Immediately buzzed about after its inclusion in the 2023 Sundance Film Festival feature lineup announcement, the trailer has already arrived for Brandon Cronenberg‘s Infinity Pool. The film stars Alexander Skarsgård as a wealthy novelist who commits manslaughter on foreign soil and is presented the opportunity to have a doppelgänger face the death penalty in his place—for a substantial fee, of course. Also starring are Mia Goth and Cleopatra Coleman. Per the official synopsis: While staying at an isolated island resort, James (Skarsgård) and Em (Coleman) are enjoying a perfect vacation of pristine beaches, exceptional staff, and soaking up the sun. […]
In making my Watergate historical fiction film 18½, I always knew that coming up with a consistent musical soundtrack was going to be essential for balancing the tone of a film that swings from comedy to thriller to drama at breakneck speed. One genre of music, and indeed one song, “Brasília Bella,” is the key to unlocking not only how our team navigated the tones and themes of the film, but also reflects the scale and scope of making an indie film at the high point of a global pandemic. Around 2018, I started working on the script for 18½ […]
In their latest short film, The Last Days of August, which depicts the slow-motion desolation of a Nebraska town economically denuded by online retail, prolific filmmakers Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck create a haunted visual poetry — a blend of formally arresting, incisively spare images and heightened sound design. The two filmmakers, who appeared on our 25 New Faces list in 2010, began as shorts filmmakers and in recent years have directed arresting character-based, documentary-tinged features (God Bless the Child, When She Runs, and, for Machoian solo, The Killing of Two Lovers and The Integrity of Joseph Chambers). But throughout their […]
The first trailer has arrived for Darren Aronofsky‘s dark drama The Whale, which stars Brendan Fraser in a highly-anticipated comeback role for the actor. The film had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in September before screening at the Toronto International Film Festival and London Film Festival. A24 will distribute the film stateside. Based on the 2012 play of the same name by Samuel D. Hunter (who wrote the screenplay), The Whale follows a 600-pound man named Charlie (Fraser), a reclusive former English teacher who attempts to re-connect with his estranged 17-year-old daughter (Sadie Sink). Hong Chau […]
Watch the trailer for Venezuelan director Lorenzo Vigas’s The Box (La caja) ahead of the film’s stateside release via Mubi. The film focuses on an adolescent boy named Hatzín (non-professional, first-time actor Hatzín Navarrete) from Mexico City, whose father’s corpse was recently discovered amid a mass grave in the country’s vast northern territory. On his way back to the capital after identifying the remains, he is shocked when he comes across a man who bears a striking resemblance to his dad. The boy quickly enmeshes himself in the man’s life—who denies any possible paternal relation—increasingly convinced that the body in […]
One year after releasing The Souvenir: Part II, the final chapter of her meditative meta-memoir project, British filmmaker Joanna Hogg returns with her sixth feature film, The Eternal Daughter. The mysterious and captivating trailer for the forthcoming A24 title was released today. The film stars Tilda Swinton, one of Hogg’s Souvenir collaborators, who occupies an intriguing dual role as an artist and her elderly mother who spend some time visiting an old family property. Though it used to be a sprawling mansion, it now exists as a modestly-sized hotel that the duo check into for an extended stay. While the […]
Sean Baker’s debut feature was 2000’s Four Letter Words, but it was his second (following his work on TV’s Greg the Bunny), Take Out, directed with Shih-Ching Tsou, that is the most clear antecedent to the neorealist-inflected work he practices today. When I interviewed Baker in 2012 about his Starlet, we began with his origin story, which included this section on Take Out: I was a bit discouraged. I was seeing these filmmakers I’d gone to school with — Todd Phillips, Marc Forster — start to make waves. Their careers were taking off. I wanted to get back to my […]
Director and producer Eileen Yaghoobian followed the release of her 2008 documentary about underground poster design, Died Young, Stayed Pretty, with a number of surprising projects, including Exit the Labyrinth, a short film produced with the Guardian about Berlin’s Labyrinth, and Send Me Your Sexts, an online service that creates short films out of user-submitted erotic chats. She’s now made a short — “a sports action horror film” — that is as well a pitch for a feature. Check out the teaser above, and look for the short on the Skater Zombies YouTube channel on Halloween. Yaghoobian sent the following […]
Watch the trailer for the urgent Ukrainian documentary Mariupol. Unlost Hope ahead of its NYC screening at the Scandinavia House on Tuesday, November 1. The film utilizes audio recordings of eyewitness testimony—from two men and three women—who were living in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol when the Russians invaded on February 24, 2022. The film also features Mariupol-based journalist Nadezhda Sukhorukova, who recounts her experiences in the wake of the war directly to the camera. Of the film, Sukhorukova stated in a press release, “I want people to understand the absurdity of the situation and feel that thousands are dying […]
Rachel Gordon, author of the recently published and recommended The Documentary Distribution Toolkit: How to Get Out, Get Seen, and Get an Audience and James Boyer, director of operations at distributor Collective Eye Films, join D-Word founder Doug Block for this useful conversation about documentary distribution and all of its related subjects. In the talk, Boyer talks about things like needed deliverables, how his company makes acquisitions and the role of festivals in launching films, and Gordon talks about the realities of self-distribution, grassroots marketing techniques, and identifying and interacting with educational instructors who may be able to place films […]