London-based director Jayisha Patel has amassed an impressive resume in a remarkably short period of time. Since 2014 Patel’s documentary shorts have screened LAFF, SXSW, NYFF, the Berlin International Film Festival and beyond, racking up numerous awards along the way. Her latest VR project — Notes to My Father, the world’s first live-action 360-degree documentary on sex trafficking, commissioned by Oculus — premiered at Sundance. Her most recent short, the Berlinale-premiering Circle, a sensitive portrait of an adolescent rape survivor caught in the endless loop of India’s gender-based violence, made its Toronto debut this week. Currently an artist in residence […]

The ability to watch time unfold — to see its impact on both subjects and filmmaker — can be one of the greatest rewards in non-fiction filmmaking. As the protagonists on screen mature, morph, change, and grow, so does the point of view of the director. In the case of British/Libyan filmmaker and photographer Naziha Arebi and her TIFF-premiering documentary Freedom Fields, the moments captured over five years demonstrate how a modern, forward-looking woman, one devoted to family, education and profession, navigates a society in which women are directed to remain mute, defenseless and powerless. For her début feature, Arebi […]

For the past eight years London’s Open City Documentary Festival has been dedicated to “celebrating the art of non-fiction,” and the upcoming 2018 edition (September 4-9) looks to be doing so in a creatively cutting edge way when it comes to immersive media. In addition to a wide-ranging Expanded Realities exhibition (divided into three themed sections, A New Lens, Motion and Sonic), OCDF will present a full day (September 7) Expanded Realities symposium featuring deep-thinking speakers tackling some of the most pressing issues affecting new media-makers today. One discussion I’m especially looking forward to is the “Barrier to Entry: Accessibility […]

The Venice Film Festival’s main competition does not enjoy a reputation as a go-to place for adventurous cinema. So far, this year’s selection has been pretty much on brand: big-name directors, “important” themes and very little risk-taking. It’s safe to assume Venice will again be well represented on Oscar night. Against all expectations (or at least mine), the first film to break this frustrating mould proved to be Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria. Judging from the cast and crew — cinematography by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom!; music by Thom Yorke!; starring Tilda Swinton, Dakota Fanning, Mia Goth, Chloë Grace Moretz, Ingrid Caven and Angela […]

One year before the release of Parting Glances and four before Longtime Companion, Arthur Bressan Jr. wrote, produced, directed and edited Buddies (1985), one of the first narrative feature films to put AIDS front and center as a subject. It might be the first, but the television movie An Early Frost aired at around the same time, and in any case, I’ve learned not to make claims for anything being the absolute first when it comes to film history since there are inevitably obscurities that elude even a guy like me who spends every waking hour watching and thinking about […]

One of the bleakest, most affecting and most expertly directed movies ever made for television arrives on Blu-ray this week in the form of Kino Lorber’s special edition of Nicholas Meyer’s The Day After. When it first aired on ABC on November 20, 1983, Meyer’s harrowing vision of the impact of a nuclear war on a Kansas town was a phenomenon — over a hundred million people tuned in, making The Day After the highest rated TV-movie in history. It also happened to be one of the most powerful and sophisticated thanks to Meyer’s uncompromising approach to his material (an […]

They say that making your first feature is a lot like having your first child. My wife, Allyssa, and I have not taken the plunge into childrearing yet but instead we created a “baby bucket list.” It included diving the Great Barrier Reef, petting a Koloa bear, seeing the Sagrada Familia in Spain, attending a rodeo in Hawaii, running a marathon and last but not least making a feature film. At the time I proposed this idea it didn’t seem far-fetched as we met in the film industry. I was working as an associate producer on Scott Pendergrast’s first feature, […]

If you’re in Los Angeles, this weekend offers a rare opportunity to see classic 3-D films projected in 35mm as the American Cinematheque and LACMA kick off their “Double Vision” series. Highlights include a screening of Friday the 13th Part III, which is perhaps the most shamelessly fun 3-D movie of all time as it exploits the technology to toss everything from yo-yos to eyeballs into the audience’s lap (it’s also the movie that introduced Jason’s iconic hockey mask); a double feature of the 1983 cult favorites Metalstorm and Rottweiler; and a presentation of Lamont Johnson’s criminally underrated Spacehunter: Adventures […]

After writing and directing the most savage, uncompromising film of his career with the independently financed They Live (1988), John Carpenter made one last stab at big-budget studio filmmaking with the 1992 Chevy Chase vehicle Memoirs of an Invisible Man to disappointing commercial and critical results. In spite of its reception at the time, however, Memoirs is a fascinating film on a number of levels – more fascinating, perhaps, than Carpenter realizes. It’s one of his few movies on which he declined to take a possessory credit, but Carpenter’s signature is all over Memoirs in its deft juggling of emotions […]

Perhaps the most innovative virtual reality work I’ve seen this year has been Lisa Jackson’s Biidaaban: First Light, which premiered earlier this year at the Tribeca Film Festival. Jackson, an Anishinaabe artist working out of the National Film Board of Canada, has spent years exploring issues of First People identity and language in her work, which includes documentary and fiction film, animation, installations, and other media; in fact, Biidaaban: First Light was designed as a corollary to a multimedia installation. The film’s narrative is minimal. It could be described as a post-apocalyptic scenario in which the viewer witnesses how nature has reclaimed […]