6296 Results for “Open ”
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Dozens of Filmmakers Sign Petition Calling on the New York Film Festival to Cut Ties with Sponsor Bloomberg Philanthropies
On the eve of the opening of the 62nd New York Film Festival, dozens of filmmakers have published an open letter calling on the festival to end its partnership with Contributing Partner Bloomberg Philanthropies, which they write is “directly implicated in facilitating settlement infrastructure in the West Bank and denying Palestinians their basic rights.” Among the signers are over three dozen filmmakers with films in the current 2024 edition, including Mike Leigh (Hard Truths), Julia Loktev (My Undesirable Friends: Part I – Last Air in Moscow), Neo Sora (Happyend), Basel Adra, Hamdam Ballal and Yuval Abraham (No Other Land), Truong […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 26, 2024 -
“Punching Above My Weight”: Director Simon Hacker on Partnering with NBA Star Gordon Hayward and Self-Distributing His Indie Comedy, Notice to Quit
I first met Simon Hacker more than a decade ago when I was teaching at the School of Visual Arts in New York and Simon was a film student. He stuck out as someone who responded to what most people around him in the classroom weren’t much interested in: tradition. While the nascent auteurists were looking to reinvent the wheel, Simon grabbed hold of the ideas of a couple of people I introduced him to: Alexander Mackendrick and David Mamet. I was preaching the basics of classical narrative storytelling, and Simon took the time to listen. “What happens next?” became […]
by Paul Cronin on Sep 26, 2024 -
“I Really Wanted to Push Back Against This Illusion of Japanese-ness”: Neo Sora on Happyend
“Ah man, I could talk about it forever.” It is the day after Happyend’s Venice premiere and director Neo Sora is holding court for a parade of journos in the ballroom of an Art Nouveau hotel on the Lido. I’m the last in line, and we’ve been chatting for almost half an hour when his face suddenly lights up. The topic Sora could talk about forever and to which we devote the last few minutes of our allotted time is music, a connection that long predates his first feature-length foray into fiction. An eclectic audiovisual artist, Sora’s a member of […]
by Leonardo Goi on Sep 25, 2024 -
“I Didn’t Expect It to Make People Laugh So Much”: Alain Guiraudie on Misericordia
In Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a young man named Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) returns to the village where he lived as a teenager to attend the funeral of his former employer. Like his protagonist, Guiraudie is back in familiar territory with his seventh feature, which finds the French filmmaker revisiting the murder mystery template of his 2013 breakthrough Stranger by the Lake. Except here, Guiraudie trades the thriller trappings of that earlier film for something more mischievous and darkly comic, more along the lines of his offbeat fables The King of Escape (2009) or Staying Vertical (2016). A kind of rural riff on […]
by Jordan Cronk on Sep 25, 2024 -
“You Just Have to Learn to Adapt”: Chase Stokes, Back To One, Episode 310
His breakout role in Netflix’s Outer Banks catapulted Chase Stokes to fame. In the series, he portrays the charismatic and determined John B, the leader of a group of young outcasts on a treasure hunt in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The show’s blend of adventure, mystery, and coming-of-age drama quickly gained a massive fanbase, establishing Stokes as a rising star. Since then he’s been in Tell Me Your Secrets, this year’s The Uglies, opposite Joey King, and next year’s Valiant One, not to mention Season 4 of Outer Banks, which is dropping in October. On this episode, he […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Sep 24, 2024 -
Shudder Speed: Fantasia International Film Festival 2024
The largest genre film festival in North America, Montréal’s ever-growing Fantasia International Film Festival celebrated its 28th edition this summer. This was my seventh year covering for Filmmaker, my ninth in attendance and I arrived with a severe case of FOMO: at an industry party last year, I met a man dressed head-to-toe in a gigantic beaver costume, allegedly to promote a feature he had at the festival. He was charming, so I told him I’d make an effort to see Hundreds of Beavers, but a part of me, taken aback by the man’s zany attire and commitment to self-promotion, knew […]
by Erik Luers on Sep 24, 2024 -
“The Distributors Point the Finger at the Streamers”: Dea Kulumbegashvili on April
Dea Kulumbegashvili’s entrancing second feature grew partly out of preparations for her first, Beginning, when she cast children in Georgia and met mothers who married quite young and had large families. In April, Ia Sukhitashvili (the lead in Beginning) plays Nina, a leading obstetrician at a maternity clinic in eastern Georgia who delivers babies at the hospital and also secretly travels to houses in the countryside to perform abortions. But while there are social and legal complications to providing these services, as envisioned by Kulumbegashvili Nina’s story transcends conventional drama to be a sometimes hyperreal, sometimes enigmatic journey through darkness […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Sep 24, 2024 -
“Made by Five People Who Love Cats”: Mary Dauterman on Booger
After the sudden death of her best friend and roommate Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin), Anna (Grace Glowicki) starts to act strange. At first, her odd behavior seems easily attributable to intense grief, but soon she begins to recognize physical abnormalities she can’t quite explain. Granted, she was bitten by her and Izzy’s fluffy, inky-black cat (the eponymous Booger) just before he fled via the fire escape. But Anna begins to suffer from far more than just cat-scratch fever and a gnarly hand wound: coarse, dark hairs begin to sprout, her movements become increasingly delicate yet uncanny, and could that actually be […]
by Natalia Keogan on Sep 20, 2024 -
“I Always Write for Places Where They Won’t Kick Me Out”: Kazik Radwanski on Matt and Mara
Matt and Mara presents a familiar premise—two old friends with an unresolved romantic connection reconnect years after their lives have diverged—but Canadian writer-director Kazik Radwanski turns this potentially contrived narrative into an organic examination of interpersonal dynamics that’s tailored to the strengths of his performers and longtime creative collaborators Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson. When Matt (Johnson) grabs the attention of creative writing professor Mara (Campbell) right before she’s about to start class, it’s clear both are looking to break out of their ruts. Mara is out of sync with her musician husband Samir (Mounir Al Shami) amidst the daily […]
by Vikram Murthi on Sep 20, 2024 -
Venice Film Festival 2024: Before the Revolution
I was trying to make sense of my notes on Happyend when I noticed him. Arms akimbo, left hand drumming his gun holster, the cop was patrolling the press room looking equal parts annoyed, bored, and baleful. I glanced away; when I looked up again, another colleague had joined him in inspecting the crowd of journalists typing at their laptops like exam invigilators. For a festival as militarized as Venice, the sight might not be front-page news: Ever since my first trip in 2014, the security corps deployed across the Lido have grown almost exponentially, reaching near-Orwellian levels in 2020, […]
by Leonardo Goi on Sep 19, 2024
