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 […]

I love music, and my walks around the world have often been narrated by various artists, mainly American rappers, as they paint stories that detail everyday experiences and color my memories and thoughts. My trip to Cannes as a Gotham Producer’s Network Fellow this year was no different, so please indulge me in the narrative direction my story takes, guided by the songs on my playlist.  Nipsey Hussle: “Grinding All My Life/Stuck in the Grind” All my life, been grindin’ all my life, Sacrificed, hustle paid the price, Want a slice? Got to roll the dice, that’s why, all my […]

Five years after upending the gender dynamics of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the Isabelle Huppert-starring Mrs. Hyde, French director Serge Bozon has returned with a modern spin on the legend of Don Juan. Like his early features Mods (2002) and La France (2007), Bozon’s Don Juan is a musical of sorts: characters often break into song—not in joyous expressions of amour fou, but rather in pained soliloquies of regret and heartbreak.  Starring Tahar Rahim and Virginie Efira, the film opens with Efira’s Julie no-showing at the couple’s wedding, an act of self-possession that leaves Rahim’s coquettish Laurent, a […]

The Tribeca Festival kicks off today, remaining in its pandemic-motivated June slot while embracing in-person screenings and events. The Godfather, accompanied by a discussion with Al Pacino, is the big retrospective, and among the celebrity-driven live talks is the sold-out conversation between director Mike Mills and Taylor Swift. As usual, for our recommendation list we at Filmmaker have tried to look past the higher-profile events, focusing on independent work by both promising new and established older creators that we’ve strong reason to believe will be worth your while. God’s Time. The feature debut from 25 New Face Daniel Antebi, God’s Time […]

Tabitha Jackson, Director, Sundance Film Festival and Public Programming, will be stepping down from the role following this month’s Sundance Film Festival London, the Sundance Institute announced today. Jackson ran Sundance’s Documentary Film Program from 2013 until taking over the festival leadership role in 2020. Her two years as Festival Director coincided with the pandemic, during which she led the festival’s pivot to a successful virtual model that saw increased audiences as well as a Satellite Screen program that extended programming to arthouses around the country. In her previous Sundance role as head of the Documentary Film Program, Jackson, a […]

Being a parent and working in the film industry is tough. Being a parent at a film festival, with your child in tow, is another matter.  Thanks to a fully supported day care facility in Cannes called The Red Balloon, or Le Ballon Rouge, after Albert Lamorisse’s popular children’s film, I just about conducted “business as usual” on the Croisette. I’m still reeling from this opportunity, as are the other participating parents who continue to converse in a long “parents in Cannes” WhatsApp group chat. Some variation of “I couldn’t have attended Cannes without this service” is the most common […]

It was only a matter of time before Sensory Ethnography Lab explorers Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor went inside—deep inside. Shot at eight different French hospitals, De Humani Corporis Fabrica intermingles imagery from within and without the human body, observing patients and listening in on surgeons during operations with special cameras and medical equipment. Immersive in different ways from their masterpiece Leviathan, and even more hypnotic than Caniba in aligning the screen’s surface with the textures of tissue, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor’s latest film takes its title from Vesalius’s groundbreaking 16th-century anatomy text, de- and re-familiarizing us with the interiors and […]

For two weeks I lived within a Cannes-imposed schedule, with every day structured by the bookending options of a new Directors Fortnight title each morning and a new Competition film at night. More importantly, there was the 7 am roll call, when tickets were unlocked online for screenings four days out. This became a relatively smooth process once the functionally unusable press URL initially given for this purpose was changed, but those tickets still went fast. Every day (before the last four days of the festival, when this unloved ritual ceased), my roommates and I would wake up at 6:59, log […]