Visions du Réel’s pivot to online-only festival has given me an unexpected new pool of films to sift through. Nearly everything that was supposed to be on the ground at a fest I’d normally never have the resources to attend is accessible online, and the streaming technology is holding up excellently. (AirDropping from laptop to TV, if you have that option, eliminates the watermark, so it’s about as good as online streaming gets.) On the public-facing side (I have no idea how that’s going), the festival went “live” on Saturday the 25th and wraps up on May 2nd. For those […]

What’s the point of a film festival if there’s no … festival? That’s the existential question we’re all asking ourselves right now, as organizations scramble to offset cancellations and postponements of physical gatherings in the wake of the global COVID-19 outbreak. In a bid to at least offer filmmakers some exposure, the Tribeca Film Festival is among those fests that made a pivot to online screenings for press and industry, representing maybe a quarter of its feature programming (supplemented by work in shorts, episodic and other categories). The funny thing is, this is how I often have experienced Tribeca – […]

A girl, a number of guns, also some cars: recombining knowingly archetypal elements from Gerardo Naranjo’s first two features, Drama/Mex and I’m Gonna Explode, Kokoloko is delightfully loose and unconstrained. In Oaxaca, Marisol (Alejandra Herrera) loves Mundo (Noé Hernández), much to the disapproval of her thuggish cousin Mauro (Eduardo Mendizábal), who literally picks her up and throws her in his car to separate the two. The not-quite-love-triangle unfolds in a larger, equally unsettled arena: road blockades are plotted, cartels are in orbit, and violence erupts at every level. The beachside backdrop recalls the Acapulco setting of Drama/Mex, Marisol and Mundo’s lovers-on-the-run arc I’m […]

After announcing on April 2 that the two companies would partner to bring selections from the cancelled 2020 SXSW Film Festival to home viewers, Amazon Prime Video and SXSW announced today the titles that will comprise the free-to-view “2020 SXSW Film Festival Collection.” A total of 39 works — features, shorts, music videos and episodic titles — opted into the program. Of the 39, only seven are features — five percent of the festival’s feature selection — and the four narrative films are all international titles. For producers and filmmakers, the Amazon/SXSW collaboration was immediately controversial upon announcement, with several […]

The production company Rathaus is partnering with a Filmmaker for a free three-night screening series, April 14 – 16, of its new and recent work, both features and shorts. The films include 2020 Sundance selection The Mountains are a Dream that Call to Me and 2019 BAMcinemafest title De Lo Mio. Says Rathaus producer and partner Alexandra Byer, “Our ESCAPES series comes from wanting to give people a night off to feign normalcy and just go to the movies in these weird times. Amongst all the chaos, we feel we have an opportunity to let people, even if just for […]

Today through April 30, the website THIS LONG CENTURY, which describes itself as “an ever-evolving collection of personal insights from artists, authors, filmmakers, musicians and cultural icons the world over,” is hosting two programs of experimental short work, with 30 shorts in total. The OUTSIDE program includes Lucile Hadžihalilović’s 2017 De Natura, Carlos Reygadas’s 2011 Este es mi Reino, and Deborah Stratman’s 1997 medium-length From Hetty to Nancy. The equally strong INSIDE program includes Jodie Mack’s 2012 Blanket Statement #1: Home is Where the Heart is, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s 2018 Blue, Peter Tscherkassky’s legendary 1999 Outer Space and David Lowery’s 2011 Pioneer. Streaming is free, though THIS LONG […]

Nonprofit organization The Future of Film is Female has launched a streaming channel that will screen short and feature films by its members for free from now until April 14. Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday the site will release a new short film; on select Fridays, the site will stream a feature-length title. Their first week of films are (online) premieres of films by Laci Dent and Eleanor Wilson as well as what’s termed a limited run of Veronica Kedar’s Family. Included in the upcoming The Future of Film is Female calendar are films from past “25 New Faces of […]

Hard to believe just a few weeks back I was eagerly preparing for my annual pilgrimage to Copenhagen to begin the spring doc fest season. Well, we all know how that turned out. Or not. As a deadly virus forced festivals the world over to cancel, CPH:DOX, long a champion of outside-the-box filmmaking, counterintuitively decided the show must go on. Rather than cut losses and hunker down in social isolation, festival director Tine Fischer and her scrappy team did the exact opposite, reaching out online to actually expand the CPH:DOX audience on a global scale. Picking up and relocating to […]

DAFilms is a VOD platform run by the DocAlliance, which (per their press release) is “a creative partnership between seven of the major European documentary festivals.” Those seven are CPH:DOX, Doclisboa, Millennium Docs Against Gravity FF, DOK Leipzig, FIDMarseille, Ji.hlava IDFF and Visions du Réel. As of March 30, America-based streamers can start streaming for the site for $6.99/month (or $4.99/month with an annual subscription, with individual rental fees for certain titles). While the exact catalogue has yet to be determined, the plan is to showcase some of the best titles from these festivals, both old and new, with future […]

Keeping calm and carrying on (digitally, that is) during the global pandemic, CPH:DOX fittingly launched its five-day CPH:CONFERENCE series with a program titled “Science is Culture.” The “day celebrating the value of science in society and exploring how new approaches to science storytelling can engage the audience” was moderated by Jessica Harrop, supervising producer of science-centric doc studio Sandbox Films. (And impressively so. Not only did Harrop seem to be downloading questions directly from my head, but she kept the proceedings running swiftly and smoothly, all while sheltering in place from her Brooklyn apartment no less.) While every discussion was […]