6296 Results for “Open ”
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Prismatic Ground Year Two: Documentary Waves
In the introduction to their co-edited collection Documentary Across Disciplines, Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg articulate contemporary documentary practice not as a category or genre, but “an attitude – a way of doing, engaging, and creating that accords primacy to the multiple and mutable realities of the world.” Emerging from the Berlin Documentary Forum, the collection embraces a vision of global documentary that spans “film, photography, contemporary art, anthropology, performance, architecture, cultural history, and theory.” If this sounds like a lot—it is, because it is. Still, rather than become amorphous in the ways terms like “glitch” or “expanded”-as-an-adjective have become, […]
by James Hansen on May 4, 2022 -
“Eat to Remember”: Audrey Ewell on Her Fiction Series, The Black Seed
In filmmaker Audrey Ewell’s The Black Seed, a woman wakes up in an anonymous corporate-style apartment with no memory of how she got there. Examining her body, it feels somewhat alien to her, as if she’s still suffering the effects of some night-before dissociative drug. Looking out the window, the city below looks peaceful, serene, but also completely depopulated. Where is she? Who is she? The only clue is a note taped to the refrigerator: “THE WORLD ENDED. IT’S NOT SAFE. EAT TO REMEMBER.” With that launches Ewell’s inventive and surprising “fiction series,” which blends a kind of existentialist mystery […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 3, 2022 -
“We Were Re-Traumatized by Working with the State.”: Jasmín Mara López on Her Hot Docs-debuting Silent Beauty
Jasmín Mara López is a journalist, audio producer, and nonfiction filmmaker whose 2015 audio doc Deadly Divide: Migrant Death on the Border received the Society of Professional Journalists’ Excellence in Journalism Award. But the Los Angeles and New Orleans-based director-producer, an immigrant rights advocate with family ties to Mexico, is also a victim of trauma herself. And even more tragically, not at the hands of any faceless government bureaucracy but by those who purport to love her the most. It’s a harrowing tale, one López heroically, and with brutal honesty, dives headfirst into in her Hot Docs world-premiering Silent Beauty. The courageously intimate film […]
by Lauren Wissot on May 2, 2022 -
“We Only Had One Puppet”: Animatronics Designer/Creature FX Supervisor Gustav Hoegen on Hatching
After designing animatronics for franchises like Star Wars and Jurassic World, Gustav Hoegen and his team scaled back and happily returned to traditional design and puppetry methods for Hanna Bergholm’s indie creature-feature Hatching–the first feature film Hoegen’s Biomimic Studio worked on from start to finish. 12-year old Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) nurses an egg she brought in from the woods—a welcome distraction from her helicopter mother (Sophia Heikkilä), who obsessively micromanages the family to maintain her perfect social media presence. Then the egg grows at least as large as Tinja and a slimy and straggly bird bursts fist first through the top […]
by A.E. Hunt on Apr 29, 2022 -
“The Law Can Be Used Simultaneously to Harm and to Help…”: Shameela Seedat on Her Hot Docs-Premiering African Moot
African Moot marks the Hot Docs return of human rights law specialist/award-winning filmmaker Shameela Seedat, who last took the Special Jury Prize at the fest back in 2018 with Whispering Truth to Power. That doc trailed her nation’s brave anti-corruption crusader Thuli Madonsela, South Africa’s first female Public Protector. And now with this latest Seedat turns her lens to an international topic even closer to home. Created under the auspices of Generation Africa, African Moot refers to the African Human Rights Moot Competition, the largest mock court tournament on the continent. (Generation Africa itself is a project of South Africa’s […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 29, 2022 -
“I Want to Make Big, Unforgettable, Life-Changing Works”: Martine Syms on Her New Directors/New Films Closing-Night Film, The African Desperate
The 2022 edition of New Directors/New Films — the annual showcase of emerging filmmakers co-presented by Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art — concludes this weekend with three screenings of its closing-night film, Martine Syms’ The African Desperate. Syms is an art-world luminary whose work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Guggenheim, LACMA, MoMA, and the Tate, among others, and her extraordinarily varied and prolific output includes video art, installations, essays and manifestos, and a publishing press. Much of her oeuvre reflects a deep engagement with the moving image, from her […]
by Nelson Kim on Apr 29, 2022 -
“I Think of the Digital Chip as a Film Stock”: DP Shawn Kim on Shooting Ozark‘s Final Season
After four seasons of financial and familial duplicity, the winding saga of Missouri drug launderers Wendy and Marty Byrde comes to an end tomorrow as Netflix releases the final half of its 14-episode swan song. I have no idea yet whether the karmic scales will finally tilt towards a comeuppance for the couple but am certain that whatever awaits the Byrdes will unfold in the murky depths of low-key interiors and the cool cyan of perpetually overcast exteriors. It’s a well-defined aesthetic that has earned three Emmy nominations for the show’s cinematographers. For the climactic season, a new team of […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Apr 28, 2022 -
“People Are Not ‘the Trauma They’ve Experienced'”: Trauma-Informed Storytelling at CPH:CONFERENCE 2022
For a film journo who closely followed last year’s he said (filmmakers)/she said (ISIS “sex slave” subjects) controversy that entangled Hogir Hirori’s Sundance-premiering (followed by film-festival-shunned) Sabaya, the recent CPH:DOX panel “Beyond Courage: Trauma-Informed Storytelling” was simply a must-see. The discussion, expertly moderated by Gavin Rees, Executive Director of Dart Center Europe (a satellite of Columbia Journalism School’s Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma), was part of the “Claim Your Story!” program, one of three engaging afternoons under CPH:CONFERENCE’s “Business As Unusual” banner. (“Follow the Money!” and “Shaping Success.” were likewise smartly curated by The Catalysts, a multimedia agency that “turns […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 25, 2022 -
“Ninety Percent of the Lighting Was Done Pretty Much How You Would’ve Done It in 1979”: Cinematographer Eliot Rockett on the Period Horror Film X
“The story can’t just change midway through,” exclaims a pretentious adult film director incredulously in X. It certainly can in a Ti West horror film, where one of the joys is often the shift from the methodical pace of the opening to the blood-drenched mania of the finale. Set in 1979, X finds a group of ambitious but inexperienced filmmakers heading to a remote Texas farm with dreams of making the next Debbie Does Dallas. However, the troupe fails to inform their hosts – an elderly couple who rent the crew their bunkhouse – about the purpose of their visit, […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Apr 21, 2022 -
“In-Person Only”: The 2022 New Directors/New Films Festival
After an online-only edition in 2020 and a hybrid Golden Jubilee last year, New Directors/New Films is once again “in-person only,” a phrase whose very existence reveals how thoroughly the COVID-19 pandemic has altered industry and audience expectations. If the advisability of our “return to normal” (masks are now optional at both host venues) is questionable, more laudable is the festival’s gender equity: 21 of the 39 directors whose films are included in this year’s slate are women, although the disparity between features and shorts demonstrates the political and social obstacles to feature filmmaking that women continue to face. Most […]
by Forrest Cardamenis on Apr 20, 2022
