Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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“I’ve Been Trying to Coin the Phrase ‘Hangout Horror'”: Alexander Ullom on SXSW 2025 Premiere It Ends
In the last decade, a growing number of films and TV shows have iterated the time loop: Russian Doll‘s nested doll approach, Inception‘s infinitely spinning top. Alexander Ullom’s feature debut It Ends subverts those genre expectations at every turn—or rather, at every absence of a turn. Premiering in SXSW 2025’s Narrative Feature Competition, the film might superficially be grouped alongside similar-sounding genre titles like It, It Comes at Night and How It Ends. But as Ullom explained to me, his intentions were both more playful and somber. In a sense, this story about four zoomers who get into a car […]
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19 Films We’re Anticipating at the 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival
The 2025 SXSW Film and TV Festival kicks off today in Austin, TX, and below are 19 films that we at Filmmaker are particularly excited about and recommend you check out. It Ends. The title is a promise in 25 New Face Alexander Ullom’s brain-teasing debut feature, premiering as the director is all of 27 years old. Four zoomers get into a car, start driving, but then the road never ends—are they in a horror film, a puzzle, neither, both? Ambitious and often very funny, It Ends will keep you guessing not just about what’s going on, but what kind of […]
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Dreams, Memory, Resistance: True/False 2025
True False Film Festival, nestled in college town Columbia, MO, is a festival for documentarians and people who love documentaries—which is a lot of people in that part of the world, it turns out. Boosting the intellectual substance is a pre-filmfest conference, “Based on a True Story,” at the renowned journalism school at University of Missouri. Rounding out the cultural experience, buskers come from throughout the Midwest to play before shows, and every business with a corner of space turns into an art gallery. And then there’s a Mardi Gras-style party and parade to complete the community atmosphere. It’s an […]
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Trailer Watch: Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2025
The forthcoming edition of the annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema series, taking place this year at Film at Lincoln Center, will be the 30th anniversary of the series. The lineup this year includes two underrated films from last year’s Cannes, Patricia Mazuy’s Visiting Hours and the late Sophie Fillières’ final film, This Life of Mine. Watch the trailer above for the series, which will take place from March 6 to 16.
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“I Feel Like the World is Literally on Fire”: Lemohang Mosese on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Ancestral Visions of the Future
Following its premiere in Venice’s 2019 Biennale College Cinema section and North American launch at Sundance 2020, Lemohang Mosese’s This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection became a noteworthy arthouse success, scoring wide international distribution and eventually gaining a place in the Criterion Collection. Now six years later, Mosese has premiered his follow-up feature Ancestral Visions of the Future, shifting to a poetic, hybrid documentary form while retaining his previous work’s expressive tempo and eye-searingly colourful outdoor cinematography. Whilst Burial was concerned with the maintenance of longterm dynastic communities in Lesotho, the landlocked country of his birth fully enclosed […]
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Anora, Didi and Baby Reindeer Are Multiple 2025 Film Independent Spirit Award Winners
Sean Baker’s Anora was the big winner at the 2025 Film Independent Spirit Awards, held yesterday at California’s Santa Monica beach. The film, about a stripper’s ill-fated marriage to a Russian oligarch’s son, picked up prizes for Best Film, Best Director and, for Mikey Madison’s lead performance, Best Lead Performance. Other films and TV shows picking up multiple wins were A Real Pain (Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Performance), Didi (Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay) and Baby Reindeer (Best Breakthrough Performance in a New Scripted Series, Best Lead Performance in a New Scripted Series, Best Ensemble Cast in […]
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Mirror Mirror: Lucile Hadžihalilović on Berlinale 2025 Premiere The Ice Tower
We didn’t have to wait too long after Earwig (2021) for Lucile Hadžihalilović’s enigmatic new offering, The Ice Tower. The whistling sounds of mountain winds announce the arrival of the Snow Queen (Marion Cotillard), both to the set of a film she’s leading in 1970s France and in the life of 16-year-old runaway orphan Jeanne (Clara Pacini). Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” the script—co-written by Hadžihalilović together with Geoff Cox—explores the subterranean tensions of loneliness and womanhood in various shapes and forms. While it may as well be considered the most “legible” Hadžihalilović film […]
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Slamdance Co-Founder Peter Baxter and Fest Director Taylor Miller on Moving to Los Angeles
Los Angeles is a city in constant renewal. When the Arclight Cinemas closed during COVID in 2021, the initial despair was lessened as a host of repertory options sprang up in its aftermath, including Quentin Tarantino’s revamped Vista Theatre, the Academy Museum and Micah Gottlieb’s Mezzanine series. On the festival side, when L.A. Film Festival and OutFest both shut down a few years apart, much discussion centered around why this city has such difficulty sustaining a film festival, especially when on the opposite coast, the New York Film Festival thrives. (This line of questioning largely overlooks the long-running, can’t-miss AFI […]
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You Can Never (Maybe?) Break the Chain: Rebecca Lenkiewicz on Berlinale 2025 Premiere Hot Milk
Spanish seaside entanglements, a combustive mother-daughter relationship, mysterious, painful malaise, the veiled threat of healing and new currents of love trail Ingrid (Vicky Krieps). Nearby, watching her life pass by is Sofia (Emma Mackey), a doctoral student in anthropology and caregiver since she was a young girl to her defiant mother Rose (Fiona Shaw), mostly restricted to a wheelchair. A story of self discovery, queer kindling and medical melancholy among these three fascinating women in a sun-baked setting, Hot Milk, premiering at the 75th Berlinale, is one of the most buzzed new titles in the Competition section. The directorial debut […]
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“Genocide Brain”: Christine Haroutounian on Berlinale 2025 Premiere After Dreaming
The title of Christine Haroutounian’s first feature, After Dreaming, suggests a waking state, but the whole film hangs in a region where the divide between facts and hallucinations is never entirely clear. A follow-up to her 2020 short World—a cantankerous, Armenian-set study of end-of-life caretaking centered on a young woman and her dying mother—Dreaming sees the Los Angeles-born filmmaker return to her ancestral turf for a surreal road trip across a country still haunted by ongoing clashes with neighboring Azerbaijan. Dreaming, however, “is not a war film,” Haroutounian told me before her feature travelled to Berlin, where it premiered in […]
