The feature debut of writer-director India Donaldson, Good One follows 17-year-old Sam (Lily Collias) during a weekend camping trip in the Catskills with her father and his oldest friend. As the two men continuously clash throughout their extended hike, Sam becomes uneasily aware of the frailty of male egos, even amid a landscape that ostensibly shields the group from broader societal pressures. Serving as the film’s editor (as well as a producer), Graham Mason tells Filmmaker about the challenges and rewards of cutting a film that revolves around a pointedly un-chatty central character, as well as his affirmed hunch that […]
Although artists by trade, Ukrainians Slava Leontyev, Anya Stasenko and Andrey Stefanov opted to help their countries fight off the Russian invasion. Their lives, their continued passion for their art and their country are now the subject of Porcelain War, co-directed by Leontyev and Brendan Bellomo, the latter of whom is based in the United States. Below, Stefanov, who also served as the film’s cinematographer, discusses making a film about war-torn Ukraine and the place of the filmmakers within it and how they managed to do it across two continents. See all responses to our annual Sundance cinematographer interviews here. Filmmaker: […]
The Sundance Institute today announced the 91 feature films, episodic and New Frontier works that comprise the 2024 40th edition of the Sundance Film Festival. Premieres by Steven Soderbergh, Lana Wilson, Nathan Silver and the Zellner Bros. join debuting filmmakers such as Jazmin Renée Jones, Haley Elizabeth Anderson and River Gallo at the festival, which runs January 18 – 28, 2024 in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah. A selection of the film’s programming will also be available online from January 25 – 28. Sundance received a record 17,435 submissions this year from 153 countries, with 4,410 being feature […]
The particular focus of this year’s Viennale might have been Chile—the main retrospective, dedicated to Raúl Ruiz, was paired with a program exploring the country’s cinema in the half century since the 1973 coup—but its neighbor Argentina was also very well-represented. More than a specific curatorial inclination, this reflected the fact that it’s been a terrific year for Argentine film. Alongside such festival-circuit hits as Lisandro Alonso’s Eureka, Eduardo Williams’s The Human Surge 3 and Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents, the Viennale screened more modestly scaled and below-the-radar films, including Martín Shanly’s About Thirty, Martín Rejtman’s The Practice and Puan by […]
Watch the trailer for Acidman, Alex Lehmann‘s most recent directorial effort. Co-written by Lehmann and Chris Dowling, the film was produced in part by Liz Cardenas, who won the 2022 Film Independent Spirit Award for producing the Duplass Brothers’ 7 Days. This year, she was nominated for the Independent Spirit Producers Award. The film stars Dianna Agron as Maggie, a woman who decides to track down her long-estranged father Lloyd (Thomas Hayden Church), a recluse who’s been given the nickname “Acidman” by locals. Part of their reunion entails attempting to make contact with UFOs, a search that reveals difficult truths about Lloyd’s […]
This interview with the director of the recommended The Unknown Country was originally posted during the 2022 SXSW Film Festival and is being reposted today as the film opens in New York, Los Angeles and other markets via Music Box Films. — Editor From the plains of the Dakotas to the Mexican-American border, landscape — seen through rain-streaked windshields at night, from overhead drone shots, and from the point-of-view of a single woman moving across a country that’s both reassuring and suddenly alien — is both subject and setting in The Unknown Country, the debut dramatic feature from artist and […]
While most producers these days are worried about the latest CPI number—that’s the Cinematic Price Index—one group of filmmakers is, somewhat paradoxically, not: those working on the lower end of the microbudget, or “no-budget,” continuum, producing finished features for the very low five figures. For them, production is retrofitted from whatever money can be raised, and if the price of gas goes up, well, the shoot just has to make do with less in another area. Among such filmmakers, there’s perhaps no one whose model is as stripped-down as Pete Ohs, who recently premiered his latest work, the well-received Jethica, […]
Blood’s thicker than the mud in the family affair that is My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, a contemporary vampire tale utterly stripped of the genre’s romance. In place of mythic hoohah, writer-director Jonathan Cuartas focuses on the grim, quotidian details of day-to-day caregiving for an extremely pale invalid named Thomas (Owen Campbell), a frail wisp of a young man who is wholly dependent on older siblings Dwight (Patrick Fugit) and Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram) for survival, sheltered inside a drab house on the forgotten edge of an anonymous city, its every window blanketed from fatal sunlight. […]
Deep in the desert of Crestone, Colorado live a group of Soundcloud rappers who live carefree off the land, growing marijuana, recording music, and posting goofy videos to Instagram? Crestone, Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s debut feature, journeys deep into the isolated, sandy abyss, placing her camera amongst an eccentric group of lost boys who have no use for the outside world, even as it steadily burns around them. If influential TikTokers can erect a California-based Hype House to stock up on “content creators,” Crestone is as appropriate a place as any to discover where these wild things are. Hertzler, a 25 […]
While the arrival of a newborn child can strengthen a couple’s relationship, the loss of one can accentuate fissures that were already there. Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman is an emotionally high-pitched study of the PTSD that results from a home birth gone fatally wrong. Based on a stage play by Mundruczó’s partner, Kata Wéber, this film adaptation moves the action to Boston and casts as its two leads Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf. Following its world premiere at last fall’s Venice International Film Festival (where Kirby was awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actress), press coverage for […]