Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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DIY Baltimore: New/Next Film Festival 2024
“Another year, another New/Next” looks to become a certainty in Baltimore. After last year’s inaugural festival, it wasn’t known if New/Next Film Festival was a one-off event or if the Maryland Film Festival would return from hiatus. In 2024, both happened a couple months and a block apart in Station North, and both announced on their closing nights that they will be back for 2025. For the foreseeable future, Baltimore has two tentpole, unjuried independent film festivals; what is not certain is how they are going to interplay with each other as establishments, rather than events with question marks attached. […]
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Register Now for Free Hundreds of Beavers Distribution Case Study
Next Thursday, October 17, over Zoom at 2:00 PM Eastern, Jon Reiss — a longtime Filmmaker contributor and author of the new and highly recommended (and distribution-focused) 8 Above Substack — and I will be hosting a distribution case study on DIY hit Hundreds of Beavers with producer Kurt Ravenwood. We’re going to investigate how the Hundreds of Beavers became a breakout success that grossed over $500K at the theatrical box office — more than tripling their production budget of $150K. Kurt will reveal how their team identified, mobilized and grew their audience, how they eventized their theatrical release and created […]
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IDA Honors Dawn Porter, Shiori Ito and No Other Land Directors Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham
Today, the International Documentary Association (IDA) announced the recipients who will receive honorary awards on December 5, 2024, at the 40th annual IDA Documentary Awards. The show will be held at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles and will be live-streamed on the IDA’s social media. From the press release: International Documentary Association (IDA) announced the honorary awards to be presented at the 40th annual IDA Documentary Awards, which will be held on December 5, 2024, at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles. The show will be streamed live on IDA’s social media channels. At this year’s ceremony, American documentary filmmaker Dawn […]
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Proud Boys, Bears and BDSM: Camden International Film Festival 2024
Given the jittery churn of U.S. election year media in a late-capitalist death spiral, it can help to look elsewhere for a parallel perspective on the rise of illiberal authoritarians and a mass public siege on the seat of national governance, a la the Jan. 6 insurrection, amid their downfall. If nothing else, what has happened in Brazil over the past several years offers a startling, even unreal reflection of post-MAGA America, with the presidency of right-wing blowhard and Trump wanna-be Jair Bolsonaro ascendent amid a corruption scandal that sent his competitor, leftist Workers Party candidate and former president Luiz […]
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TIFF 2024: Wavelengths
As someone who finds the feature film a more or less moribund form at the moment, the only real draw for returning to TIFF after five years away was the Wavelengths program. It’s ridiculous, of course, to think that three group shows of shorts could summarize the activity of any corner of the film world, but programmers Andréa Picard and Jesse Cumming have managed—year after year and despite all manner of institutional obstacles—to present clear enough visions of the state of post-avant garde small gauge and video work that I’ll always be curious to see what they think is going […]
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Illness and Empathy: San Sebastian Film Festival 2024
If San Sebastian Film Festival director José Luis Rebordinos ever wanted to choose a poster child for how the new voices of today can become the established veterans of tomorrow, he could do a lot worse than Pedro Almodóvar, whose debut Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom played at the festival back in 1980. At this year’s 72nd edition, during which Almodóvar turned 75, he was back in the northern Spanish coastal city to receive a lifetime Donostia Award and show his latest film, The Room Next Door. At the award ceremony, Almodóvar was given the prize by […]
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“North Dakota is Trump Country Today”: John Hanson and Rob Nilsson on the 4K Restoration of Northern Lights
It would be easy to call 1979 a red letter Cannes for New Hollywood: Apocalypse Now got Francis Ford Coppola his second Palme d’Or (split with Volker Schlöndorff for The Tin Drum), Terrence Malick received Best Director for Days of Heaven. Outside of the spotlight of official competition, another American film playing in the International Critics’ Week walked away with the second ever Camera d’Or for best first feature. Directed by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, Northern Lights returned the pair to their North Dakota roots by documenting 94 year-old Henry Martinson, a socialist organizer instrumental in the victory of […]
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Previewing the 2024 Gotham Week Project Market, Expo and Honors
Returning following a one-year hiatus precipitated by the WGA strike is the Gotham Week Project Market, which runs today through October 4 at the Brooklyn Navy Yards. (The final Expo day on branded content will take place at Soho Works.) Produced by The Gotham Film & Media Institute, Filmmaker’s publisher, the Gotham Week Project Market is the latest iteration of the non-profit’s annual event, which began as the Independent Feature Film Market in 1979, when the organization was known as IFP (the Independent Feature Project). Originally a showcase presenting finished films to buyers, the event has morphed several times over […]
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21 Films to See at the 2024 New York Film Festival
With this year’s New York Film Festival underway, Filmmaker is recommending 18 films to watch over the course of the festival, which runs this year from September 27 through October 14. This year, our staff has covered several festivals— including TIFF, Venice, and Cannes,—whose premieres will be screening at NYFF during these upcoming weeks, some of which have previously been featured on our site. Below, we have compiled a list of the must-see films playing at the New York Film Festival, along with links and excerpts from director interviews and festival dispatches as well as, for three titles we have […]
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NYFF 2024: The Brutalist
Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist took seven years to realize, a process he understandably seems to have found traumatic—both the film and interviews he’s given about it are about how financiers are monsters. Per Corbet, The Brutalist “was made for under $10 million. But I still need millions of dollars. That’s very complicated because it means I often have to interface with people with whom I don’t share the same ethics and morals.” Process is text: Anyone who’s ever worked for an equally oblivious and imperious rich person, one whose underlings can only work out how their near-impossible plan of action […]
