An act of sexual violence leads an awful retribution in Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli’s Violation, which premiered this past week at the Toronto International Film Festival. But were the film’s execution as simple, as blunt, as this brief synopsis might suggest, there’d be little to distinguish Violation from so many other works in the rape-revenge genre. Instead, in their debut feature Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli have radically scrambled the dramatization of cause and effect, sliding backwards and forwards in their storytelling to place a sexual assault that happens on a couple’s weekend getaway within the broader psychology of the survivor’s family […]

IFP, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the inaugural audio programming for the upcoming 42nd edition of IFP Week, which will take place virtually September 20 – 25.  Unfolding over the last two days of the conference, September 24th and 25th will be, says IFP, “robust conversations and events that will explore audio storytelling, real-time decision making, and what goes on behind the scenes in the world of audio.” The programming complements the maiden edition of IFP Week’s Audible Audio Hub, which features 36 audio-only projects connecting with some of the industry’s leading producers and financiers. Industry guest speakers will include: Sean […]

When I last spoke to Nicole Reigel for Filmmaker, it was in 2014 to profile the Jackson, Ohio native for our 25 New Faces list. After a stint in the military and then time producing her own plays for theater, Riegel had arrived in Los Angeles and quickly made a name for herself as a screenwriter, with directors such as Cary Fukunaga and Justin Lin on board for her scripts. But her ultimate goal, she revealed in the piece, was to direct — an ambition realized this year with her flinty, tremendously assured and compellingly acted debut, Holler. Selected for […]

When Francesco Rosi adapted artist and activist Carlo Levi’s 1945 memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli for Italian television in 1979, contemporary observers of the director probably saw it as a strange choice. Rosi had made his name with searing, forcefully immediate studies of Italian society and politics like Salvatore Giuliano and Hands Over the City; Levi’s book about his banishment to an isolated rural town during the reign of Mussolini was as modest and personal as Rosi’s earlier films were sweeping and elaborate. Yet the memoir had in fact been a dream project of Rosi’s for decades, and the four-part, […]

Adapted from Iain Reid’s 2016 novel, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things returns to familiar preoccupations—solipsistic men and idealized girlfriends, already subjective memory’s decay, aging and death, ambitious futility. From the book Kaufman retains the text of page one (an interior monologue from the unnamed female narrator), some dialogue from the subsequent first chapter and the course of events up to about page 150 (out of 210). Otherwise, the dialogue’s almost entirely been junked before a final act of Kaufman’s own conception, which are both excellent substitutions: the novel has a manifestly underwhelming twist ending and isn’t exactly packed with scintillating exchanges […]

The Producers Guild of America (PGA) issued this week “COVID Safety Protocols for Producing Independent Productions,” a 57-page set of mandates, recommendations and guidelines for shooting during the coronavirus pandemic. Following similar documents — like the more studio-oriented “Safe Way Forward,” issued by IATSE, SAG-AFTRA and the DGA — the PGA paper, drafted by its Production Safety Task Force, both further codifies new industry safety practices while addressing issues specific to independent (i.e., non-studio or streamer-backed) productions. Additionally, like this summer’s documentary guidelines from Doc Society, Field of Vision and Sundance Institute, the PGA’s “COVID Safety Protocols” broadens its mandate […]

Responding to a help-wanted ad, 85-year-old Sergio Chamy agrees to infiltrate a Santiago nursing home as a “mole agent” to find out if a client’s mother is being abused. As a “spy” he uncovers a hidden world of frustration and loneliness.  Maite Alberdi’s documentary borrows from film noir before evolving into an unsettling look at the lives of the elderly. It was developed with the help of the Sundance Institute Documentary Film Program and the Tribeca Film Institute. The Mole Agent screened at Sundance, and is available on demand starting September 1. Filmmaker spoke with Alberdi from her office in […]

In his final book, The Weird and the Eerie, critic and theorist Mark Fischer differentiates between “the weird” and the supernatural as it appears in both literature and film. For example, the supernatural world of vampires, writes Fischer, “… recombines elements from the natural world as we already understand it….” These supernatural stories are contrasted with fictions based around suggestions and byproducts of natural phenomena, such as black holes. “… The bizarre ways in which [a black hole] bends space and time are completely outside our common experience,” Fischer writes, “and yet a black hole belongs to the natural-material cosmos […]

In 2011, I was trying to evolve. To be something no one else was. Define myself, so to speak.  First, I trained for something that wasn’t really needed. Something where I would go into conflict zones or hard to reach areas — mountains, jungles, etc. Something that I could do quite easily and trained accordingly, but again “things” evolved. A friend of mine had created VFX plates and had learned something that was already dying out.  As a result, I took my game higher, evolving into some risky endeavors. This opened a door that I didn’t know existed. The next few years […]

Until September 7 American filmmakers can submit their works-in-progress to one of the leading European programs supporting new US filmmakers, US in Progress. Celebrating its tenth anniversary, US in Progress has always taken place within the American Film Festival in Poland and has consisted of events and a live pitching forum. For this edition — November 11-13, when international travel, particularly from the US, is uncertain due to the coronavirus pandemic — US in Progress will take place virtually while an in-person American Film Festival unspools in Wroclaw alongside the New Horizons Film Festival. “It’s the same structure as before,” […]