Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Tokyo International Film Festival 2025: Echoes and Sermons
In 2021, the Tokyo International Film Festival decided to leap out of mediocrity. It was, acquaintances told me, previously the kind of place where they’d show Princess Diaries 2 for red-carpet celebrity purposes, and in terms of its relationship to local fare, The Hollywood Reporter’s Gavin J. Blair wrote that the other TIFF “faced criticism in the past that it was run mostly by, and for the benefit of, the ‘big four’ Japanese studios” (Toho, Toei, Shochiku, Kadagawa). With the 2021 appointment of programming director Ichiyama Shozo, Tokyo—like the Busan International Film Festival—is now designed to be a launching pad for […]
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“I Just Need More Money To Make the Longer Version of It”: On the Proof-of-Concept PROOF Film Festival
From Half Nelson to Whiplash, Bottle Rocket to Short Term 12, making a short film as a feature proof-of-concept has been a time-tested independent film strategy to generate screenplay interest and secure feature financing. But, in the past, the “proof-of-concept” part of a short’s identity is usually hidden to audiences, revealed only by the filmmakers as they then circulate their screenplays and pitch decks. More recently, though, the proof-of-concept short has come into its own as a sub-genre worthy of its own consideration and showcase. Currently in the middle of its three-day third edition is the American Cinematheque’s PROOF Film […]
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“A Community Campfire”: The 2025 Camden International Film Festival
On the cusp of every autumn for the last 21 years, the Camden International Film Festival becomes the center of the nonfiction world, offering a kind of community campfire in the midst of the seasonal showcase sprawl (Telluride, Toronto, New York), its focus on a more intimate, artist-led level of engagement in the crisp air of coastal Maine, far from the madding crowds (and industry noise). This year’s festival, situated in Camden and Rockland, felt securely grounded after several years shadowed by various uncertainties: COVID, a hurricane, and the departure of founder and former executive and artistic director Ben Fowlie […]
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The Gotham Announces the 2025 Gotham Award Nominees; “One Battle After Another” Tops with Six Noms
One Battle After Another, Familiar Touch and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You are among the multiple nominees for the 2025 35th edition of the Gotham Awards, announced today by The Gotham Film & Media Institute, Filmmaker‘s publisher. Among its six nominations, the Paul Thomas Anderson picture received nominations for Best Feature, Best Adapted Screenplay (from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland), and Outstanding Supporting Performance (for both Benicio Del Toro and Teyana Taylor). Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Filmmaker‘s current cover story, received nominations for Best Feature, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Outstanding Lead Performance (Rose Byrne). Sarah […]
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“Collapsing the Past Into the Present”: Connor Sen Warnick on “Characters Disappearing”
A half-hour into Connor Sen Warnick’s Characters Disappearing, left-wing revolutionary Mei (Yuka Murakami) hangs up a poster declaring “The East is Red.” Until that point, the film seems to take place in the strict past-tense, moving through the domestic spaces of Asian Americans in New York’s Chinatown in the early 1970s. But when Mei crosses the street, a woman moves through the frame in front of her in a mask and puffy jacket clearly out of our current decade—Mei, and her radical moment, exist in a past which haunts our present. Warnick’s film doesn’t hide the reality of how and […]
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NYFF 2025: Duse, Gavagai
When I caught up with Martin Eden during the pandemic, I liked it pretty well but didn’t understand “what, exactly, is the value of […] a eulogy for the Western European project’s dissolution at this late date.” Whoops! I don’t know why I couldn’t grasp why Pietro Marcello wanted to delve into fascism’s allure for charismatic upstarts in 2019; I certainly get it now, so perhaps my positive response to his tepidly-received Duse is, in part, a delayed apology for spacing the first time round. This film’s project is, pretty precisely, gender-flipped Martin Eden (more succinctly, per my colleague Mark […]
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New/Next Film Festival 2025: On Campus
Begun as a scrappy response to the Maryland Film Festival cancelling its edition in 2023, New/Next held its third run in Baltimore from October 2 to 5 and has already announced that the festival will be back next fall. “The word about the festival in the filmmaker community is really strong, especially about the quality of experience we offer them,” festival programmer and co-founder Eric Allen Hatch said during an edition which brought in over 300 filmmakers to The Charles Theater. “I find that most of the works I would want to show are being sent to me.” “You keep […]
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Busan International Film Festival 2025: Follow the Money
The first conversation I had in Busan was with a Malaysia-based genre film buyer who told me about the recent challenges of dealing with his adopted country’s famously rigid censor board while clearing promotional materials for a new Bollywood film, which he described as a less-violent John Wick. The poster showed the lead actor holding a bottle of beer and smoking a cigarette; unsurprisingly, the board nixed both elements and rejected the compromise of erasing them while leaving smoke still trailing out of the star’s mouth. In the end, the buyer was provided with an image of the hero on […]
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The 2025 San Sebastián Film Festival
The 73rd San Sebastian International Film Festival marked the penultimate edition for its director José Luis Rebordinos, who has grown and expanded the event on Spain’s northern Basque coastline over his 15 years at the helm. One noticeable element of his programming down the years has been its satisfying cohesion, with themes frequently running across the festival’s different strands so that discussion of ideas is able to break out beyond a single movie into wider debate. Perhaps, as he begins to contemplate passing the baton onwards, it should come as little surprise then, that one of this year’s key subjects […]
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20 Recommended Films at the 2025 New York Film Festival
With the 63rd edition of the New York Film Festival kicking off tomorrow (Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt is the Opening Night Film), we at Filmmaker offer a list of 20 recommendations, the majority films we’ve seen and reviewed out of other festivals, a list augmented with a couple of strongly anticipated titles. Find below recommendations from Vadim Rizov, Blake Williams, Natalia Keogan, Leonardo Goi, Vikram Murthi, Nicolas Rapold and Sofia Bohdanowicz, with links to their coverage. For more information and tickets, visit the NYFF site. Gavagai There are two world premieres in NYFF’s Main Slate this year. The starry inclusion […]
