Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Exclusive Clip from Christina Kallas’s Slamdance-Premiering Paris is in Harlem
Set in 2017, Christina Kallas‘s Slamdance-premiering latest feature, Paris Is In Harlem, takes place the night before New York’s infamous Cabaret Law was repealed. In a historic Harlem jazz bar, a shooting alters the lives of several strangers who have gathered for the final night of “no dancing.” The filmmaker has provided Filmmaker an exclusive clip, which you can watch above. XYZ Films is handling North American sales on the film.
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Trailer Watch: Slamdance-Premiering Coming-of-Age Horror Picture, Honeycomb
“Lord of the Flies meets The Breakfast Club” is how 21-year-old director Avalon Fast’s Honeycomb is described. The logline: “Five small-town girls abandon their mundane lives and move into an abandoned cabin. Growing increasingly isolated, their world becomes filled with imagined rituals and rules but the events of one summer night threaten to abruptly end their age of innocence forever.” With K.J.Relth Miller of Slamdance calling the film “a lo-fi achievement that perfectly encapsulates the Slamdance spirit,” the film will premiere at the virtual festival January 27. Check out the film’s first teaser above.
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Trailer Watch: Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral
Following its premiere at last year’s Venice Film Festival, The Cathedral, the sophomore feature by Ricky D’Ambrose (a 25 New Face of Film in 2017), makes its US premiere at this year’s Sundance. We’re pleased to share the first trailer for the film, an assured, highly compressed yet emotionally impactful portrait of a young man’s upbringing from early ‘80s childhood to late ‘10s college. D’Ambrose’s coming-of-age story boasts David Lowery as an executive producer. The film’s Sundance page is here, and D’Ambrose’s essay about acting as his own graphic designer is here.
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Watch: David Ehrlich’s 25 Best Films of 2021
Indiewire critic David Ehrlich is back with what is always the most beautifully realized and most pleasurable to take in “best films of the year” list — his annual video countdown of the year’s best cinema. As always, much of the joy comes from Ehrlich’s unexpected editorial rhythms, ingenious match cuts and savvy music choices, drawn from the year’s films, which here range from the Sparks’s Annette score to Louis Armstrong. Last year, in order to justify the huge amount of time it takes Ehrlich to make these videos, he decided to urge viewers to support a charity chosen by […]
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Trailer Watch: Michel Franco’s Sundown
Michel Franco’s Sundown is unsettling tale of existential drift, one that upends the way in which the concept of family is often thematized in narrative films. It’s now given a suitably eerie trailer by its distributor, Bleecker Street. The story involves a brother (Tim Roth) and sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) vacationing at a Mexican resort when sad news arrives from abroad. The sister leaves, the brother stays, and the film’s mysteries concern the brother’s inscrutable motivations. Spasms of violence are expected in any film by the New Order director; those are hinted at by the trailer’s concluding sequence of flash cuts […]
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Watch: Plant Life, Adinah Dancyger’s Parquet Courts Music Video
An ambitious series of 11 music videos accompanied the new Parquet Courts album, Sympathy for Life, and as the band’s Sean Yeaton writes here in an email, the band has opened up the viewing possibilities behind the original live distribution: In the spirit of miracles, I thought I’d bring up a recent one in PC history, where we somehow incredibly (with the help of so many of our talented friends and colleagues) produced 11 new music videos–one for every song on Sympathy For Life. Until now the only way to see them was a live stream event that I successfully managed […]
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Trailer Watch: Robert Eggers’s The Northman
The spectacular first trailer for the anticipated third feature of Robert Eggers, The Northman, just dropped. About a Viking prince avenging his father’s murder, the film reunites the director with Anya Taylor-Joy, the star of his debut, The Witch, and Willem Dafoe, the star of his sophomore film, The Lighthouse. (And that’s in addition to Alexander Skarsgard, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Ethan Hawke and Bjork). In a Filmmaker interview on the film’s production, DP Jarin Blaschke promised that the film will be “accurate as hell”: Well, at least as accurate as 1,000 years ago can be. I don’t want to […]
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Trailer Watch: Robert Greene’s Procession
In films like Actress, Kate Plays Christine and Bisbee ’17, filmmaker Robert Greene has explored the interstices between documentary and fiction storytelling, particularly how the latter’s dramatic strategies can shape issues around self-knowledge and historical memory found within the former. In his latest, Procession, which had its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, this exploration is undertaken with the most direct and wrenching of intents as it involves the work of a group of men using drama therapy and role play to confront memories of their childhood abuse. In reporting from the Camden International Film Festival, Pamela Cohn wrote in […]
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Trailer Watch: Grasshoppers, The First Feature from 2018 25 New Face of Film Brad Bischoff
We profiled writer-director Brad Bischoff back in 2018 as part of that year’s 25 New Faces of Film. At the time, Vadim Rizov described his feature screenplay as “A bleakly funny Before Sunrise for mutually destructive alcoholics, it follows unstable couple Ray and Lisa over one increasingly sodden day and night, roaming through neighborhood streets, bars, open houses and many places they’re increasingly unwelcome.” Three years later, the film is making its world premiere as part of this year’s BendFilm Festival. We’re happy to share the premiere of the film’s trailer, whose visual control grounds performances by Saleh Bakri (The […]
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Trailer Watch: Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta
Here’s the first teaser trailer from IFC Films for Benedetta, Paul Verhoeven’s long-awaited “lesbian nun” movie. Verhoeven’s characteristically provocative drama about a 17th-century nun who claimed to experience visions of Jesus premiered at this year’s Cannes (where Blake Williams reviewed it). The movie’s in theaters and on demand on December 3.
