17728 Results for “”
-
Wes Goodrich
At the start of the 1970-set Palm Sunday, writer-director Wes Andre Goodrich’s mordantly ironic parable of cultural assimilation, Jimmy, a young Black Jamaican immigrant, is struck by a vision while attending a Black Southern church. He sees himself surrounded by an all-white congregation; their hands laid across him, he breaks into a beatific smile. Moments later, he visits the church’s pastor and announces his plan to join the all-white Baptist church nearby. The pastor is critical, unbelieving that the white church will take in this new congregant. “They’ll accept me if it’s God’s will,” Jimmy replies. Over the course of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
25 New Faces of Independent Film 2023
by Filmmaker Staff on Sep 20, 2023 -
Risk On: Chloe Domont on Fair Play
With credits on high-profile TV series like Suits, Star Trek: Discovery and Billions, writer-director Chloe Domont had experiences in the entertainment industry where she felt like she had to adapt to the boys club. Those experiences, as well as the fear of all she could lose if she didn’t play along, were front of mind when she was crafting Fair Play, an intense, high-stakes and increasingly nerve-wracking relationship and workplace drama with notes of ’90s erotic thrillers. But in no way did Domont want to use the film industry as a backdrop for her masterful feature directorial debut. “That would […]
by Tomris Laffly on Sep 20, 2023 -
Craig Quintero
As virtual reality has developed over the past several years, various arguments have been made on its behalf. The most infamous is that virtual reality is a kind of “empathy machine,” allowing a viewer direct access to the experience of others. Others view virtual reality as the new frontier of gaming. Then, there are documentarians for whom the VR concept of “presence”—a viewer’s ability to feel themselves in a place they are not—has an almost pedagogical function, allowing them the experience of being in different cultures or within historical moments. The mysterious, unsettling work of Craig Quintero and the Taipei-based […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Philip Thompson
In Philip Thompson’s I’m at Home, the host of a children’s show, played by Thompson, enters the set singing the same song at the top of every episode. “Create, create, create!” he chirps—but, while the intros repeat, his energetic spark fades as datamoshing breaks down the footage, mirroring his psychic deterioration. The spot-on recreation of an analogue children’s TV program mutates into something quieter and depressed. By film’s end, the host is sitting catatonic, staring straight into the camera. That feeling of burnout was real for Thompson, who made the film at the beginning of the pandemic, during his junior […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Marathon Training: The Documentary Awards Season Grind
By the time you read this, awards season, that annual ritual of accolades and extroversion, will be full throttle. Mounting and sustaining a campaign is often prohibitive, both as a budgetary line item and as an all-consuming occupation. Contenders live in the air and in hotels, go where their team sends them, agree to hundreds of interviews and participate in just as many Q&As and roundtables. But on the upside, an awards campaign is an opportunity to build a worldwide network of friends and contemporaries. Filmmaker reached out to former Academy Award nominees in the Feature Documentary category to share […]
by Tom White on Sep 20, 2023 -
Among the Ashes: Iterating the Generative Documentary Where There’s Smoke
I grew up in a firefighting culture full of pancake breakfasts, fire parades and beef and beers. For 20 years my dad was a volunteer firefighter and amateur fire scene photographer. He shot thousands of 35mm slides of blazes, often capturing moments of destruction that are disturbing and yet at times hauntingly beautiful. However, my dad’s obsession with fire would eventually intersect with our lives in devastating ways. In the 1980s, while on a family vacation, our van erupted in flames. 11 months later, our house burnt to the ground. For over 30 years, I’ve wondered if those two fires […]
by Lance Weiler on Sep 20, 2023 -
Rathaus Announces Detroit-Focused $10,000 Film Production Grant
Rathaus, the New York and Detroit-based production company behind such films as Tim Sutton’s Funny Face, Cedric Cheung-Lau’s The Mountains Are a Dream that Call to Me and Diana Peralta’s De Lo Mio, has announced a new grant supporting Detroit-based filmmakers. The Rathaus Film Grant will give $10,000 to one moving image artist in support of a short film, feature film, documentary, hybrid piece, or video art. Funds are unrestricted. As the FAQ notes, they “can be used in any way that significantly progresses your project forward. This could be anything from; supporting you to take time off to write […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Sep 20, 2023 -
Aidan Gillen is Still “Fishing From The Ether”: Back To One, Episode 266
Aidan Gillen returns to the podcast (first time: Episode 40). You know him from some of the most beloved shows of the century: Game of Thrones, The Wire, Peaky Blinders, to name a few. Now he stars in the Irish neo-noir film Barber, where he plays a private investigator hired by a wealthy widow to find her missing granddaughter. He talks about why he doesn’t look at the lines until the day before shooting, how his latest venture on the stage affected his work, why he still doesn’t like rehearsal for film, what bothers him about an “actor-centric” production, and […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Sep 19, 2023 -
TIFF 2023: Wavelengths, Arthur & Diana
“You’re here for an experimental shorts program, so you know,” said filmmaker Shambhavi Kaul. “You know.” Her latest was premiering as part of the second Wavelengths shorts program of TIFF 2023, the section-within-a-section of the festival I value most—once a rejuvenating four sessions when I started attending TIFF in 2016, subsequently pared down to two in a smaller auditorium and back to three in this year’s edition. In his overview of this year’s Wavelengths, Michael Sicinski walks through its history and how, over the years, it’s enfolded other, more fleeting sections for adventurous work; now, there can only be one, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 18, 2023
