6300 Results for “Open ”
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“PARAíSO”: AN INTERVIEW WITH NADAV KURTZ
On still mornings in the “Windy City,” a select few people can be seen careening down the high rises that mark Chicago’s skyline. While the buildings they descend contain people waking up for their daily routines—or the destinations of such routines—these men are living out their routines. In the short documentary Paraíso (Paradise), newcomer Nadav Kurtz delves into the lives of three Mexican immigrants working as window washers in Chicago. The film, which won Best Documentary Short awards at this year’s Tribeca International Film Festival and the Seattle International Film Festival, portrays a segment of the workforce for Chicago’s largest […]
by Daniel James Scott on Jun 18, 2012 -
CRISIS? WHAT CRISIS? VIEWS FROM MARCH 2012’s THESSALONIKI DOC FEST
It’s the Greek moment. Again. Still. Thousands of years of civilization, and we’re still anxiously awaiting an epistle from Hellas! In the first hours after Sunday’s fraught second Parliamentary election of the year, few analysts are confident there won’t be a third election or that even the successful formation of a coalition government would last, or be able to withstand the growing force of the Euro-wide economic crisis. The Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, also known as “Images of the 21st Century,” in its fourteenth year, took place in mid-March 2012, before the inconclusive May 6 elections had even been set. Here […]
by Ray Pride on Jun 18, 2012 -
PERSONAL DEMOCRACY
The Internet is transforming social life and the political landscape. The growing pallet of digital media content-production technologies and social networking distribution sites, like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, is redefining the meaning of “democracy” and an individual’s ability to participate in the political process. The annual Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) is a geek and political-wonk fest, a 21st century Woodstock – without the drugs, rain and rock ‘n’ roll – and this year’s gathering was no exception. This is a momentous election year, with a day of reckoning coming in November. The nation is living through what Nobel Prize-winning economist […]
by David Rosen on Jun 14, 2012 -
Director Nisha Pahuja on The World Before Her
India-born, Toronto-bred Nisha Pahuja’s beautiful and poignant The World Before Her won the World Documentary Competition Award at Tribeca Film Festival, where it premiered a few weeks ago. And while Pahuja grew up and lives in Toronto, she still has a fascination for her homeland. The World Before Her is her third film, after Diamond Road and Bollywood Bound, and her second dealing with India. It presents two sides of the country. For one segment of the film, Pahuja’s crew follows 20 “Miss India” contestants as they endure the pageant’s controversial month-long training regimen. The audience accompanies the women on […]
by Leopoldine Huyghues Despointes on Jun 14, 2012 -
Director Matthew Akers on Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present
The self-described “grandmother of performance art,” Marina Abramovic has for almost 40 years been one of the leading lights of a still-marginalized form. Born to ex-partisan parents in 1946, in the early days of Tito’s Yugoslavia, she is the fascinating subject of Matthew Akers’ new documentary, Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present. Despite her international renown, the Belgrade-born, New York-based Abramovic failed to enter the public consciousness in the States until her blockbuster 2010 MoMA retrospective. Akers’ film is a sinewy tour through Abramovic’s peculiar life and working process as she embarks upon her most high profile performance yet, one […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 13, 2012 -
SEATTLE FILM FEST CLOSES ANOTHER SPRAWLING, MONTH-LONG AFFAIR WITH AWARDS
When you go to the Seattle International Film Festival, you hear often that it is the largest, most highly attended film festival in the United States. 460 Films! 25 Days! 70 Countries! 160,000 attendance! Bigger is better! However, as I learned during the dying days of this year’s event, what makes SIFF one of the country’s more interesting festivals isn’t its size per se. Sure, other than pre-Rutger Wolfson Rotterdam, I can’t think of a festival that has approached this level of sprawl. So one can with relative fleetness dispense with the “this is my grand theory of modern cinema in […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 12, 2012 -
Mission Accomplished: Lorrel Manning and Michael Cuomo on Happy New Year
I first met writer/director K. Lorrel Manning and actor/producer Michael Cuomo at the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, where we found ourselves the fish-out-of-water New Yorkers in a sea full of Southwest cinephiles. Their SXSW 2011 (sold out) hit Happy New Year is grounded in star Cuomo’s nuanced portrayal of a fictional outsider named Cole Lewis, a sergeant who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and now finds himself battling demons both mental and physical in the psych ward of a veterans hospital. I spoke with the two about their veterans outreach effort, Indiegogo versus Kickstarter, and the best […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 11, 2012 -
EVERYNONE WINS GRAND PRIZE AT VIMEO AWARDS
Last night at the NYU Skirball Center, the Vimeo Awards took place and one of the 25 New Faces from 2011, Everynone, were the big winners. For their excellent Symmetry, the video collective of Will Hoffman, Daniel Mercadante and Julius Metoyer III took away both the prize in the Lyrical category and the Grand Prize, which came with an additional $25,000 in prize money. In my profile of Everynone for 25 New Faces last year, I wrote: If you listen to the radio, then you may have seen the short documentary essay films of the New York collaborative, Everynone. For the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 8, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #122
Second #5734, 95:34 There is a look of pity on Detective Williams’s face as he delivers his warning to Jeffrey not to “blow it.” At this point, it’s not entirely clear whose side the Detective is on; is his Hollywood stock detective outfit for real, or is he—like the “well-dressed man”—wearing a disguise? His warning to Jeffrey, as he takes him by the arms and looks into his eyes, is like a secret communication, a signal to Jeffrey not to rush things, not dig too deeply because what he might find at the terrible, rotten core of things is not […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Jun 8, 2012 -
Todd Solondz on Career Longevity and Dark Horse
Todd Solondz just scored one of the best reviews of his career with A.O. Scott’s New York Times rave for Dark Horse, opening today. Favorably comparing it to Death of a Salesman (!), Scott writes: But Mr. Solondz brilliantly — triumphantly — turns this impression on its head, transforming what might have been an exercise in easy satirical cruelty into a tremendously moving argument for the necessity of compassion. Again and again — in the ’90s indie touchstones Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness, and more recently in Life During Wartime — this director has blurred the boundary between misanthropy […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 8, 2012
