Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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A Look Back at Sundance 2023: Remote Viewing, Favored Cameras, Standout Films
Some set their calendars by January’s Sundance, which like clockwork kicks off each new year of indie releases. For me, these 11 intense days of nonstop screenings are a rich bounty that takes time to digest. Ergo my slow coverage, below. Usually I manage to see about 30 of the 120 features Sundance typically selects. This has always worked out to a quarter of the program. What are the odds someone else saw the exact same combination? My dictum for years now has been that no two people see the same Sundance. Even the most diligent reviewers and audience members […]
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Everything Everywhere All at Once Sweeps the Spirit Awards
The Daniels’s Everything Everywhere All at Once won Best Feature at the Film Independent Spirit Awards yesterday. The A24 picture, which has been sweeping other awards events, is the Best Picture frontrunner for next week’s Academy Awards. The film dominated other categories as well, winning Best Director for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Best Lead Performance for Michelle Yeoh, Best Breakthrough Performance for Stephanie Hsu, and Best Editing for Paul Rogers, Best Supporting Performance for Ke Huy Quan and Best Screenplay, again for Kwan and Scheinert. No other work won more than one category with the exception of the TV […]
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Sundance Institute Announces 2023 Momentum Fellows
The Sundance Institute announces eight filmmakers selected for the fifth annual Momentum Fellowship, a program created to provide financial support and coaching for mid-career artists from underrepresented communities. The year-long fellowship is tailored for artists who have recently achieved a major accomplishment—such as a successful feature film or episodic work—and offers customized guidance for the fellows as they aim to level up in their careers. “Over the years, the fellows selected for Momentum have all experienced success with their recently completed projects. This has often been a critical moment for artists to receive creative and tactical support as they focus […]
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“A Militant Archiving Process”: Mohanad Yaqubi on R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity
The Tokyo Reels, a project by Subversive Film (Mohanad Yaqubi and Reem Shilleh), was first exhibited as an installation and mini film festival at documenta fifteen. This collection of 20 films depicting the Palestinian struggle was safeguarded for decades by Japanese activists before its preservation by Subversive Film. Following its restoration, the collection served as the basis for R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity (2022), set to have its North American premiere at this year’s True/False Film Festival. In November 2022, as R21 was having its world premiere at the International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam, we spoke with Yaqubi on transnational film […]
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The Overlook Film Festival Announces 2023 Lineup
Today, The Overlook Film Festival unveils the slate for its 2023 edition, to take place in New Orleans from March 30-April 2. The horror-focused festival will open with Universal’s Dracula reboot Renfield and close with Evil Dead Rise, the latest entry in the Evil Dead franchise. Additional programming includes interactive events, live performances, immersive programming and parties. Several retrospective titles have also been announced, entailing a 30th anniversary screening of Joe Dante‘s Matinee, a 10th anniversary screening of Jim Jarmusch‘s Only Lovers Left Alive, Alfred Hitchcock’s silent film The Lodger accompanied by a live score and William Castle’s The Tingler “featuring surprise […]
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Film at Lincoln Center and MoMA Announce Lineup for New Directors/New Films 2023
Today, Film at Lincoln Center and MoMA announce the lineup for New Directors/New Films 2023, which will run from March 29-April 9 in New York City. Boasting 27 feature films and 11 shorts, the 52nd edition of the festival will open with Savanah Leaf’s A24 film Earth Mama and conclude with Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s Mutt, which recently won the Special Jury Award winner at Sundance. “We are thrilled to bookend the 2023 ND/NF edition with two remarkable features, directed by up-and-coming artists Savanah Leaf and Vuk Lungulov-Klorz, portraying tormented yet determined characters with sensitivity, authenticity, and a true inspiring artistic vision,” […]
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Berlinale 2023: The Plough
A tiny visual suture at the very beginning of Philippe Garrel’s The Plough inadvertently attests to two different formats being stitched together. The letters of the production company/financing body credits have slightly serrated edges against a dark grey background and clearly come from a digital file, while the subsequent dedication and title card have smooth-lined lettering against a perceptibly darker black, with a few scratches further confirming their celluloid origin. Somebody output those titles to 35mm, then scanned them back in, which speaks to differing deliverables standards for different parts of the chain, as well as to Garrel’s loyalty to the medium (he’s […]
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Berlinale 2023: A Very Long Gif, Our Body and Orlando, My Political Biography
My Berlinale 2023 started with a trip down Eduardo Williams’ digestive tubes. Much of the material in A Very Long Gif, a single-channel installation included in the Forum Expanded exhibition, was captured with a capsule endoscopy camera. This minuscule device is swallowed like a pill and journeys through one’s gastrointestinal tract, taking thousands of pictures along the way. Effectively, it records a traveling shot at a frame rate of two or three images per second. Williams ingested one himself and condensed its eight-hour passage into a 75-minute sequence, which is looped and projected on a wall in a large round […]
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Five Things We Learned About Festival Strategy and Film Distribution at IFFR
We did the impossible. We made a feature film. When our docu-horror Residency was accepted into the International Film Festival Rotterdam, we learned that we needed yet another miracle—we needed a sales rep to get our film in front of the right audiences. It used to be that getting selected by a festival like IFFR meant automatically getting acquired by a sales rep, but those days are long gone. On a predictably gray day during the festival, Residency director Winnie Cheung sat on a panel to speak about this very issue: the drastically changing landscape of indie distribution. Moderating the […]
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Rotterdam 2023: Three-and-a-Half Days of the Tiger
I was lucky to see two films I liked upon arriving for my first IRL International Film Festival Rotterdam: with a limited timeframe of three-and-a-half days, starting strong put me in a desirably pleasant and more-receptive-than-usual mindset, even if my fortunate choices seemed mostly like beginner’s luck. The festival’s extremely public firing last year of most of its senior and longstanding programmers led, whether out of solidarity (either publicly stated or more quietly expressed via networks of mutuals) or lack of enthusiasm about the resulting lineup, to some regular attendees sitting it out. When I arrived a third of the way […]
