Twenty-three projects hailing from 21 countries will receive support from the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund. Announced today, the projects will receive $540,000 in unrestricted grant support with funds made possible by The Open Society Foundations and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. “During a time of shared crisis, it is essential that Sundance continue its steadfast support of artists across the globe,” said Documentary Film Program Director Carrie Lozano in a press release. “These films creatively assert our common quests, conditions and resilience as they interrogate notions of individual and collective power.” “Creative support for nonfiction storytellers feels […]
On the title page of her script for The 40-Year-Old Version, director and star Radha Blank wrote: “A New York Tale in Black and White.” Cinematographer Eric Branco took those words to heart, shooting the Netflix production almost entirely on Kodak Double X film. In the film Blank plays an alternate of herself, a playwright once named in a “30 Under 30” list of artists to watch, now trying to reinvent herself as the rapper RadhaMUSPrime. Over the 20-day schedule, Branco shot almost entirely on locations in Manhattan and the Bronx, from apartments to studios, clubs, theaters, and crowded streets. […]
Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo series is one of the more durable franchises in American cinema, which is somewhat surprising given that it didn’t really find its voice until its fourth installment and began with a film that didn’t lend itself to sequels at all. First Blood, which Ted Kotcheff directed from a script by Stallone, Michael Kozoll and William Sackheim in 1982, is a stand-alone action classic, an elegant and austere survival film in which Vietnam vet John Rambo takes on the town that wronged him without killing a single person. Stallone made up for First Blood’s low body count with […]
When confronted by the press about Chicago’s overwhelming political corruption, city politicians often shrug and curtly concede: “That’s Chicago politics.” The city’s corruption is so native and unyielding that it just “is what it is,” has been and always will be. In Steve James’ five-part docuseries City So Real, a buoyant portrait of Chicago loosely wrapped around the 2019 mayoral election and the murder trial of Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke, the city’s denizens justify an array of their problems with that same self-referential and self-enabling sentiment, “That’s just Chicago for you.” But the city’s 2019 mayoral election saw […]
Oliver Laxe’s first two films, You All Are Captains (2010) and Mimosas (2016), take place in his adopted home of Morocco. In this year’s Fire Will Come, however, the writer-director returns to his childhood stomping grounds—not Paris, where he was born and raised, but the mountainous enclaves of rural Galicia, an autonomous region in the northwest corner of Spain. Born to Galician parents, Laxe spent formative summer retreats visiting relatives among the natural splendour of the Serra dos Ancares, parts of which overlap with the religious pilgrimage route of the Camino de Santiago. Drawing from childhood memories, Laxe exalts the […]
“We don’t call you ’hun’ or ’sweetheart’ or ’baby,’” says Theresa (Debra Winger) to her daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) late in Miranda July’s new Kajillionaire, the filmmaker’s dreamily eccentric interrogation into the social construct of familial love. “We don’t wrap little birthday presents with ribbons,” she continues, acidly, as Old Dolio looks on in despair. Old Dolio has just brought in $1,575 from an airport luggage scam—the family, which includes dad Robert (Richard Jenkins), makes their living from a succession of convoluted small-time cons that net in the two and three and, only sometimes, four figures—and she’d just […]
Six months ago, I was considering an update to my now biennial guide on how to prepare your film for festival exhibition. The 2018 version of that guide is available on the Filmmaker website and is a good reference if you are showing your film at a drive-in or outdoor screening that has a DCP server or some other file-based playback system. However, the majority of festival screenings happening this fall and into next year will be on virtual festival platforms. Pre-pandemic, I would’ve told you that the widespread adoption of a streaming component to festivals was as likely as […]
“My thinking is silly. My memories are preposterous. My ideas are laughable. I am a pompous clown. I can, on occasion, become aware of this. There are moments of clarity that I find all the more humiliating because I can see myself as others likely do, but I cannot control any of it. The pathetic, comical thought process continues, almost as if a script is playing out. Almost as if I myself am a puppet, defined by some external force, written to be the foil in some strange cosmic entertainment witnessed by someone somewhere. But who or what? And why? […]
The following interview with Darius Marder about Sound of Metal, currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video, was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2020 print edition. Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal stars Riz Ahmed as Ruben, the drummer for a two-person heavy metal band who loses his hearing and, for much of the film, his perspective and sense of self as a result. His hearing falters and almost entirely disappears early in the film during the middle of a tour with his girlfriend/bandmate Lou (Olivia Cooke). Both are recovering addicts, and as their world is turned upside down, Lou fears Ruben […]