Face Sarah Friedland; the recently released Summer Solstice, by writer/director Noah Schamus; India Donaldson’s […]
-
“I Wanted to Make a Black, Gay Paris, Texas“: Shatara Michelle Ford on Their BlackStar-Premiering Sophomore Feature Dreams in Nightmares
Three cross-coastal best friends reunite for a spontaneous road trip across the American underbelly in Dreams in Nightmares, the sophomore feature from writer-director Shatara Michelle Ford. Though a significant pivot in theme and scope from their lean yet intense debut feature Test Pattern, Ford’s latest continues to plainly indicts the oppression that finds Black, femme, queer bodies at a stark institutional disadvantage. After being laid off from their respective jobs in academia and finance, Z (Denée Benton) and Tasha (Sasha Compère) hop on the phone to reschedule a planned trip to the Dominican Republic. Instead of lounging in paradise, Tasha […]
-
28 Projects Selected for Sundance Institute Documentary Fund 2024 Grants
Sundance Institute announced today the recipients of this year’s Sundance Institute Documentary Fund, which awarded unrestricted grants with a total granting pool standing at $1,450,000 to 28 projects. From the press release: The Documentary Fund prioritizes the support of artists from historically marginalized communities and seeks to amplify global voices telling crucial stories. More than half of the grant proposals came from outside the U.S., with the final group of grantees representing 25 countries. The majority of projects (92%) receiving grants are directed by artists from communities that have been traditionally marginalized and 60% are from first-time feature directors. Through […]
-
Is There Life After Fire?: A Trip to Greece’s Evia Film Project 2024
One of the evergreen questions of filmmaking is: Can cinema make a difference? Usually, the issue is raised in connection with specific movies, such as those championing change, including SeaWorld-skewering doc Blackfish, or better husbandry of the planet. Take one step back, though, and there’s another, perhaps more vital way that cinema can make a difference — by bringing a community together in shared experience and cause. This latter force for good is firmly in evidence at Greece’s Evia Film Project, which has just wrapped its third edition on the island nestled near the mainland a couple of hours from […]
-
Screening Before the Storm: Drowning in Anxiety at Fantaspoa
The rain started just as our plane took off from Porto Alegre, sealing our narrow escape. Forty-eight hours later, the airport was underwater, as Brazil’s Rio Grande do Sul faced its worst flooding in nearly a century. How could this happen? We had just premiered my new film there a few nights before. Was it a dream? A quick glance at my arm confirms otherwise. Like many filmmakers who attend the so-called “coolest” of the Méliès Federation’s consortium of fantastic film festivals, I got inked by Laiss, a native tattoo artist who specializes in blackwork. Mine is a simple line drawing […]
