“It’s so great that this festival is back again!” In one form or another, I kept hearing that phrase between June 15 to 18 at DC/DOX, a brand-new festival in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Sky Sitney, DC/DOX’s co-founder, was also a founder of the 1990s-born Silverdocs, a partnership between American Film Institute and Discovery Networks mourned by the entire doc community after it passed. Silverdocs morphed into AFI Docs when Discovery bailed, but AFI Docs was run out of AFI’s Los Angeles office and often seemed out of touch with DC. Meanwhile, Sitney co-founded a mini-festival, Double Exposure, with […]
PAM CUT // Center for an Untold Tomorrow, the film and new media arm of the Portland Art Museum, is currently accepting applications for their third annual Sustainability Labs. The six month program is specifically tailored for multidisciplinary media storytellers, providing mentorship, career-developing resources and stipends to further their artistic practices. Applications close on July 1. “Our organization is all about artists who aren’t content to be contained—by medium, what’s come before or a singular type of media that they’re working with,” Amy Dotson, director of PAM CUT and curator of Film & New Media at the Portland Art Museum, […]
Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker’s Sundance-premiering The Stroll is a beautifully and lovingly crafted time capsule of NYC’s Meatpacking District that mostly spans from Giuliani’s infamous “broken windows” reign of terror through Bloomberg’s post-9/11 “gentrification on steroids,” as one knowledgeable interviewee ruefully reflects (seconds after I coincidentally yelled those same words at my screener). Unsurprisingly, our billionaire mayor did indeed view unrestrained capitalism as the solution to every problem, including that of the “undesirable” communities—starving artists and sex workers—that called the neighborhood home. For me, the most revelatory aspect of this heartfelt walk down memory lane isn’t that it’s offered from […]
Though Wes Anderson’s films can be seen as the product of the director’s sharp imagination, the finished work is nothing without those who turn his thoughts into spreadsheet-enabled reality. Most of the physical things on screen—the punctilious graphic design on signs and cards, the actual locations, the trimmed sets and the giant buildings in the distance that exist just to fill up white space—exist thanks to production designer Adam Stockhausen, who has been Anderson’s go-to since 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom. Stockhausen has noted his fondness for planning productions in an old-fashioned, tactile way which likely appeals not only to the very […]
“She plans to continue working with ‘first-time performers in live settings’ and is developing a feature she hopes will be in production in the next year,” is how the profile of writer/director Hannah Peterson concluded for our 25 New Faces of Independent Film list in 2018. The Graduates, about a group of students returning to their high school one year after a mass shooting, is that feature, having just made its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival, winning Best Cinematography in a U.S. Narrative Feature for director of photography Carolina Costa. Co-starring John Cho, Maria Dizzia and Mina Sundwall, The […]
Less than a year after Luca Guadagnino‘s cannibal love story Bones and All, the Italian director returns with Challengers. Written by playwright Justin Kuritzkes, the film stars Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist as participants in a ménage à trois that eventually develops into a monogamous marriage between two of them. Years later, the trio unexpectedly reunite, stirring feelings of jealousy, lust and betrayal anew. Per the film’s official synopsis: Challengers stars Zendaya as Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy turned coach and a force of nature who makes no apologies for her game on and off the court. Married […]
Few television show characters are more iconic than Mad Men’s Don Draper. Jon Hamm played him for 7 seasons and just might have changed television forever. Since then Hamm has ventured into film and exercised his funny muscles. Last year’s Confess, Fletch was a wonderful example of what Hamm can do with good material, and so is his latest, Maggie Moore(s), directed by his friend (and Mad Men co-star) John Slattery. In this episode, he talks about how Slattery worked with him to establish the very specific tone of that film, and what he needs from a director in general. He details how his previous television […]
The Tribeca Festival announced competition winners for its 22nd annual edition during an awards ceremony yesterday at Racket NYC. Awards were presented in the following categories: Feature Film, Short Film, Audio Storytelling, Immersive, Games, Human / Nature, AT&T Untold Stories, and Tribeca X. So Young Shelly Yo’s Smoking Tigers and Guto Parente’s A Strange Path swept U.S. and International Narrative categories, while Andrew H. Brown and Moses Thuranira’s Between the Rains won two out of four awards in the Documentary Competition. Several of this year’s award winners have been covered on the Filmmaker site, including The Gullspång Miracle (Best Editing […]
World premiering tomorrow at the Provincetown Film Festival is Summer Solstice, the debut feature of writer/director Noah Schamus, which previously was included in the 2022 US in Progress work-in-progress coproduction forum. The filmmakers have just released a teaser trailer — watch it above. And here’s the description from the Provincetown program book. Leo, a trans man, and his cis and straight friend, Eleanor, go away for an impromptu weekend trip, during which they uncover old secrets, new challenges, and find the answer to the age-old question: can bad sex and good friends mix? Writer-director Noah Schamus’s funny, melancholic feature debut […]
Post-WWII national anxieties offer a glimpse into our current tolerance for totalitarianism in Brooklyn 45, writer-director Ted Geoghegan’s latest horror effort. Presented as a real-time film in a bottle setting, the film takes place during the immediate aftermath of the war as a group of veterans meet at one of their Brooklyn (by way of Chicago) abodes to reconnect and (attempt to) mend fresh wounds. Clive “Hock” Hockstatter (Larry Fessenden) hosts the group, who assemble in part to support their old friend after his wife’s recent suicide. Rounding out the guest list is Marla Sheridan (Anne Ramsay), who worked as […]