6300 Results for “Open ”
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“DocsStillSoWhite: Moving From Ally to Accomplice” at Full Frame’s 9th Annual A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy
“DocsStillSoWhite: Moving From Ally to Accomplice” — the title inspired by a curriculum developed by the panel’s moderator Seena (“The Woke Coach”) Hodges — was the second of two diversity-centric A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy discussions presented at this year’s Full Frame. Speaking before an impressively packed house in The Durham Hotel lobby early on a Saturday morning, the upbeat Hodges began by reminding the four panel participants to be mindful of the allotted hour (while wryly apologizing for the “colonial construct of time”). She then asked the two teams of filmmakers — two black producers working alongside two white directors — […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 19, 2019 -
Art of the Real 2019: Darkness, Compulsive Cinephilia and Godard
2016: not a good year for most people, and certainly not for Frank Beauvais. His Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream is the opening night film at this year’s sixth annual Art of the Real series, Film Society of Lincoln Center’s perspective on the year in nonfiction. Handily for me, Beauvais (a music supervisor and documentarian making his feature debut) has written his own IMDb synopsis, upon which I cannot improve: January 2016. The love story that brought me to this village in Alsace where I live ended six months ago. At 45, I am now alone, without a car, a job […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 18, 2019 -
“That’s Thirty Years of Footage I’ve Accumulated”: Kidlat Tahimik on BalikBayan #1: Memories of Overdevelopment and His Pioneering Career in the Philippines
One of the pioneers of independent cinema in the Philippines, Kidlat Tahimik has been tinkering away on his latest film since 1979. Like much of his output, the pugnaciously titled BalikBayan #1: Memories of Overdevelopment, Redux IV (2017), resembles as much a collage of moods, periods, film stocks and video formats as it does any kind of coherent movie. Working from an original 33-minute cut assembled in the early 1980s, the film is in part about Enrique of Malacca, a slave who accompanied his master Ferdinand Magellan on the first circumnavigation of the globe. What showed at Play-Doc, the small […]
by Christopher Small on Apr 16, 2019 -
“A Friendly Person Who is Easier to Handle Than a Dog”: Werner Herzog’s Masterclass at Visions du Réel
A figure of such stature as Mikhail Gorbachev is an awkward fit for a documentary by Werner Herzog, a director whose non-fiction work has chiefly focused on extraordinary personalities and experiences excluded from history books. As such, it’s not overall surprising that his latest, Meeting Gorbachev (co-directed with his frequent producer André Singer), should be hamstrung by its subject, a man who withstood unimaginable political pressure and media scrutiny as he navigated, if not orchestrated, one of the most momentous chapters of the 20th century. As Herzog explained in a masterclass held during the 50th Visions du Réel documentary film […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Apr 12, 2019 -
“There’s a Vulnerability That Can Isolate Us, Whether We’re in an Era of Analog Connectivity or Virtual…”: Five Questions for Colewell Writer/Director Tom Quinn
Receiving its world premiere tomorrow in the Launch section of the 2019 SFFILM Festival, Tom Quinn’s sophomore feature Colewell stars Karen Allen, whose filmography runs from intimate dramas to some of contemporary cinema’s biggest blockbusters, as a clerk in a small town post office whose way of life — and, actually, her life itself — are imperiled when her branch is scheduled for closure. Inspired, as Quinn relates below, from learning of an instance in which a town was literally erased from a map, Colewell is a gentle, melancholic film, one inflected by bursts of real anger and sorrow, that […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 12, 2019 -
“I Don’t Want to be Brought on to This Just Because I’m a Female…”: Emma Tammi on Directing Her Horror Western, The Wind
It’s not until you approach a genre of film from a new perspective, and as filmmaker Emma Tammi puts it, flip “the camera 180 degrees,” that you see how one-sided that genre’s films have been. In her narrative feature debut The Wind, out now in theaters, Tammi brings a unique point-of-view to the 1800s American frontier story and all of its psychological terrors. Combining well-crafted scares with the complexity of Teresa Sutherland’s script, the film takes us on a journey of solitude, loss and the demons that can be dredged up in the Wild West. Lizzy (a wonderful Caitlin Gerard), […]
by Meredith Alloway on Apr 11, 2019 -
“He Stays the Strongest Because He Has This Unquenchable Love in His Heart”: Writer/Director Camille Vidal-Naquete and Actor Félix Maritaud on Sauvage/Wild
Leo (Félix Maritaud) never counts his money after he’s with a client. The gay sex worker at the center of Camille Vidal-Naquet’s film Sauvage/Wild is, honestly, happy to be there. Drifting from client to client and from place to place, the homeless hustler has one constant that is quickly disappearing: his unrequited feelings for fellow hustler (though “gay 4 pay”), Ahd (Éric Bernard). Leo’s intense yearning for human connection and affection, mixed with his somewhat paradoxical disinclination to be “kept” in a (facile) domestic situation, and ailing body but unrelenting spirit, are reminiscent of Giulietta Masina in Federico Fellini’s Nights […]
by Kyle Turner on Apr 10, 2019 -
The Sound of a Panic Attack: Composer Keegan DeWitt on Her Smell
What does self-destruction sound like? In Her Smell, the sixth film from Alex Ross Perry, it takes many forms: a nasty laugh, a frenetic synth loop, a warble of radio static. The sounds come hard and relentless. A raw sound wave, warped to mimic the syncopations of a demented drum machine, serves as its palpitating heartbeat. For reasons I can’t fully explain, it’s a sound that induces instant anxiety. Her Smell sounds, and unfolds, like a panic attack. The urge to self-destruct hounds its central character, Becky Something (Elisabeth Moss), just as music dogs viewers for most of its 134 […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Apr 9, 2019 -
At The Mercy Of The Sun: Cinematographer Fan Chao On Shooting An Elephant Sitting Still
There’s an elephant at a circus in Manzhouli that sits and won’t move.“Perhaps some people keep stabbing it with forks,” Yu Cheng muses to his close friend’s wife, but the elephant still won’t budge. This is one of four characters whose lives eventually intersect en route to the seated behemoth. In the bleak mining city of the late writer/director Hu Bo’s slow epic An Elephant Sitting Still, people tend to linger as they’re being hurt too, in spite of the obvious exits that beckon them. Somewhere in the time it takes to endure this 230 minute trial of misanthropy, you […]
by A.E. Hunt on Apr 8, 2019 -
Rotterdam 2019: Livestreaming the Ephemeral in Present.Perfect.
If the International Film Festival Rotterdam can be credited for just one thing–and this would leave aside their robust global funding initiatives and industry market–it would be expanding the definition of what fits at a festival. And, therein, the definition of film. For instance, IFFR spotlights everything from installations to initiatives like this year’s Blackout program (curated by Julian Ross), which centered on performances using the now defunct Kodak 35mm carousel slide projector. It follows, then, that the festival’s centerpiece program, the Bright Future section, challenged the narrow idea of film being a title card followed by three acts and […]
by Kiva Reardon on Apr 5, 2019
