70 Results for “Poland Progress”
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From Ida Lupino to Reese Witherspoon: Female Representation Onscreen at the Viennale and BFI Film Festival
“Hard, Fast, and Beautiful” is the title of a dedicated Ida Lupino program at the recent 53rd Vienna International Film Festival. The program is named in honor of Lupino’s film, which New York Times critic Bosley Crowther reviewed in 1951. “It simply recounts the quick parabola that a girl tennis player describes in becoming a tennis champion and then chucking it all for love,” he wrote of the “trite and foolish” script. Hard, Fast, and Beautiful was Lupino’s third directorial attempt. Well, technically, it was her fourth. When director Elmer Clifton had a heart attack in 1949 during Not Wanted, Lupino […]
by Taylor Hess on Nov 19, 2015 -
A Sense of Crisis: Directors Paula Ortiz, Mercedes Moncada, and Hanna Sköld at the San Sebastián Film Festival
“Life doesn’t have punch lines or a plot. It unfurls in ways that are somewhat random,” says Laurie Anderson. We’re sitting in a small room with fluorescent lighting and acoustically challenged walls. Anderson is wrapping up her last morning at the San Sebastián Film Festival with her newest hit, Heart of a Dog. She isn’t happy I showed up for the interview without having seen her film. I wasn’t happy myself, having missed the screening after several bus route missteps when I arrived in town the night before. If I hadn’t missed the film though, I wouldn’t have gotten the […]
by Taylor Hess on Oct 6, 2015 -
Right Then, Right Now: The Locarno Film Festival 2015
Considering last year’s Locarno Film Festival presented what turned out to be some of the best films of 2014 – Lav Diaz’s From What Is Before, Pedro Costa’s Horse Money, Martín Rejtman’s Two Shots Fired and Matías Piñeiro’s The Princess of France – artistic director Carlo Chatrian had a lot to live up to in his third year of tenure. Unbelievably, when the program of the festival’s 68th edition was announced, the main competition featured an even more impressive selection of auteurs. Though the extremely high expectations weren’t quite met, it was nevertheless an excellent year, and for every disappointment […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Aug 19, 2015 -
Anything Can Happen: True/False’s Sidebar Neither/Nor 2015 Investigated Polish Documentary Traditions
Now in its third year, the Neither/Nor sidebar of the annual True/False Film Festival has quickly become both a fundamental facet and essential rejoinder to the curatorial ideal of the program proper. Free of categorical imperatives, the festival’s binary brand has become over time a kind of shorthand for an often uncategorizable strain of filmmaking in which the ethos of nonfiction is consistently complicated by the visual language of fiction. The idea behind Neither/Nor is the reconstruction of a continuum between past and present iterations of this method, teasing out parallels between classic and contemporary storytelling modes while contextualizing the […]
by Jordan Cronk on Apr 6, 2015 -
SXSW Announces the 145 Features Playing in its 2015 Lineup
SXSW announced today the 145 features being show in its upcoming SXSW Film Conference, March 13-21 in Austin, TX. From a record number of 2,385 feature submissions will be shown new work by directors Hannah Fidell, Benjamin Dickinson, Patrick Wang, Ron Nyswaner, Alex Sichel, Ondi Timoner and Alex Garland, among many others. The festival’s Episodics strand continues, with five new web series being shown in this second year. Of the large number of submissions, Festival Director Janet Pierson said, ““When faced with a record 2,400 feature submissions, we had every intention to cut back on the total number in our […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 3, 2015 -
Tribeca Film Festival Announces Spotlight, Midnight, Storyscapes and Special Screenings Sections
The 2014 Tribeca Film Festival is rounding out its features line-up with the Spotlight, Midnight, Storyscapes and Special Screenings selections. Heavy hitters in the Spotlight category include Roman Polanski, Kelly Reichardt, Ira Sachs, Jon Favreau and Paul Haggis, with script ventures from Nicole Holofcener and Joss Whedon, as well as Chris Messina and Courtney Cox’s directorial debuts. Among the Special Screenings are new works from Tsai Ming Liang and Remote Area Medical directors Jeff Reichart and Farihah Zaman. Add in the transmedia Storyscapes and the chupacabra-featuring Midnights, and it’s shaping up to be a solid slate. The full synopses are below. SPOTLIGHT […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Mar 6, 2014 -
Loving Vincent: Animation in Oil
In an age when everything has already been done, it’s a rare feat to devise a way to make a film that no one has ever tried before. But that’s what the team behind Loving Vincent did when they decided to make their film about the last days of Vincent Van Gogh’s life by animating with actual oil paintings, each one executed by a professional artist on a full-sized canvas — in the style of Van Gogh himself, of course. As anyone who remembers the Van Gogh sequence in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams knows, the effect of the master’s artwork on […]
by Randy Astle on Feb 27, 2014 -
Full Lineup for 2014 New Directors/New Films
A Sundance heavy set of additional titles has been announced for this year’s New Directors/New Films series, taking place at MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center from March 19 – 30. I covered the first announcement back in January, noting that the festival’s obscure spirit was alive and well, though the recent inclusions appear to be verging on BAMcinemaFest territory, with such buzzed titles as Obvious Child, Dear White People, She’s Lost Control, The Babadook, To Kill A Man and A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. I’ve enjoyed the festival for international discoveries, and we still have plenty of those too: Fish & Cat […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Feb 20, 2014 -
“Directors These Days Really Have to Understand the Business of Film”: Producer Christine Vachon in Wroclaw
“I’ve been around so long that I’ve seen the ‘death’ of independent film at least three times” – Christine Vachon, Producing Masterclass Widely regarded as one of the key figures in American independent cinema, Christine Vachon is now well into her fourth decade of film production. Her first feature film as a producer was Todd Haynes’ corrosive, Jean Genet-inspired Poison (1991), which set the tone for the host of fearlessly confrontational films that followed, including Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) and Larry Clark’s Kids (1995). In 1996, alongside Pamela Koffler, Vachon co-founded the NYC-based production company Killer Films, which has been […]
by Ashley Clark on Nov 21, 2013 -
Afghan Doc Subject, TV Presenter Seeks Asylum, Talks Life Under the Taliban
In 2011, I spent three months in Afghanistan making the documentary The Network. The film is set behind the scenes at the first, largest and most successful television station in Kabul, Tolo TV. I thought it would be surprising, timely and somewhat subversive to make a positive film about Afghanistan in the face of the impending withdrawal of foreign troops. One of the things I discovered while making The Network is it’s difficult to make a positive film about Afghanistan. While the achievements of Tolo are extraordinary as is the massive, unprecedented social change media has brought to the country […]
by Eva Orner on Aug 12, 2013
