Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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The American Pavilion Announces Its Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival
The American Pavilion announced today the 2022 program of its Emerging Filmmaker Showcase at the upcoming 2022 Cannes Film Festival. 33 films comprise this 25th anniversary edition, with the program screening at the American Pavilion along with finalist films from the 2020 and 2021 editions. All screenings with filmmakers in attendance with be accompanied by live Q&As. From the press release: The films in the Emerging Filmmaker Showcase focus on themes as diverse as the meaning of community, gender identity, the COVID-19 epidemic, self-perceptions and representation, the holocaust, the development and evolution cultural identity, family dynamics, the quest for love, […]
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The Gotham Announces 2022 Gotham TV Series Lab Series Projects
The Gotham Film & Media Institute (formerly IFP) announced today ten series projects participating in the Gotham TV Series Lab (running May 9-13) for outstanding projects in development and written/created by first-time series creators. From the press release: For the first year included in the cohort of ten projects, there are two projects from the Expanding Communities program by way of recommendations of partner organizations, GYNO and NIGHT WATCHERS. Expanding Communities is a program dedicated to providing resources, a community space, and industry access to individuals with Disabilities and Black, Indigenous, PoC, and LGBTQIA+ creators across film, TV, and audio […]
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BAMcinemaFest Announces 2022 Program
BAMcinemaFest, which is returning with an in-person event June 23 – 30 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, announced today the complete 2022 edition slate. The film opens with Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s Aftershock, a documentary about the the ways in which the US maternal health system fails Black women and families, and it closes with Ramin Bahrani’s Sundance premiere, 2nd Chance, a portrait of Richard Davis, who invented the modern bulletproof vest while being something of an independent filmmaker and fabulist. Among the restorations are Ayoka Chenzira’s 1993 first feature film, the coming-of-age dramatic comedy Alma’s Rainbow, about […]
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Prismatic Ground Year Two: Documentary Waves
In the introduction to their co-edited collection Documentary Across Disciplines, Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg articulate contemporary documentary practice not as a category or genre, but “an attitude – a way of doing, engaging, and creating that accords primacy to the multiple and mutable realities of the world.” Emerging from the Berlin Documentary Forum, the collection embraces a vision of global documentary that spans “film, photography, contemporary art, anthropology, performance, architecture, cultural history, and theory.” If this sounds like a lot—it is, because it is. Still, rather than become amorphous in the ways terms like “glitch” or “expanded”-as-an-adjective have become, […]
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NAB Show 2022 Exhibitors Race to the Cloud
All it took was a billion dollar acquisition for the industry to take a bigger leap into the cloud. Not to say that cloud-based workflows haven’t been part of productions already, but if you wanted to stamp a singular theme on NAB Show 2022, it would be: “to the cloud we go.” Following a COVID-19-induced two-year hiatus, NAB 2022 returned as an in-person event. Show producers announced 52,468 attendees took part in the multi-day tradeshow, roughly half the number of the last three pre-pandemic editions: 91,460 (2019), 92,912 (2018) and 103,443 (2017). While the “natural buzz” of the show floor […]
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“I Want to Make Big, Unforgettable, Life-Changing Works”: Martine Syms on Her New Directors/New Films Closing-Night Film, The African Desperate
The 2022 edition of New Directors/New Films — the annual showcase of emerging filmmakers co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art — concludes this weekend with three screenings of its closing-night film, Martine Syms’ The African Desperate. Syms is an art-world luminary whose work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim, LACMA, MoMA, and the Tate, among others, and her extraordinarily varied and prolific output includes video art, installations, essays and manifestos, and a publishing press. Much of her oeuvre reflects a deep engagement with the moving image, from her […]
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“People Are Not ‘the Trauma They’ve Experienced'”: Trauma-Informed Storytelling at CPH:CONFERENCE 2022
For a film journo who closely followed last year’s he said (filmmakers)/she said (ISIS “sex slave” subjects) controversy that entangled Hogir Hirori’s Sundance-premiering (followed by film-festival-shunned) Sabaya, the recent CPH:DOX panel “Beyond Courage: Trauma-Informed Storytelling” was simply a must-see. The discussion, expertly moderated by Gavin Rees, Executive Director of Dart Center Europe (a satellite of Columbia Journalism School’s Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma), was part of the “Claim Your Story!” program, one of three engaging afternoons under CPH:CONFERENCE’s “Business As Unusual” banner. (“Follow the Money!” and “Shaping Success.” were likewise smartly curated by The Catalysts, a multimedia agency that “turns […]
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“In-Person Only”: The 2022 New Directors/New Films Festival
After an online-only edition in 2020 and a hybrid Golden Jubilee last year, New Directors/New Films is once again “in-person only,” a phrase whose very existence reveals how thoroughly the COVID-19 pandemic has altered industry and audience expectations. If the advisability of our “return to normal” (masks are now optional at both host venues) is questionable, more laudable is the festival’s gender equity: 21 of the 39 directors whose films are included in this year’s slate are women, although the disparity between features and shorts demonstrates the political and social obstacles to feature filmmaking that women continue to face. Most […]
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Columbia’s Digital Storytelling Lab Announces its Annual Digital Dozen
Columbia’s Digital Storytelling Lab announced its “Digital Dozen” earlier this week—its annual list of the most innovative examples of digitally enabled storytelling. Unlike other awards programs, this one has no categories, so what you saw was a typically eclectic mix of XR, immersive theater and interactive installations, this time with some NFTs thrown in as well. But the Breakthroughs in Storytelling Awards, as they’re officially known, always come with a few surprises, and this year was no exception. The DSL’s top honor, the 2022 Breakthrough Award, went to “Life After BOB: The Chalice Study,” a narrative animation by the New […]
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From Analog to TikTok: Female Directors Sweep CPH:DOX 2022
In keeping with its 50/50 gender balance pledge, this year’s DOX:AWARD program—CPH:DOX’s international main competition showcasing an all-premiere lineup—featured six male- and six female-directed films from a range of countries. And, as in years past, I agreed to watch and rate them all on a scale of one (not my cup of tea) to four (brilliant!) stars for the Danish film magazine Ekko’s international film critics’ jury grid. It’s an annual duty I’ve come to grudgingly love. On the one hand, I have to watch a dozen films that weren’t necessarily on my must-see list (that I’d carefully whittled down from […]
