There is a sign somewhere out in the desert (every designer knows where) like a motel sign, except that instead of “NO VACANCY” it says “SANS SERIF,” and the most important man in America is the man whose sole job is to pull the giant lever that turns “SANS” off or on, which he does once every ten years. The KonMari craze of the late 2010s, with its flat-pack packaging of deaccumulation into a lifestyle brand, represents the top of the decade-long pendulum arc that swings forever between minimalism and maximalism. When I still took the subway to work every […]
The Sundance Institute announced today the full Feature Film, Indie Episodic, and New Frontier categories for the upcoming 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Returning from last year’s purely virtual festival, this year’s Sundance will be a hybrid edition, with in-person events at Park City, Salt Lake City and the Sundance Mountain Resort in Utah as well as on an enhanced online platform for remote attendees. Additionally there will be The Spaceship, a “bespoke immersive platform.” Continuing from last year’s experimentation, in-person screenings at seven Satellite Screens venues will occur across the country during the Festival’s second weekend. Films this year — […]
The Gotham Film & Media Institute, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the nominees for its upcoming 2021 Gotham Awards. Selected by committees of film and television critics and programmers, Gotham Award nominees have usually included a mix of higher-profile awards season frontrunners as well as critically acclaimed lower-budgeted films from smaller distributors, and this year that’s even more the case. Amazon’s Passing, directed by Rebecca Hall, and Netflix’s The Lost Daughter, directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, both received multiple nominees, including Best Picture. But also in the Best Picture category, along with an additional Breakthrough Director nomination, is Shatara Michelle Ford’s Test […]
Writing out of Cannes, Blake Williams reviewed Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest, Bergman Island, a meta-fictional drama about a female filmmaker’s marriage to a fellow director and the ways in which she mines her life, creative anxieties and influences for narrative material. About the film, which jumps between the filmmaker’s (played by Phantom Thread‘s Vicki Krieps) exploration of the Baltic island where Ingmar Bergman lived and shot several of his films, her conversations with her partner (Tim Roth) about her efforts to crack her third act, and imagined scenes from the film to be, which feature Mia Wasikowska and Joachim Trier-regular Anders […]
Jane Campion, Joel Coen, Gaspar Noe, Joachim Trier, Mia Hansen-Love, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Todd Haynes and Pedro Almodovar are some of the heavy-hitting directors whose work will receive U.S. premieres at the 2021 New York Film Festival. Just announced is the main slate, which features many returning veterans as well as filmmakers appearing at the festival for the first time, including Rebecca Hall, Saul Williams and Alexandre Koberidze. Two filmmakers — Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and Hong Sangsoo — are represented by two titles. The festival runs September 24 – October 10, and proof of vaccination will be required at all venues. Festival […]
A larger-than-usual Competition — 24 films — for its 2021 edition was announced today by the Cannes Film Festival, along with the Out of Competition, Un Certain Regard and other titles that comprise (for now) its official selection. Delayed from its usual dates in mid-May to July 6-17, the festival opens with the long-awaited Leos Carax Sparks-scored musical Annette and contains new features by Asghar Farhadi, Mia Hansen-Løve, Jacques Audiard and Nanni Moretti. Cannes also adds this year a new section, Cannes Premieres, containing films by festival veterans such as Oliver Stone, Kornél Mundruczo and Andrea Arnold. Among the American […]
In April, as we began to put together the Summer, 2020 issue of Filmmaker, we asked directors, cinematographers, editors and other film workers to send us their thoughts on the quarantine and their own creative lives. The responses printed here were collected from April through mid-June — personal statements that speak variously to individual filmmaking practices, films halted mid-production, politics, art and life. “At Present, Many of Us are Living in the Conditions of My Speculative Fiction…”: Alison Nguyen on Her Isolated, Computer-Simulated Woman, “Andra8” “… Every Night I Dream That I am Shooting a Film”: DP Benoit Delhomme on Life […]
Strand Releasing, the inventive, carefully curated independent distributor known for its release of both American and international arthouse auteurs, turns 30 this year, and to celebrate it has invited its filmmaker friends to create short iPhone films that speak in various ways to Strand’s mission and film culture today. I’m happy to premiere here exclusively at Filmmaker shorts by Ira Sachs, whose Frankie opens this Friday, October 25th; Indignation director, screenwriter and producer James Schamus; and Shulie and A Woman, A Part director Elisabeth Subrin. Previously released have been shorts by Fatih Akin and Karim Ainouz. Comments Strand co-founder Marcus […]
Greek director Babis Makridis premiered his debut feature L at the Sundance Film Festival in 2012. He returned to the festival this year for his follow-up, the dark comedy Pity co-written by the co-writer of Yorgos Lanthimos’s films. The film stars Yannis Drakopoulos as a self-absorbed sad-sack addicted to the pity of others. Pity was shot by Konstantinos Koukoulios, here making his debut as a DP of features. Koukoulios spoke with Filmmaker about the influence of Edward Hopper on the movie, lighting a forest at night and his primary aesthetic goal: to make a film about sadness that doesn’t look sad. Filmmaker: How and why did […]
One of the major discoveries of the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, Lana Wilson’s The Departure is a beautiful, wise and deeply empathetic immersion into one fascinating character’s unique approach to suicide prevention. Ittetsu Nemoto is a former punk rocker turned Buddhist priest who, in quietly wrenching group sessions, counsels the suicidal while facing down his own demons. Working in a small, remote temple in Japan, he constructs spare, philosophical rituals for his patients and then, separately, bonds with them in more personal, emotionally intimate ways. Following Nemoto both within his practice and outside of it, The Departure initially grabs hold […]