The lineup for the 79th Venice Film Festival is now live, one day after Noah Baumbach‘s adaptation of Don Delillo’s novel White Noise was announced as the opening night film. The films announced today include Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde, Darren Aronofsky‘s The Whale, Joanna Hogg‘s The Eternal Daughter, recently jailed Iranian director Jafar Panahi‘s No Bears, Frederick Wiseman‘s narrative turn A Couple and more. White Noise marks the first time that a Netflix film serves as the festival’s opening night film. The streamer is also present with Dominik’s Blonde, the Nicolas Winding Refn mini-series Copenhagen Cowboy and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Bardo (or False […]
The Sundance Institute announced today the fellows selected for this year’s Producers Lab (July 25-28) alongside the participants in its Producers Summit (July 29-31). The forthcoming Lab features 11 fellows, with six fiction and five non-fiction producers among them, each with specific projects. More than 40 industry leaders and 26 independent filmmakers will also be involved in the subsequent Producers Summit. From the press release: The Producers Labs support emerging independent producers through intimate group sessions and one-on-one meetings with veteran producer advisors to hone their creative instincts, communication, and problem-solving skills and to develop strategies for pitching, financing, production, […]
My producer and friend Rebecca Lamond had decided a few months ago to make her first trip to Cannes, primarily for business meetings to pitch our next feature film. I’d also never been, and initially I didn’t see the point of joining her given the cost of flights and everything else. But when changed circumstances meant I was going to be in France in May and Rebecca said she had a sofa I could sleep on, it seemed logical to go. After all, there are other reasons to go to Cannes: the films, obviously, and the people that make, program […]
On July 16, the Omaha, Nebraska based non-profit Film Streams is hosting a local celebration for See Change, the organization’s initiative that strives for gender parity in their programming. The fundraiser will spotlight four women documentary filmmakers, featuring a discussion moderated by Film Streams’ artistic director, Dr. Diana Martinez. The four visiting filmmakers are Ramona Díaz (A Thousand Cuts), Grace Lee (American Revolutionary), Yoruba Richen (The New Black) and Lucy Walker (Waste Land). The event will be held at Film Streams’ Dundee Theater, the longest-surviving cinema in Omaha. Film Streams Executive Director Deirdre Haj, who took on the title last […]
During the lead-up to the release of Rebeca Huntt’s first feature, BEBA, a raw documentary portrait of the artist as a young Afro-Latina filmmaker on a path towards self-acceptance and discovery, the filmmaker and DP Sophie Stieglitz led a one-day workshop on 16mm production at the cinema arts organization Mono No Aware. Presented by NEON (Beba’s distributor) and Ghetto Film School, six women of color filmmakers were invited to take place and attended “an intimate discussion around personal filmmaking” led by Huntt before being sent outside to the streets of Brooklyn with a roll of film and a Bolex camera. […]
The Gotham, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today that Gotham Week, its annual conference and project market, will move to a new location: the Brooklyn Navy Yards. Taking place September 17 – 23, the ’22 edition marks the event’s return to in-person following two years of a virtual format. In addition, The Gotham announced a new component to Gotham Week, the inaugural Partner Expo, which will bring together, according to the press release, “partners from The Gotham’s Expanding Communities, Owning It, and Gotham EDU programs for the first time. The Expo will showcase thought leadership on the advancement of the film and […]
“We’re not sure how to describe it,” Bujalski told the Cambridge Day‘s Tom Meek of his seventh feature, the Tribeca premiere There There. “We’re just gonna put it on the screen and let everybody else tell us what we did.” That promised a strange film, and There There delivers. After a disorientingly shot-at-home sax solo from musician Jon Natchez (whose quarantine-vibes solo sets provide interludes between segments), There There begins the first of six narrative sequences centered around pairs of unnamed characters with Lennie James and Lili Taylor, who’ve spent the night together for the first time. They’re introduced in rigorously locked-off shots […]
Cine Gear Expo Los Angeles roared back over the weekend, as the multi-day tradeshow saw a number of key exhibitors return to its new home at the LA Convention Center. Attendees poured in by the thousands eager to get their hands-on the latest tech, soak up knowledge at a seminar or tune their skills during a masterclass. While cloud-based technology emerged as a theme at NAB Show 2022, Cine Gear had its share of companies showcasing turn-key virtual production solutions. Among them is NoitomVPS, which combines a 5×7 capture space and hybrid tracking markers with optical cameras. The motion capture data […]
In Ukraine, Russian disinformation has finally met its lie-dismantling match in the information warfare sphere—which, ironically, within the larger landscape of our head-spinning, 24-hour news cycle, only serves to muddy the waters of “truth” even further. Fortunately, the besieged nation has a thriving documentary scene with a habit of taking the patient and longterm vérité approach. Out of that tradition comes Lesya Kalynska and Ruslan Batytskyi’s feature debut A Rising Fury, world-premiering at Tribeca Festival, the culmination of an often fraught, messily complicated eight-year filmmaking journey. This breathtakingly cinematic explainer of current events follows the young patriotic Pavlo, a soldier from the Donbas […]
Set in the fall of 2020, Daniel Antebi’s feature debut, God’s Time, is a New York comedy about two best friends in recovery—Dev (Ben Groh) and Luca (Dion Costelloe)—who grow concerned when, at a meeting, the woman they’re infatuated with reveals her plan to murder her ex-boyfriend. Surely she wouldn’t go through with it, right? Even though her ex did kick her out of their apartment and kidnapped her little dog? Thanks in large part to the chemistry shared by its three leads—Liz Caribel Sierra as Regina, the woman of Dev and Luca’s dreams, more than holds her own as […]