Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“That’s the Beauty of Theater, It Parallels Your Life In Sort of Mysterious Ways”: Adeel Akhtar, Back To One, Episode 338
Adeel Akhtar is a versatile British actor known for his powerful performances across film, television, and theatre. He gained widespread acclaim for his BAFTA-winning role in the BBC drama Murdered by My Father, and won another one, a few years later, for Sherwood. His other credits in front of the camera include Four Lions, The Big Sick, Enola Holmes, Utopia, and Sweet Tooth. On stage, Akhtar has appeared in productions at the National Theatre and the Royal Court. Currently he wows audiences as Lopakhin in a new production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. On […]
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NAB 2025: LED Screen Advancements, Tariff Concerns and Hybrid Lenses
Nearly 1,100 vendors spread across three halls of the massive Las Vegas Convention Center for the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show which, over five days each April, covers a lot of ground, both physically and with the wide scope of technology encompassed under “broadcast.” In a press conference, Karen Chupka, NAB’s managing director and executive vice president, highlighted this Show’s new points of focus, including sports and content creators; ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith was a featured guest speaker at NAB earlier that same morning. Scrolling through each day’s list of scheduled panels and talks illustrates just how […]
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Inaugural Henry Awards for Public Interest Documentary Announce Grand Prize Winner, Finalists and Honorable Mentions
The inaugural Henry Awards for Public Interest Documentary, awarded by the Documentary Film in the Public Interest Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, have been announced, including a grand prize of $100,000 for While We Watched, whose director Vinay Shukla contributed an essay to our fall 2023 issue about his creation of the best-selling board game Shasn. The awards were decided by a jury consisting of Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, Mandy Chang, Petra Costa, Ron Nixon and Michèle Stephenson. From the press release: The Documentary Film in the Public Interest Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s […]
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Tribeca Festival Announces 2025 Features Including New Films by RZA, Mariska Hargitay
The Tribeca Festival, which runs from June 4 to 15 in 2025, has announced the feature film lineup for this year’s edition, including the debut feature from 25 New Face of Independent Film 2022 Walter Thompson-Hernández. From the press release: The final selections were chosen from a record-breaking number of submissions (13,541). This year’s program includes 118 feature films representing 95 world premieres, 135 filmmakers and 36 countries. 48 (40%) of the features are directed by women and 42 (36%) are directed by BIPOC filmmakers. 44 filmmakers are making their feature debut at this year’s Tribeca Festival and 32 directors […]
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“The Biggest Challenge Was That Janis Has Led an Incredibly Interesting and Varied Life”: Director Varda Bar-Kar on Janis Ian: Breaking Silence
Even if you don’t count yourself has a diehard Janis Ian fan, the singer-songwriter’s songs, such as her 1967 hit “Society’s Child,” when they appear in Varda Bar-Kar’s compelling bio-doc, Janis Ian: Breaking Silence, will strike a memory chord, so ubiquitous they have been across radio playlists for more than half a century. It’s a real strength of Bar-Kar’s film, which is organized around several of Ian’s most memorable albums, including the eponymous 1993 release, that she weaves these compositions into a rich fabric that places Ian’s personal life story — her coming out, her relationship with and 2003 marriage […]
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Seven Documentary Organizations Sign Letter Decrying DOGE National Endowment for the Humanities Cuts
Seven filmmaker support organizations, including the International Documentary Association, Women Make Movies and Third World Newsreel, have signed a letter protesting Trump administration cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities that will affect both independent documentary filmmakers and non-profit organizations. In addition to funds for future grants, the administration is rescinding grants awarded during the Biden administration — monies that filmmakers and organizations had already planned to spend. The New York Times reported today: Starting late Wednesday night, state humanities councils and other grant recipients began receiving emails telling them their funding was ended immediately. Instead, they were told, […]
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Amalia Meets Bing: Walking with the Canine Star of The Friend and Talking to Owner Bev Klingensmith and Trainer Bill Berloni
By mere chance, The Friend has been a part of my life for quite some time now. I was first introduced to the book when Hal Hartley recommended it for my book club sometime around 2021, when I was just a girl with two cats. Fast forward and it’s 2024, now I love dogs and had just adopted a puppy named Variety Magazine. It was during that spring, on one of those early days of puppyhood, that he got street cast for a b-roll sequence in an upcoming film… that was to be an adaptation of Sigrid Nuñez’s The Friend. […]
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“Field of Dreams in Reverse”: Baseball Movies, Eephus and One Last Game in East River Park
“We called it Field of Dreams in reverse: if you wreck it, they will leave,” writer and actor Nate Fisher told me of the selling pitch for Eephus, the melancholic baseball comedy he co-wrote with Michael Basta and director Carson Lund, which made its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival last Fall after debuting at Cannes, 2024. (The film is currently in theatrical release from Music Box.) The unusual baseball film captures the last recreation-league baseball game played at a soon-to-be-demolished field in a deliberately ambiguous New England location, carried out by two teams—the Riverdogs and Adler’s […]
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“The Cause of Fascism was the Capitalists”: Igor Bezinović on Fiume o morte!
In 1919, poet, playwright, aristocrat and nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio led an expedition of disgruntled legionnaires from the Italian army to occupy the city of Fiume, now a part of Rijeka in modern-day Croatia. D’Annunzio’s irredentist conquest initially sought to reclaim the former Roman province of Dalmatia for the new state of Italy. D’Annunzio treated his occupation of Fiume with the same romanticism as his writing, even going so far as to obsessively have him and his men filmed and photographed to project a propagandistic ideal. These images, along with D’Annunzio’s continued popularity in Italy, have muddled history, with the event […]
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“The Power of a ‘Like’ When Someone Needs It Is More Powerful Than We Realize”: Tracie Laymon On Her Heartwarming Bob Trevino Likes It
To this cranky viewer constantly engaged in a battle to limit his social media time, the concept of Tracie Laymon’s debut feature, Bob Trevino Likes It, almost feels like time-travel science fiction, a trip back to a world where social media provided positivity and good vibes, not toxic rancor, nefarious scammers and wellness grift. In the comedy drama, now in release from Roadside Attractions, an adrift young woman, Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira), who is forever let down by the gross insensitivities of her biological father (French Stewart), finds both a pal and needed self affirmation by randomly befriending a man […]
