Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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The Gotham Announces 2025 Gotham Week Expo Programming
The Gotham Film and Media Institute, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the programming for the 2025 Gotham Week Expo, taking place during Gotham Week Monday, September 29th – Friday, October 3, in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Declares the organization in a press release, “The fourth-annual Expo, featuring enhanced design-thinking sessions, will bring together partners from The Gotham’s Expanding Communities initiative to provide community and thought leadership on topics pertinent to film and media creators as well as resources for nonprofit media organizations. “ After years at the Brooklyn Navy Yards, The Gotham will return to the DUMBO neighborhood for its Brooklyn events. […]
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Locarno 2025: A Cinema of Risks
A few black-and-white photos of Locarno’s first editions hung from the walls of the hotel that hosted me there for five days this month. Long before it began to stretch across several venues around town—none more iconic than the Piazza Grande, which every night turns into an 8,000-seat open air theater—the fest originally took place in the garden of Locarno’s Grand Hotel. This is where those pictures were taken. It is August 22, 1946, and they’re watching Giacomo Gentilomo’s My Sun—a crowd-pleaser with which the festival, just relocated from Lugano, opened the first edition in the city it’d be renamed […]
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From Elitist to Egalitarian: Julian Radlmaier on Phantoms of July
The films of Julian Radlmaier have all been infused with a specific kind of longing for a better future in the sense of Marxist utopias. From his early films—A Spectre is Haunting Europe (2013) and A Proletarian Winter’s Tale (2014)—to the snappy meta-commentary Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog in 2017 and 2021’s Bloodsuckers, aptly sub-titled “A Marxist Vampire Comedy,” Radlmaier has perfected the political allegory for our day and age. Static tableaux paired with outrageously funny one-liners (“Germany is sinking like the Titanic and we’re Leonardo DiCaprio”) make the films meme-friendly without compromising their devotion to labor politics and community. […]
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U.S. in Progress 2025 Submissions Now Open for American Independents Seeking Finishing Funds
U.S. in Progress is now through September 5 accepting submissions from American independent filmmakers with pictures in post-production seeking finishing funds. Accepted filmmakers and projects will attend the in-person event, November 4 – 8, in Warsaw and Wroclaw under the framework of Poland’s American Film Festival, where they will present the rough cuts of their narrative projects to European buyers and Polish post-production companies providing over $100,000 in post services. The program has had a great curatorial run the last few years. Recent projects that are alumni of U.S. in Progress include the recently released Familiar Touch, directed by 2023 […]
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“What Was I Going to Do, Edit Don DeLillo?”: Ben Rivers on Locarno 2025 Premiere Mare’s Nest
For a film about the end of the world, Mare’s Nest is hardly lugubrious. Then again, you could say the same about Ben Rivers’s entire oeuvre. Few directors who’ve kicked off their careers after the proverbial “end of history” have so assiduously used their cameras to imagine what that might look like; fewer still have pictured the Armageddon as existing somewhere between dystopia and utopia. It can be difficult to tell whether Rivers’s films are post- or pre-apocalyptic, if the solitary figures they often center on—like the old hermit riffing on Darwin’s theories from his dilapidated forest hovel in The […]
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NYFF 2025 Announces Currents Lineup
Film at Lincoln Center announced Currents for the 63rd New York Film Festival, taking place from September 26 through October 13 at Lincoln Center and in venues across the city. The Currents slate includes 16 feature films and 24 short films in five programs, representing 28 countries. “In a film landscape that is so often homogeneous by design, this year’s Currents lineup is energizing for being a showcase of the boundless possibilities of cinematic language,” said Dennis Lim, Artistic Director, New York Film Festival, in a press release. “Resurrecting old technologies and subverting new ones, the filmmakers and artists here use an ingenious array of styles and forms to investigate the past and illuminate the present, in […]
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63rd New York Film Festival Announces Main Slate, Including Reichardt, Poitras, Denis, Jarmusch and More
Film at Lincoln Center announced today the 34 films that comprise the Main Slate of the 2025 New York Film Festival. The Opening Night film is Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, and Jim Jarmusch’s latest, Father Mother Sider Brother is the Centerpiece. The Closing Night film, Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On?, is a world premiere, and it joins others including Gavagai by Ulrich Köhler (In My Room, NYFF56), “an astute drama in which a film adaptation of Medea becomes the center of cross-cultural tensions.” From Sundance there is Khalil Joseph’s BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, from Venice Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s […]
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FIDMarseille 2025: Fascist Equestrians and Others
Since changing its official name from Festival International du Documentaire de Marseille to Festival International de Cinéma de Marseille, FIDMarseille has become a significant premiere-driven industry festival dedicated to the expansive genre of “creative nonfiction” to include experimental, hybrid and essayistic works, often with a political ethos. For its 36th edition, FID reaffirmed its rare outspokenness on Palestine by screening To Gaza (2025) and hosting daily morning screenings of the collective work Some Strings. Through retrospectives of Radu Jude and Chilean duo Carolina Adriazola and José Luis Sepúlveda, the festival also seemed intent on signaling that it is not only […]
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Karlovy Vary 2025: Promising Young Men and Women
“There are so many promising debut features, then all those filmmakers go on to be jury members.” A new acquaintance was lamenting the dearth of directors under 40 with distinct styles and durable careers; I laughed, but it was a fair synopsis of a grim landscape. Per Wallace Stevens, the imagination may always be at the end of an era, but at this particular moment imagination and reality seem truly as one. Still, I’m in my unlikely second act as an (aspirational) optimist seeking reasons to be cheerful, and film festivals can help keep me in that headspace—at least we […]
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Cinema without Adjectives: Rita Azevedo Gomes on Fuck the Polis
In Rita Azevedo Gomes’ cinematic universe, a characteristic blend of literary adaptation and cinematic innovation creates simultaneously concrete and oneiric landscapes—places where the wandering subject, camera, plot and spectator become absorbed by the unknown, yet strangely familiar, territory before them. With Fuck the Polis, her most bold and daring film to date, the Portuguese filmmaker continues her cinematographic explorations of word, image, time and human emotions. Making its world premiere at FIDMarseille 2025, Polis follows Irma, who around twenty years ago, believing herself condemned, traveled to Greece. She now retraces that journey, moving from island to island in what becomes […]
