Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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TIFF 2024: Lázaro at Night, Hard Truths
Bell and Bulgari are gone as sponsors, but Listerine is one of 37 new ones at TIFF 2024. This year, the defining image of the fest’s early days has been the 95-milliliter bottles of Listerine Total Care (Mild Mint) neatly arrayed on mini-shelves next to the sinks in the washrooms of the festival’s Lightbox headquarters. There, the walls are branded with mock-movie poster key art for “Listerine: The Movie,” with a bottle of that pink liquid sandwiched between five-star laurels for “Refreshing Plot Twist” and “Breath of Fresh Air.” An employee stocking those bottles estimated that over a thousand are […]
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Resurrecting Kathleen Parlow: Sofia Bohdanowicz on Her TIFF-Premiering Measures for a Funeral
Around a decade ago, Sofia Bohdanowicz began what would become a cycle of films, encompassing the features Never Eat Alone, MS Slavic 7 and A Woman Escaped (co-directed by Blake Williams and Burak Çevik) and the shorts Veslemøy’s Song and Point and Line to Plane, starring Deragh Campbell (who is often credited as cowriter or codirector) as Audrey Benac, a sort of fictional alter-ego who has encounters with art, and in particular with the artistic legacy of Bohdanowicz’s forbears. In Veslemøy’s Song, Audrey travels to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to listen to a haunting vintage […]
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12 Films to Anticipate at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival
With the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival now underway, we at Filmmaker picked 12 films we are anticipating seeing. Consider it a given that higher-profile Telluride and Venice premieres such as the two Sigrid Nunez adaptations (The Friend and The Room Next Door), Conclave, Saturday Night are on our list too, but don’t overlook these films, for which TIFF is either their world premiere or North American launch. Bonjour Tristesse. For her debut feature author (Too Much and Not the Mood) and cultural critic Durga Chew-Bose — she interviewed Mia Hansen-Love for Filmmaker several years back — has ambitiously adapted […]
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“Sit Here. Stand Here. Work Here. Slap Her Here”: Lav Diaz and Hazel Orencio on Phantosmia
Since the late 1990s, Lav Diaz’s cinema has explored the Philippines’ troubled history with colonization, authoritarianism, corruption, poverty, macho-feudalism and the tensions that animate and enliven the sociopaths of today. His durational works are simultaneously a test of patience and spirit and assertions that the stories of Filipinos deserve time and space to unfold in all of its complexities. Diaz’s works paint portraits of good men and women whose morals disintegrate along with their minds, poisoned by the pressures of the world, leading them to commit uncharacteristic acts of violence one would think they are too progressive or too intelligent […]
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The Gotham Film & Media Institute Announces Programming for 2024 Gotham Week Expo
The Gotham Film and Media Institute, Filmmaker’s publisher, announced today the programming for the 2024 Gotham Week Expo, taking place during Gotham Week on Monday, September 30th – Thursday, October 4th in locations throughout New York City. As announced in a press release, The Gotham “brings together partners from The Gotham’s Expanding Communities initiative to provide community and thought leadership on topics pertinent to film and media creators, including discussing challenges and solutions on how to approach advocacy and career advancement.” Opening the Expo will be a demo and conversation with Kamala Avila-Salmon, Lionsgate’s Head of Inclusive Content. The presentation […]
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Production Studio Wavelength Sponsors Yellow Springs Film Festival, Hosts First Live WAVE Grant Showcase and Panel Discussion
Production studio Wavelength has announced its official sponsorship of the Yellow Springs Film Festival. From the press release: On Sunday, October 6, 2024, at 1:45 PM ET, Wavelength, in partnership with YSFF, will host its first-ever WAVE Grant showcase featuring short films from WAVE Grant alumni including Ana Verde’s Te Llaman Las Olas (The Waves Call You), Geena Hernandez’s Chicks, Sofia and Andrea Riba’s American Girl, Hannah Patterson’s Late to the Party, Amanda Gordon’s Sugar Honey, Leena Kurishingal’s No Escape, and Neha Aziz’s So, That Happened. The screenings will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by Wavelength’s Head of […]
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At the Movies with Notorious B.I.G.: dream hampton on It Was All a Dream
Since its inception in 2012, Blackstar Film Festival has become one of my favorites. In a recent interview in Essence, founder Maori Karmel Holmes said, “When I started the festival, I didn’t realize that it was going to be an annual event, and I was mostly interested in seeing films that I knew existed in the world but hadn’t been shown in Philadelphia. I was also interested in a specific kind of film, mostly experimental, largely made by independent filmmakers and wanting to put them together in a way that would put artistic films next to social justice documentaries and […]
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“Cinema Forever” (?): Locarno Film Festival 2024
The biggest headline of the 77th Locarno Film Festival wasn’t a movie but a man: Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan, who attended to receive a career achievement award as a reminder (none is needed) of the role red carpet celebrity plays in drawing money and attention to festivals which can then, aspirationally, redirect both towards smaller title. But even as the whole idea of “cinema” requires increasingly vigilant caretaking, those festivals themselves are nearly all in financial trouble. When I got this job at Filmmaker a decade ago, companies who’d invested a lot of time and money in VR were […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
