Baltimore filmmakers and audiences commingled in and around the historic Parkway Theater at the physical center and symbolic heart of the city from May 2 – 5 for the 25th anniversary edition of the Maryland Film Festival (MdFF). When MdFF announced in 2022 that they would be ceasing operations the following year, including all screening activity at the Parkway (its home since the renovations finished in 2017), I thought the fest could go the way of so many things in the city’s arts district, Station North: quiet abandonment and disrepair. It is a testament to the institutional strength of the […]
The logline for Snack Shack—two teenaged best friends spend the summer of 1991 working at a community pool food stand and get up to shenanigans—suggests a hyper-generic “one crazy summer”-type coming-of-age flick, but the film distinguishes itself with specifics almost immediately. It opens with AJ (Connor Sherry) and Moose (Gabriel LaBelle) at an off-track betting parlor intently watching the races with lit cigarettes dangling from their mouths. They exchange gambling strategies and profane insults before deciding to bet their new winnings on one more long-shot race. They hit big, but upon leaving they see someone swipe their cab, making it […]
Monica Sorelle’s debut feature Mountains is currently screening at the Seattle International Film Festival, with its final screening tomorrow, May 14, and then on the festival’s streaming platform from May 20 – 27. Mountains, the debut feature by Miami-based filmmaker Monica Sorelle, opens with a Haitian proverb: Dèyè mòn gen mòn—behind mountains are mountains. We hear the brutal clamor of a towering demolition crane—perpetually under construction, Miami, where Mountains is set, has no mountains but these—as it rakes the shingles off a roof. The patriarch of the family at Mountains’ center is Xavier (Atibon Nazaire), a construction worker who’s been […]
In The Conference of the Birds, the famous Persian epic written in 1177 by Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar, a group of birds gather and discuss their collective journey to meet their king, the Simurgh, a mythical winged creature. In this allegory for the human search for enlightenment and wisdom—despite our flaws—a sparrow cowers, hoping to avoid the quest altogether. “I do not wish to begin such a toilsome journey for something I can never reach…I shall be content to seek here my Joseph in the well,” she says, in one translation. “If I find him and draw him out, […]
“I’m so happy,” producer Park Tae-joon said at the Jeonju Cinema Project awards, one of the ceremonies indicating the festival was drawing to a close. “Every day I drank […] festival drinking.” Park’s admission was funny and honest, the kind of thing no one on-stage at an American festival would say even/especially if it were true (bad optics). But in fact, Jeonju was one of the most temperate festivals I’ve ever attended, with official parties ending by 10:30 or 11 and many choosing to go back and sleep after that. They could, if they liked, go to Soseul, unofficially dubbed […]
Slamdance announced last week that the Slamdance Film Festival will move from Park City, Utah, where it’s been since its founding in 1995, to Los Angeles beginning with next year’s edition. The dates will shift slightly to February 20-26, and the move will afford the festival bigger and more professional screening facilities, including at Landmark Theatres and the DGA Theater complex. As Slamdance co-founder and President Peter Baxter notes in our interview below, Slamdance has long had a Los Angeles presence, through both its year-round office but also through its summer AGBO+Slamdance Summer Showcase. About the move, filmmakers and AGBO […]
In The Last Stop in Yuma County, an empty pump at an isolated desert gas station strands a collection of characters (including a pair of bank robbers and knife salesman Jim Cummings) at the adjoining roadside diner. Written around the standing sets available at Four Aces Movie Ranch in Palmdale, California, the feature debut from director Francis Galluppi was partially funded by the sale of producer James Claeys’ house. That provided enough budget for a 20-day shooting schedule, a cast of familiar genre faces (including Richard Brake, Gene Jones and Barbara Crampton), a few epic needle drops and one talented […]
Jeonju International Film Festival, which has become over the last two decades one of the must-go fests in East Asia, prides itself on its innovative curation. The 25th edition in 2024 was packed with film folk, especially from East and Southeast Asia. They were making their way through a thicket of information on 232 films, almost half of which were Korean. (Translators helped with Q&A sessions, and with interviews, and films were typically subtitled in English.) In their spare time, attendees were wandering through historic streets (Jeonju is the origin city of Korea’s great Joseon empire, familiar to viewers of […]
This year’s 31st edition of Hot Docs (April 25-May 5) was chockfull of drama, both onscreen and off. And while there were no protests (such as at IDFA) nor riot police dispatched (see Thessaloniki) there was quite an upheaval in the run up to the event itself. Which then led to much speculation as to the health and future of North America’s largest nonfiction fest. Indeed, before the event even began 10 programmers abruptly resigned and the artistic director stepped down. (Not exactly the type of news you want upstaging your press conference to unveil Dawn Porter’s Vandross biopic Luther: Never […]
Returning for its fourth edition, the experimentally-focused Prismatic Ground film festival will once again host a series of screenings across several NYC theaters and via a free streaming platform. Running from May 8 through 12, the program kicks off with an appropriately urgent Opening Night screening at the Museum of the Moving Image of Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory (1981), preceded by a reading from poet Hala Alyan and concluding with a post-film discussion between Bidoun magazine’s Tiffany Malakooti and researcher, writer and curator Adam HajYahia. “Most of my energy and attention in the last several months has been focused […]