There are two long back-and-forth tracking shots in Savanah Leaf’s wise, emotionally full debut feature, Earth Mama. In the first, the pregnant Gia—a 24-year-old Oakland single mother fighting for custody of the two young children she already has lost to state-sponsored foster care—purposefully strides across a playground, the camera focused on her as she passes expensive strollers and children playing in the background in soft focus. Moments before, she has asked the owner of the photo studio she works at for a cash advance: “I don’t want my baby coming out with no clothes or nothing,” she says. (Leaf cuts […]
After more than 30 years of collaborating as a writing-directing duo, the Coen brothers have decided to embark on solo projects for the foreseeable future. Joel Coen helmed The Tragedy of Macbeth back in 2021, and Ethan Coen debuted Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind last year at Cannes. While that documentary still awaits a release, Ethan’s lesbian road movie Drive-Away Dolls is set to hit theaters early this fall. Co-written by spouses Coen and Tricia Cooke (who also edited Drive-Away Dolls together), the film stars Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan in the lead roles with Beanie Feldstein, Pedro Pascal, […]
“It’s so great that this festival is back again!” In one form or another, I kept hearing that phrase between June 15 to 18 at DC/DOX, a brand-new festival in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Sky Sitney, DC/DOX’s co-founder, was also a founder of the 1990s-born Silverdocs, a partnership between American Film Institute and Discovery Networks mourned by the entire doc community after it passed. Silverdocs morphed into AFI Docs when Discovery bailed, but AFI Docs was run out of AFI’s Los Angeles office and often seemed out of touch with DC. Meanwhile, Sitney co-founded a mini-festival, Double Exposure, with […]
PAM CUT // Center for an Untold Tomorrow, the film and new media arm of the Portland Art Museum, is currently accepting applications for their third annual Sustainability Labs. The six month program is specifically tailored for multidisciplinary media storytellers, providing mentorship, career-developing resources and stipends to further their artistic practices. Applications close on July 1. “Our organization is all about artists who aren’t content to be contained—by medium, what’s come before or a singular type of media that they’re working with,” Amy Dotson, director of PAM CUT and curator of Film & New Media at the Portland Art Museum, […]
Though Wes Anderson’s films can be seen as the product of the director’s sharp imagination, the finished work is nothing without those who turn his thoughts into spreadsheet-enabled reality. Most of the physical things on screen—the punctilious graphic design on signs and cards, the actual locations, the trimmed sets and the giant buildings in the distance that exist just to fill up white space—exist thanks to production designer Adam Stockhausen, who has been Anderson’s go-to since 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom. Stockhausen has noted his fondness for planning productions in an old-fashioned, tactile way which likely appeals not only to the very […]
“She plans to continue working with ‘first-time performers in live settings’ and is developing a feature she hopes will be in production in the next year,” is how the profile of writer/director Hannah Peterson concluded for our 25 New Faces of Independent Film list in 2018. The Graduates, about a group of students returning to their high school one year after a mass shooting, is that feature, having just made its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival, winning Best Cinematography in a U.S. Narrative Feature for director of photography Carolina Costa. Co-starring John Cho, Maria Dizzia and Mina Sundwall, The […]
The Tribeca Festival announced competition winners for its 22nd annual edition during an awards ceremony yesterday at Racket NYC. Awards were presented in the following categories: Feature Film, Short Film, Audio Storytelling, Immersive, Games, Human / Nature, AT&T Untold Stories, and Tribeca X. So Young Shelly Yo’s Smoking Tigers and Guto Parente’s A Strange Path swept U.S. and International Narrative categories, while Andrew H. Brown and Moses Thuranira’s Between the Rains won two out of four awards in the Documentary Competition. Several of this year’s award winners have been covered on the Filmmaker site, including The Gullspång Miracle (Best Editing […]
Post-WWII national anxieties offer a glimpse into our current tolerance for totalitarianism in Brooklyn 45, writer-director Ted Geoghegan’s latest horror effort. Presented as a real-time film in a bottle setting, the film takes place during the immediate aftermath of the war as a group of veterans meet at one of their Brooklyn (by way of Chicago) abodes to reconnect and (attempt to) mend fresh wounds. Clive “Hock” Hockstatter (Larry Fessenden) hosts the group, who assemble in part to support their old friend after his wife’s recent suicide. Rounding out the guest list is Marla Sheridan (Anne Ramsay), who worked as […]
Janus Films has released a trailer for the 4K restoration of Jean Eustache’s 1973 opus The Mother and the Whore, which will open at New York’s Film at Lincoln Center on June 23. An official synopsis of the restoration reads: After the French New Wave, the sexual revolution, and May ’68 came The Mother and the Whore, the legendary, autobiographical magnum opus by Jean Eustache that captured a disillusioned generation navigating the post-idealism 1970s within the microcosm of a ménage à trois. The aimless, clueless, Parisian pseudo-intellectual Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives with his tempestuous older girlfriend, Marie (Bernadette Lafont), and begins a […]
The haunted halls of a defunct Catskills hotel wreak psychological violence on a group of young, queer city slickers in Bad Things, the long-awaited sophomore feature from writer-director Stewart Thorndike. Arriving nearly a decade after Lyle, Thorndike’s sapphic take on Rosemary’s Baby starring Gabby Hoffmann, Bad Things similarly tackles plot points and thematic fixations of another scary movie staple—Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining—through a thoroughly queer and feminist perspective. Ruthie (Gayle Rankin) is debating whether or not to sell the now-derelict hotel her mother used to run years prior. With a decisive real estate meeting only days away, Ruthie assembles a […]