Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Visions du Réel 2025: Choose Your Illusion
In 2002, a George W. Bush aide coined the phrase “reality-based community”—a label meant pejoratively, anticipating the present belligerent moment. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” that (still!) anonymous official ranted. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” This psychotic assertion is paraphrased—nearly word-for-word, surely inadvertently—by the […]
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NAB 2025: LED Screen Advancements, Tariff Concerns and Hybrid Lenses
Nearly 1,100 vendors spread across three halls of the massive Las Vegas Convention Center for the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show which, over five days each April, covers a lot of ground, both physically and with the wide scope of technology encompassed under “broadcast.” In a press conference, Karen Chupka, NAB’s managing director and executive vice president, highlighted this Show’s new points of focus, including sports and content creators; ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith was a featured guest speaker at NAB earlier that same morning. Scrolling through each day’s list of scheduled panels and talks illustrates just how […]
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ACID Announces 2025 Cannes Lineup
The ACID section of Cannes has announced its lineup for this year’s edition. From the press release: ACID (Association du Cinéma Indépendant pour sa Diffusion) is a collective of filmmakers who support independent films by giving them greater exposure. Their goal? To help original, daring films reach their audience, both in France and abroad. […] ACID stands out for its unique selection process: filmmakers choose the films they support. Each year, 14 filmmakers see over 600 feature films for the Cannes Film Festival and select 9 of them, to receive invaluable support for their release in theaters and at festivals, […]
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Trade Wars: Ian Bell on WTO/99
The archival documentary WTO/99 functions both as historical document and prophecy of the future, chronicling the four days in 1999 when anti-globalization activists from multiple movements—labor unions, student groups, teamsters, anarchists, nonprofit organizations like Global Exchange and the Rainforest Action Network—took to downtown Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference. While the King County Sheriff’s Office and Seattle Police Department initially took a hands-off approach to supervising the peaceful protests, they quickly adopted a more aggressive tack after protestors successfully blocked WTO delegates from reaching the convention center on the first day of the conference. Tear gas, pepper […]
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Five Favorites from the 2025 New Directors/New Films Festival
The 54th edition of New Directors/New Films, co-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center, runs from April 2 to April 13. This year’s program includes 24 features and 9 shorts. As always, the slate is admirably international in scope, spotlighting work from 22 different countries, with many films making their U.S. premieres after screening at festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, Karlovy Vary, Rotterdam, and Venice. Although I’ve attended ND/NF for more than two decades, and reported on it for this website and others for almost half that time, I still get excited when the slate […]
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The Tides that Bind: Cinema At Sea Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival 2025
In a panel on Pacific Islander filmmaking organized by the Hawai’i International Film Festival last year, a Native Hawaiian producer noted that fellow creatives in the region were “not divided by land, but connected by water”—a thought at the heart of the new Cinema At Sea Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival in Naha. The southernmost and westernmost region of Japan, made up of multiple islands geographically closer to Taipei than Tokyo, Okinawa may be best known historically as the site of several bloody battles during WWII, or colloquially as the “Hawaii of Japan,” a sun-kissed vacation dreamland of azure waves […]
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Sundance Institute Announces Boulder, Colorado, as the New Home for the Sundance Film Festival Beginning in 2027
The Sundance Institute announced today that, beginning in 2027, Boulder, Colorado will be the new home for its Sundance Festival. Commented Amanda Kelso, Sundance Institute acting CEO in a press release, “Boulder is an art town, tech town, mountain town, and college town. It is a place where the Festival can build and flourish. This is the beginning of a bold, new journey as we invite everyone to be part of our community and to be entertained and inspired. We can’t imagine a better fit than Boulder.” From the press release: Together with the Boulder host committee, the Institute envisions […]
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Watch Now: Eight Short Films from Filmfort 2025
Filmmaker is proud to continue our annual partnership with the Filmfort Film Festival by exclusively hosting eight short films from this year’s lineup, which will be available to view on our site through Saturday. The four-day festival, which occurs during the Treefort Music Fest in Boise, Idaho, highlights an array of emerging independent cinema. Alongside robust film programming, Filmfort also features DIY panels and filmmaker Q&As in the heart of the city’s downtown area. See the Filmfort ’25 line-up here, and check out this year’s selection of films below. A Floresta dir. Brooks Dierdorff 2024, USA/Brazil, 16 mins Synopsis: […]
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New Henry Awards Announces 15 Inaugural Semi-Finalists for Public Interest Documentary Annual Prize
The Documentary Film in the Public Interest Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy announced today a new award for documentary film — The Henry Awards for Public Interest Documentary —and its first list of 15 semi-finalists. “The Henry Awards recognize nonfiction films that advance public understanding of the critical issues of our time while demonstrating outstanding cinematic achievement,” the Center announced today in a press release. “Guided by the hallmarks of ethical practice, rigorous investigation, and courageous storytelling, the Henry Awards are intended to honor and encourage a documentary filmmaking practice grounded in […]
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True/False Film Fest 2025: Excavation, Therapy, Protest
Hu Sanshou’s Resurrection premiered at last year’s Taiwan International Documentary Festival; this year, the director was awarded the annual True Vision award at True/False before the first of two showings of this feature. A classically exemplary slab of rigorously conceived Chinese nonfiction, Hu’s fifth feature was executed under the larger auspices of the Folk Memory Project, a group of Chinese films focusing on the Great Famine of 1959-61. Resurrection’s first 15 minutes are giganticist in the vein of Zhao Liang’s Behemoth minus funky distorting lenses, beginning with an extremely gods-eye perspective of a tractor working cliffside, a tinily perceptible human […]
