6300 Results for “Open ”
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“If the Co-Producer Disappears, Our Company is in Danger”: Komplizen Film’s Janine Jackowski and Jonas Dornbach
Toni Erdmann, A Fantastic Woman, Western, Tabu, Syndromes: Each bears the name Komplizen Film as either primary or co-producer. Founded in 1999 by Maren Ade and Janine Jackowski at their Munich film school, Komplizen has gone on to produce a body of work that displays a keen and consistent intelligence, is distinctive to their own tastes and avoids the whiff—evident even with many fine arthouse production houses—of the cookie-cutter. Komplizen has produced Ade’s three films to date, providing a backbone to their experiments in other fields and giving them the confidence to draw other directors and co-producers into the fold. […]
by Christopher Small on Aug 29, 2019 -
Points North Institute Announces 2019 Forum and Artist Programs at Camden International Film Festival
Having already revealed the Foucauldian dynamic that will run through this year’s Camden International Film Festival — a focus on “story and power” — the festival’s parent organization Points North Institute unveiled today the forum and artist programs that will take place over the event’s mid-September weekend. The annual Points North Forum will ask “critical questions about how the documentary film and media community reflects existing power structures, including questions of racial equity, access, funding, and which stories are being told, how, for whom, and by whom,” according to the press release. Other highlights and programs include masterclasses by Apollo […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 29, 2019 -
Todd Chandler
Todd Chandler was nearly three years into the filming of his Untitled Safe Schools Project — a documentary about schools’ various responses to gun violence — when the Parkland shootings happened. “The media onslaught was quite challenging for [the project],” says Chandler. “One funder asked, ’Are you going to Parkland?’ I said, ’I’m not going to Parkland, but I’m pretty sure there will be plenty of other filmmakers going there.’” Indeed, the simple version of Chandler’s in-production documentary would have been for him to embed himself at a single school — one like Parkland, for example — and document teachers’, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Micaela Durand and Daniel Chew
“Can we make a film about the internet without showing the internet?” says Micaela Durand, explaining the challenge she and her filmmaking partner Daniel Chew gave themselves. This summer at The Shed the pair presented the results, First and Negative Two. Both short films explore desire in the age of online communication; the latter was supported and commissioned by the new Hudson Yards–affiliated cultural center’s Open Call series (First premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam). In addition to charting sex and dating in the Instagram and Grindr era, the films also subtly comment on what Durand and Chew describe […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
A.V. Rockwell
It could be some kind of paradise, The Edward R. Mill School for Boys. The landscape is green, near tropical, lush — for the traumatized lost boys in this relatively unsupervised natural environment, a place to claim as their own. But A.V.Rockwell’s trenchant, astonishingly accomplished short, Feathers, is not about the replication of uncritical transcendentalist tropes. Against scenes of the school’s newest student, Elizier (Shavez Frost), enduring hazing by the island’s other youth while flashing back to the memories of his father’s shooting death by police, Rockwell lays a nondiegetic soundtrack of urgent fundraising cold calls by the school’s headmaster […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Deniz Tortum
Deniz Tortum’s Phases of Matter explores Istanbul’s Cerrahpaşa Hospital, where Tortum’s father has worked for 30 years, and where Tortum himself was born. Viewed in near–final cut form, Matter bears a meaningful relationship to the signature works of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), where Tortum studied. With sound design by SEL’s in-house go-to Ernst Karel (Leviathan), Phases of Matter immerses viewers in the hospital without much prefatory content. Cheerful amongst themselves but serious about their labor, doctors and nurses convene for meetings and interact with patients. About 30 minutes in, a spectacular camera movement disrupts the low-key film language, exiting […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Courtney Stephens
Courtney Stephens has curated series of experimental work for New York’s Museum of the Moving Image and Flaherty NYC, contributed footage to Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time, made shorts ranging from the purely experimental to found-footage to more purely documentary and, with Pacho Velez, codirected the feature doc The American Sector, set to receive its premiere this coming winter. One potential through line is an interest in the possibilities of the travelogue. A Bay Area native, Stephens attended Berkeley to study medical anthropology rather than film. Her film education came while working in New York for a magazine that was […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Sephora Woldu
Sephora Woldu’s debut feature, Life is Fare, is a counterintuitively fun film on a not very fun subject: defining diasporic identity, specifically in relation to Eritrea, a country whose independence wasn’t recognized until 1993 and whose national identity is still a work in progress. A Bay Area native, Woldu plays Fare’s lead as a version of herself. In the opening scenes, she explains to her skeptical mom (Almaz Negash) that she wants to make a film on this loaded topic. Mom has an appalled reaction many first-generation kids will find familiar: Those topics aren’t just painful, they’re private, for family […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Billy Chew
Having premiered in the NEXT section of the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, The Death of Dick Long obtained status as a midnight attraction, complete with ardent, if not secret-keeping, fans. Like the most audacious films of the witching hour, The Death of Dick Long, directed by Daniel Scheinert (half of directorial duo Daniels, 25 New Faces in 2015) and written by Billy Chew, comes complete with a salacious title, jaw-dropping gumption and a shocking twist that’s both comically perverse and in tune with its preceding hysterics. Set deep in Alabama, the film follows two beer-guzzling bandmates who clumsily attempt to […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Carlo Mirabella-Davis
The less known going into Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s narrative feature debut, Swallow, the better. Haley Bennett plays Hunter, a housewife caught in a thankless, controlling marriage who, one day, decides to routinely swallow dangerous objects. Is it an act of self-harm? An aggressive display of marital defiance? Deliberately opaque at the outset, Swallow, which had its world premiere at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival and will be released by IFC Films next year, is a heady feminist concoction that barrels forward like a cross between the early filmography of Todd Haynes and the plays of Henrik Ibsen. Born in New York […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019
