Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: Tom Quinn’s Colewell, Starring Karen Allen
Tom Quinn’s Spirit Award-nominated Colewell receives a limited theatrical as well as digital release beginning this Friday, December 13. The theatrical starts with a run at Facets Theater in Chicago, with other cities to be announced. On the occasion of its premiere earlier this year at the SFFILM Festival, I wrote, “Colewell is a gentle, melancholic film, one inflected by bursts of real anger and sorrow, that is both character study as well as meditation on loneliness and community in a time of both technological and political change.” The trailer just dropped, which gives a good look at lead Karen […]
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Clip Premiere: Cara Jones’s DOC NYC-Premiering “Moonie” Doc, Blessed Child
Receiving its world premiere tomorrow at DOC NYC is filmmaker Cara Jones’s Blessed Child, a documentary about her own childhood spent in Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. From the press release: More than a decade after leaving the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (the “Moonies”), through a trove of never before seen footage from within the church and extraordinary home videos of her family’s upbringing alongside Reverend Moon and his disciples, filmmaker Cara Jones attempts to finally break free from the religious cult which dominated her childhood. Blessed Child is one daughter’s attempt to unpack the legacy of the […]
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Trailer Watch: Beth B’s DOC NYC-Premiering Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over
Beth B’s Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over, her doc about the provocative and pummeling musician, writer, multi-media artist, social critic, No Wave pioneer and recent podcast host premieres Saturday night at DOC NYC, and the first trailer is online. Writes B about the film: Voicing the unheard and seeing the unseen are themes that have run through my films with an eye to creating dialogue, community, and a place for self-knowledge and acceptance. My documentary films are social, political and personal investigations; home movies focusing on people I know or have come to know. Lydia Lunch was 19 […]
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Strand Releasing’s “30/30 Vision”: Premiering New iPhone Shorts by Ira Sachs, James Schamus and Elisabeth Subrin
Strand Releasing, the inventive, carefully curated independent distributor known for its release of both American and international arthouse auteurs, turns 30 this year, and to celebrate it has invited its filmmaker friends to create short iPhone films that speak in various ways to Strand’s mission and film culture today. I’m happy to premiere here exclusively at Filmmaker shorts by Ira Sachs, whose Frankie opens this Friday, October 25th; Indignation director, screenwriter and producer James Schamus; and Shulie and A Woman, A Part director Elisabeth Subrin. Previously released have been shorts by Fatih Akin and Karim Ainouz. Comments Strand co-founder Marcus […]
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Trailer Premiere: Graham Swon’s The World is Full of Secrets
Says Graham Swon — a 2016 Filmmaker 25 New Face — about his debut narrative feature, “I’ve always wondered: is it possible to make a film which represents violence – at it’s most brutal and direct – without glorifying the act or exploiting the suffering of the victim? The World is Full of Secrets is an attempt to answer that question, through the pleasures and casual sadism of adolescence. It’s a love letter to that pain you feel when you first realize there’s a difference between fantasy and reality.” Premiering today is the film’s trailer, which, counter to 98% of […]
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Trailer Watch: Uncut Gems, the New Safdie Brothers Film Starring Adam Sandler
The first trailer for the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, with Adam Sandler in the frantic lead, is here. More or less accurately representing the film’s tone, this also gives viewers their first listen to Daniel Lopatin’s excellent, clangorous score, although be warned: there’s plenty of footage from Uncut Gems, including from the end, throughout. Uncut Gems is out from A24 this December.
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Watch: Not Getting Stoned with Caveh: Rick Alverson
With Rick Alverson’s Filmmaker-recommended The Mountain opening today in theaters, we’re debuting this edition of Not Getting Stoned with Caveh featuring the Virginia-based auteur and his blissed-out interlocutor, Caveh Zahedi. Re the “not,” Alverson disdains pot smoke, allowing Zahedi to puff in his presence but not exhale. Topics discussed: why filmmakers talk about financing all the time, whether cinema produces a physiological response in our bodies that can’t be adequately described in words, and how Alverson thinks about his own filmography.
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Watch: Guts, Noah Hutton and Taylor Hess’s Short Doc on the Feminist, Anti-Colonial Environmental Lab, CLEAR
“Reproducing the status quo is deeply political because the status quo is crappy,” says the Newfoundland-based Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research’s Max Liboiron in Taylor Hess and Noah Hutton’s sharp and inspiring short doc, Guts, currently streaming at The Atlantic (and embedded above). At CLEAR, Liboiron’s work is both deeply political as well as practical. Her environmental science examining the effect of plastic pollutants on animal and human environments and food chains poses a more-than-rhetorical challenge to mainstream ideas around recycling and environmental cleanup. From The Atlantic: In the documentary, she asks a group of well-intentioned recyclers to look […]
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Watch: “Thirst,” Gaspar Noe’s Sebastian Music Video
A Travis Bickle wannabe is shitkicked at a neon-streaked Parisian club — it’s the new video from Gaspar Noe, which brings a near-Irreversible level of violence and the director’s trademark twisting overhead camera to a club track by the French producer. Check it out above.
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Watch: Caveh Zahedi’s “Not Getting Stoned with Alex Ross Perry”
Alex Ross Perry, writer/director of the highly recommended and in-theaters Her Smell, is the guest in this latest installment of filmmaker Caveh Zahedi’s self-explanatory interview show,(Not) Getting Stoned with Caveh. As is the case with the show as well as its sister series, Getting Stoned with Caveh, Zahedi takes a few hits before drawing out his subjects in conversation. Here, the totally straight Perry discusses with Zahedi subjects ranging from small talk at parties to sociability to cinephilia in general. And, oh yeah, at the instigation of a cinematographer friend, Zahedi varies his practice here, switching from his usual two-camera […]
