Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: David Ehrlich’s 25 Best Films of 2023 Video Countdown
Indiewire critic David Ehrlich returns at the top of the year with his characteristically excellent supercut of the past year’s best films. This 2023 edition clocks in at over 18 minutes and includes such films as Past Lives, The Taste of Things, Oppenheimer, The Zone of Interest and, well, 21 others. Music includes cuts from Pet Shop Boys, Radiohead and Bonnie Tyler. If you haven’t seen any of these titles, the overall exuberance of Ehrlich’s presentation will send you to the theaters or their streaming platforms. Every year Ehrlich pairs the supercut with a charity. This year’s, he writes, “is […]
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Trailer Watch: The Peasants
DK and Hugh Welchman are the directors of 2017’s Loving Vincent, a Vincent Van Gogh biopic created entirely from individually painted images. Now they return with the similarly ambitious The Peasants, for which you can watch the trailer above. As the filmmakers write in the press kit of the film’s making: While The Peasants incorporates the same painting animation technique made popular with our previous film Loving Vincent, our approach to the painting animation for The Peasants varied significantly from Vincent. […] The over 100 painting animators who worked on the film did so on specially designed PAWS units (Painting Animation […]
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Watch: DP Gregory Oke’s Hand-Scratched Animated Music Video for Will Epstein’s Golden
Cinematographer Gregory Oke, whose credits include Charlotte Wells’s astonishing debut Aftersun, recently made his first foray into music video. His clip for Will Epstein’s “Golden” is unexpected, a pulsing, sinuous work of animation in which he hand-scratched film negative as well as shot the singer and then treated the resulting footage in similarly analogue ways. Watch the video above, and read below statements from both Epstein and Oke. “When I met Greg, I could tell right away he was a kindred spirit even though all the points of our shared aesthetic sensibility weren’t immediately known to us. Naturally, I was […]
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Trailer Watch: DOC NYC Short Breaking Silence
Directors Amy Bench and Annie Silverstein (one of Filmmaker‘s 2014 25 New Faces) have collaborated on the short doc Breaking Silence, which premieres today at DOC NYC before release on the PBS app beginning November 15. Winner of both a Jury and Audience Award at SXSW 2023, as well as Best Documentary Short awards at the Atlanta and Oak Cliff Film Festivals, the film is, in the words of the filmmakers, “a verité portrait of Walker and Leslie Estes, a deaf father and CODA daughter from Baton Rouge, LA, who work together upon Leslie’s release from prison—driven by their shared experiences […]
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Trailer Watch: Sean Price Williams’s The Sweet East
Written by critic Nick Pinkerton, Sean Price Williams’s directorial solo feature debut, The Sweet East, enters limited release from Utopia on Dec. 1. The trailer captures the comedy’s scrappy, often-scabrous nature. Click here to read Vadim Rizov’s review from Cannes and here to read Jordan Cronk’s interview with Pinkerton and Williams.
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Watch: Frank Mosley and Hugo De Sousa’s Good Condition
Good Condition is an eight-minute meditation on loneliness, technology and new beginnings. It marks the second collaboration between filmmakers Frank Mosley and Hugo De Sousa after their 2022 comedy short film The Event. This time, they embark on an eerie trip to the suburbs, following a melancholy man named Barry (Hugo De Sousa) trying to complete a transaction with a ghostly figure that keeps evading him. Good Condition premiered at Aspen ShortFest and Fantasia earlier this year, and will finish its run this November at the Cucalorus Film Festival. Click here to read Mosley and De Sousa’s interview with Patrick […]
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Trailer Watch: How to Have an American Baby
We’re happy to share the first trailer for Leslie Tai’s debut documentary How to Have an American Baby, which next plays at the San Diego Asian Film Festival on Nov. 3 before making its New York City premiere on November 14th at DOC NYC and continuing on to Cucalorus Film Festival screenings on November 16 and 19. From the press release: a creative documentary that takes us behind the closed doors of the booming shadow economy catering to Chinese tourists who travel to the U.S. to give birth—in order to obtain U.S. citizenship for their babies. Told through a series of […]
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Trailer Watch: Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow
Martina Radwan’s Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow will have its world premiere at DOC NYC in the U.S. Competition section on November 10. In advance, we’re pleased to share the film’s trailer. From the press release: This film tackles the emotional and ethical challenges that arise when a determined, idealistic and thoroughly unprepared American cinematographer decides to support three Mongolian orphans, while traveling back and forth. Told over the span of six years, Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow is a deeply personal film and an honest portrait of how storytellers and their characters impact each other. As the filmmaker and central character, Martina grapples […]
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Trailer Watch: Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction
Winner of the People’s Choice Award at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction is a scathing adaptation of Percival Everett’s novel Erasure. Jeffrey Wright stars as Monk, a frustrated Black novelist who sets out to write a book purposefully full of outrageous Black stereotypes. American Fiction enters limited theatrical release on December 15 before expanding on December 22.
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Trailer Watch: Godfrey Reggio’s Once Within a Time
Koyaanisqatsi director Godfrey Reggio returns with his first feature in a decade, Once Within a Time, opening this Friday at New York’s IFC Center from Oscilloscope Labs. In Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2014 issue, Reggio, co-director Jon Kane and DP Trish Govoni discussed the “perfect image” of his last feature, Visitors, which was comprised of just 74 black-and-white shots, each running 70 or so seconds. Made during the COVID-19 pandemic, the animated Once Within a Time is a very different work, described as “a bardic fairy tale about the end of the world and the beginning of a new one, tinged with […]
