In Summering, James Ponsoldt‘s return to cinema following several years of episodic television work, four young girls, best friends about to enter different junior high schools, find their final moments of group bonding upended by a shocking discovery: a dead body. Encountered near a secret spot they dub Terabithia (after the YA novel and film Bridge to Terabithia), the gruesome find turns into a challenge. What if rather than calling the police or telling their parents these friends could actually solve the mystery of this deceased middle-aged man’s identity and cause of death? It’d be both a kind of end-of-summer […]
Girl Picture, the sophomore feature from Finnish director Alli Haapasalo, ditches hokey coming of age conventions while preserving the crushing emotional weight inherent to being a teenage girl. The film’s protagonists—best friends Mimmi (Aamu Milonoff) and Rönkkö (Eleonoora Kauhanen), alongside Mimmi’s lover Emma (Linnea Leino)—navigate the threshold of impending adulthood, oscillating wildly between manic self-centeredness and graceful altruism, encapsulating the disparate emotional poles one must traverse to arrive at self-actualized adulthood. What truly sets Girl Picture apart from the otherwise cloyingly twee coming of age landscape is its depiction of teenage sexual awakenings as something that can be natural, pleasurable […]
The trailer has been released for Juan Pablo González’s sophomore feature Dos Estaciones, a naturalistic gem that details the daily minutiae (and unusually gorgeous monotony) integral to the operations of a struggling tequila ranch. The film focuses on the ranch’s stony owner Maria (Teresa Sánchez), a pillar of her community who can’t always deliver paychecks but consistently finds the time to attend employee family gatherings. The film premiered earlier this year at Sundance, where Sánchez won the Special Jury Award Acting Prize. González was one of Fiilmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of Film back in 2015, and Vadim Rizov interviewed the […]
Premiering at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, Lidia Duda’s Fledglings is an entrancing look at a trio of seven year olds who bravely travel far from home to board at a school for the visually impaired. Forced to rely only on themselves, their teachers — and most importantly one another — Zosia, Oskar and Kinga spend their days mastering everything from handrails to utensils, to spelling words and playing the piano. Not to mention navigating often overwhelming emotions. (At least for the creative Zosia and sensitive Oskar, whose developmental disabilities can sometimes stress the besties out. Kinga, on the other […]
New York’s Metrograph Theater will pay homage to the “unsung” innovators of New York City’s independent film landscape in their repertory series The Process: A Tribute to Robert and Irwin Young. Running from August 12 through 21, the series highlights the directorial work of Robert M. Young as well as a slew of renowned titles that were processed at the now-defunct DuArt Film Laboratories, where his brother Irwin Young acted as owner and chairman until his death earlier this year at the age of 94. Series curator Nellie Killian was originally approached by Caught screenwriter Edward Pomerantz to program that […]
The following appeared in Filmmaker‘s Spring, 2000 edition accompanying All Tomorrow’s Yesterdays, an article in which four filmmakers reflect on the work of Alain Resnais. — Editor Anatole Dauman, through his company Argos Films, produced or co-produced many of the masterworks of postwar European cinema – including Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog; Hiroshima, Mon Amour; Last Year at Marienbad; and Muriel.Following his death in 1998, his daughter, Florence Dauman (herself a producer of A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Cinema), assumed control of the company, which today houses the greatest collection of independent cinema in France. Ms. Dauman […]
In 2000, Filmmaker, timed to a traveling retrospective, asked four directors to reflect on the work of legendary French film director Alain Resnais. We are reposting this piece now as another retrospective, Film Forum’s Alain Resnais 100, opens tomorrow. The below films, with the exception of Je T’aime, Je T’aime, are all also streaming now on the Criterion Channel. See as well this article’s original sidebar, in which producer Anatole Dauman reflects on the making of Night and Fog and Hiroshima, Mon Amour. — Editor Perhaps more than those of any other modern director, the films of Alain Resnais are […]
María Álvarez’s 2020 doc Le temps perdu (premiering theatrically on these shores at NYC’s Film Forum August 12th) is the second film in an exquisite trilogy, beginning with 2017’s Las cinéphilas and ending just last year with the IDFA debut of Las cercanas. All three docs are poetic meditations on the intersection of art, aging and memory, similarly focused on vibrant geriatric characters whose connections to cinema, literature and music (in ascending part order) are as profound as life itself. In the case of Le temps perdu reading becomes, in the apt description of one enthusiastic gent, “a creative act” — and an epic one at that. For […]
For its 26th edition, the Fantasia International Film Festival returned to a fully in-person, three-week event in downtown Montréal. The festival has always been my own personal summer retreat, affording me a few days in Canada to embrace the undying creativity of the independent horror scene and the festival’s homegrown traditions. For reasons I’ve never fully understood but have always been happy to accept the entire audience erupts in applause at a generic TV spot for Nongshim ramen and, as the lights go down before a film, loudly meows like a cat. If you attend a screening in Concordia University’s Sir […]
Submissions are now open for the 2022 edition of U.S. in Progress, which awards $100,000 in post-production services to American independent filmmakers with films in post-production. The event will take place November 9 – 11 at the American Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland, where American projects in their final stages will meet European buyers as well as top Polish image and sound post-production companies. From the press release: The program’s objective is to inspire U.S. producers to work with Poland, either by fostering co-productions or to connect them with services and, for future projects, locations. The Polish Film Institute offers […]