The Gotham Film & Media Institute, Filmmaker’s parent organization, announced today that poet, playwright, writer, filmmaker, director, civil rights activist, and educator Kathleen Collins will receive the inaugural Icon Tribute posthumously during the 2021 Gotham Awards Ceremony. Her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, will accept the inaugural Gotham Icon Tribute on behalf of her mother. The Gotham Icon Tribute was conceived by the Gotham Awards Advisory Committee this year on its thirty-first anniversary to serve as an elevated moment during the awards ceremony to call attention to the boldness, artistry, and impact of a filmmaker from a marginalized community whose work […]

Nearly two decades on from the release of his controversial 2002 opus Biggie & Tupac, British filmmaker Nick Broomfield is revisiting the story of the iconic, titular American rappers. In the BBC- and Abacus Media Rights-backed Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac, currently available through Gravitas Ventures on digital platforms, Broomfield delves into fresh testimony about the potential involvement of the LAPD and Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight in the murders of Smalls and Shakur. Rather than relying on a single smoking gun to propel the story forward, the documentary instead offers a panoramic […]

Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler (Medium Cool, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) is the subject of Shoot from the Heart, a new documentary short by Joan Churchill and Alan Barker. Shot over a ten-year period, it follows Wexler as he works on a music video, interacts with film students, and accompanies Jane Fonda to a festival screening of Coming Home. A highlight of Shoot from the Heart is a dinner Wexler shares with documentarian D.A. Pennebaker. The meal extends over hours, with additional footage supplied by Chris Hegedus. As the two reminisce about Sally Rand and […]

I just completed my second feature film, This Is Not a War Story. It’s a narrative hybrid film, complete with combat veterans denouncing war and Tom Waits wailing on the end credits. The film went from a microbudget experiment in 2017 to a Warner Media/HBO release in 2021. The supporting cast is composed entirely of non-actor veterans. We shot for 41 spread-out days, (with no bone-crushing overtime) and with a crew of eight-to-12 dedicated crewmembers functioning as a collective, in the model of a worker co-op. Our schedule was designed around two-week shooting periods, strategically scheduled over a course of […]

Launching this month, VidaFair.com gives filmmakers control over their content’s monetization without needing the approval of elite gatekeepers or multinational conglomerates. The startup sees itself in lofty terms — democratizing revenue creation to ordinary people through tech — somewhat in the footsteps of Uber and Airbnb. VidaFair lets filmmakers set their own fee per 24-hour video rental, anything from $0.00 to $20.00 is allowed (yes, filmmakers can choose to make nothing per stream if they wish). VidaFair has its own fee per rental stream, of course, but it’s purely based on file size, i.e. the metric which most closely correlates […]

Swedish director Frida Kempff makes an astonishing and bold debut with Knocking, her Sundance-premiering psychological thriller now out in the U.S. on digital platforms. Molly (Cecilia Milocco) has been released from a mental hospital into everyday life, moving into a spartan apartment in an impersonal urban apartment building. But at night, as images of her past trauma flicker through her recovering brain, there’s a knocking sound. What begins as an irritant turns to destabilizing obsession as Molly begins to believe that the sounds originate from a woman help captive and in danger. In an incredible performance, Milocco keeps us both […]

Twenty nonfiction feature projects have been awarded grants totaling $600,000 by the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program in its latest funding round. The grants target projects in all phases of filmmaking, from development to distribution and impact. Disability, feminist history, globalization, grief and loss, and housing inequality are among the subjects and, notes the press release, “… eight out of the ten U.S. films granted are helmed by at least one BIPOC director. This statistic reflects  the fund’s commitment to emerging artists whose voices have been historically marginalized in hegemonic Western societies. Globally, half of the projects supported have international […]

A young girl with melting ice for teeth bound to a mysterious protector, an older man who drains and refreezes those teeth each day — such a scenario, found in artist Frank Catly’s 2019 novel Earwig, provides the perfect source material for French filmmaker Lucile Hadžihalilović, whose films depict the uncanny transformations of adolescence in startling, near-surreal ways. In 1994’s medium-length La Bouche de Jean-Pierre, a teenage girl, ensconced at her aunt’s following her mother’s suicide attempt, is subjected to the menacing gaze of her aunt’s abusive boyfriend. In her feature debut, 2004’s Innocence, adapted from Frank Wedekind’s novella, Mine-Haha, or On […]

Not merely an addendum to Todd Haynes’s The Velvet Underground, Ed Lachman’s Songs For Drella is a ravishingly beautiful, sometimes thrilling audiovisual recording of a song cycle by Lou Reed and John Cale, the founders of the Velvet Underground. Cale and Reed’s early musical collaboration as the VU was inspired but unlikely – they had diametrically opposed musical roots and passions. Short lived as the band was, it became the source for punk, glam, and whatever followed from those fundamentally subversive pop genres. The VU began sliding toward death when Reed effectively fired Cale in 1968. (He had fired their first producer, Andy Warhol, […]

Two sets of parents enter a plain, drab room located down the hallway of an unassuming Episcopalian church. Their reason for meeting pertains to their respective sons, both of whom have died. One set of parents have lost their son to a mass shooter at his high school, the other set’s son was himself the mass shooter.  That is the basis for Fran Kranz’s emotionally raw debut feature, Mass, a film that is necessarily an actors’ showcase but also an exercise in pared-down filmmaking that finds tension and release in the subtlest of camera gestures. As the parents debate everything […]