The ninth annual edition of Double Exposure, a festival celebrating investigative journalism, once again brought together an intensely engaged group of journalists, documentarians, lawyers and funders. Washington, D.C., where antennas prick right up when you start talking about how to influence public opinion, is the precise intersection for these different professional groups to find each other. So, it’s not surprising that this is an event where the (three-day) symposium is at least as important as the festival. The topics were tough. What does collaboration look like for newspapers used to honing their competitive edge and maintaining strict distance from “sources”? […]
As the US’s largest university-run fest, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival (October 21-28) smartly caters to an overwhelmingly collegiate audience, which means bringing in loads of celebrities for red carpet events (Kevin Bacon! Ava DuVernay! Eva Longoria!) balanced with veteran Hollywood craftspeople for numerous nuts and bolts panels (this year’s Artisans series included “The Creators of Worlds: The Artisans of Oppenheimer”). Not to mention there’s a puppy dog enthusiasm with which these young industry aspirants gobble up the eight-day “celebration of cinematic excellence.” It’s both contagious and, for someone like me long past their dorm room years, dauntingly exhausting. (FOMO […]
Kino Lorber, a leading name in independent film distribution for over 45 years, has launched Kino Film Collection, a new streaming service available in the U.S. on the Amazon Service via Prime Video Channels for $5.99 per month. As their press release states, “The Collection will feature new Kino releases fresh from theaters, along with hundreds of films from its expansive library of more than 4,000 titles, many now streaming for the first time.” Highlights now available on the service or soon to be added include notable titles Filmmaker has covered over the years, such as Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess, […]
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 […]
Written by critic Nick Pinkerton, Sean Price Williams’s directorial solo feature debut, The Sweet East, enters limited release from Utopia on Dec. 1. The trailer captures the comedy’s scrappy, often-scabrous nature. Click here to read Vadim Rizov’s review from Cannes and here to read Jordan Cronk’s interview with Pinkerton and Williams.
Sundance Institute announced today the 2023 lab fellows selected for their 10th Episodic Lab program, taking place at the Sundance Resort in Sundance, Utah. The selected eight artists are Daniela Bailes (The Letters), Elaine Hsieh Chou (Get Home Safe), Marissa Díaz (Cochinas), Sam Dunnewold (Guts), Laurie Hartung (Rabbit Hole), Farah Merani (The Painted Muse), Sylvia-Anne Parker (Blackbirds) and Hernando Cortes Watson (Horsepower). From the press release: Their eight projects include themes that explore family secrets, vengeance, sex positivity, magic, revolutionaries, and world-class stallions. Designed to bring together early-career writers with an original series IP that has not yet been produced, […]
NAB Show New York is where thousands of just-like-you broadcast, media and entertainment professionals gather to access pivotal insight and get hands-on. With an immersive show floor experience, you’ll discover cutting-edge products from 200+ exhibitors with the opportunity to ask vendors questions in person. Refine your understanding of the latest industry trends and techniques. Network with your peers and the pros alike. It all comes together here. https:/nabshow.com/newyork2023/
A neo-Western that premiered on March 16, 2010, Justified is about a man outside of time: Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens (a tall, lithe and supremely self-confident Timothy Olyphant), who metes out frontier justice (i.e. shoots folks at the drop of his very large hat) despite his temporal position in Obama’s America. Elmore Leonard made his bones writing (lots of) Westerns in the ’50s and, even after branching out into the super-cool super-bare crime novels he became famous for starting with The Big Bounce (1969), continued to dip into the genre; his 2001 long short story “Fire in the Hole,” […]
Heather Dewey-Hagborg is on a mission to confront the uncomfortable future, especially when it comes to emerging tech. Stranger Visions features portrait sculptures crafted from analyses of genetic material the transdisciplinary artist, educator and filmmaker literally picked up in public places (one person’s discarded cigarette butt is another’s way into a stranger’s DNA). T3511, a collaboration with cinematographer Toshiaki Ozawa (Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog), sees an anonymous saliva sample become fodder for the alchemizing of the perfect romantic partner. Now there’s Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera, perhaps Dewey-Hagborg’s most ambitious work to date. Opening at NYC’s Fridman Gallery on […]
Immersive and poetically expressive, Raven Jackson’s confident debut feature All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt chronicles the life of Mack, a Black Mississippi woman portrayed at different ages by four different performers, with a lived-in attentiveness and affection. Throughout Jackson’s non-linear ecosystem of portraits, quiet sequences, dewy visuals and sensual soundscapes, the filmmaker breaks the conventions of storytelling so naturally that you instantly recognize the confidence of someone well-versed enough in her art and craft to make her own set of rules. The seeds of Jackson’s approach and exactness of imagination were already planted in her short film, Nettles (2018), […]