U know what I hate? Financiers who ghost u after expressing lots of interest, asking for this that & the other thing, mtg w/yr team. I understand financiers who are too busy to reply in 1st place. But what's up w/ones who suddenly go cold after being so hot? DO NOT GHOST ME.❌👻 — Mynette Louie (@mynette) March 3, 2022 On March 2, 2022, Mynette Louie, producer of award-winning films like The Tale and I Carry You with Me, tweeted out the above complaint, railing against what anecdotally appears to be a lamentable industrywide trend of financier ghosting. Filmmakers and […]
Armageddon Time returns the American writer and director James Gray to his childhood—or at least to a version of it. While its treatment of grade-school-age protagonist Paul Graff (Michael Banks Repeta) and his dealings with the world of grown-ups in and around his home in 1980s Queens, New York, might not be, strictly speaking, autobiographical (Gray has been careful to distinguish between personal and autobiographical filmmaking), Armageddon Time draws upon the filmmaker’s childhood to fashion a story of a boy’s moral and aesthetic education that seems at once thoroughly lived-in and unsentimental. For nearly two hours, we watch as young […]
Southern Louisiana–based filmmaker ZandashĂ© Brown’s 2018 gothic horror short, Blood Runs Down, opens innocently. The night before a young girl’s birthday, as her mother brushes her hair for the next day’s party, she asks her mother what she’ll be allowed to do once she’s a year older. It’s a sweet moment of bonding—one Brown severs moments later when the child, remaining awake to try on her new dress, suddenly is struck by some form of possession that both enrages her parent and causes her eyes to bleed. Acknowledging the complex and at times contrasting traits of a mother-daughter relationship is […]
The language in Tina Satter’s Is This a Room is quotidian, banal. One sample exchange: “Do you have any pets?” “I do. I have two pets.” “Because you’ve been gone for a while, so do we need to maybe let them out and use the bathroom and stuff like that?” But as structured and placed within a conceptual frame by Satter, the dialogue—directly taken from two FBI transcripts of agents interviewing whistleblower Reality Winner at her home, as well as a phone call from Winner to her sister on a recorded jailhouse line—surgically reveals gendered power dynamics as well as […]
A three-person, one-set short that dazzles within that setup, Antonio Marziale’s Starfuckers opens with an unnamed young man (Antonio Marziale) weeping and closes with the same image reframed as coming from a place of empowerment. In between, he arrives at a ritzy house in the LA hills and performs an act of hired degradation for a member of the showbiz elite (Jonathan Slavin). Showering, the unnamed young man admits an accomplice (Cole Doman) through the bathroom window and, one drugged drink later, the tied-up exec wakes up to their show. The first young man performs in drag alongside his accomplice, […]
In 2015, Alex Morelli drove through Ely, Nevada, for the first time as part of a larger western road trip. “I’d been researching the history of the west and the extractive economies that have sustained some of these really small, isolated communities,” he recalls. Ely had gone from stagecoach town to copper mining boom and bust before the late 1980s, when a maximum security prison facility was built there, becoming the area’s primary employer. After passing through, Morelli “couldn’t get Ely out of my head” and, with grant money, continued making trips there. When Nevada decided to build an execution […]
In a way, Hollywood was always within earshot of Darol Olu Kae’s home in Watts, Calif., but he didn’t consider filmmaking a possibility growing up. The road to such a career was shrouded from view, as was the integral role his hometown played in myriad Black arts movements, particularly free jazz—Watts being the home of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, or Ark, a non-traveling music ensemble, founded in 1961 by the late avant-garde jazz virtuoso Horace Tapscott (composer for the LA Rebellion films Passing Through and As Above, So Below, directed by Larry Clark). It would take leaving home and […]
Today, the South by Southwest (SXSW) Conference and Festivals announced that Janet Pierson, long-time VP, Director of the SXSW Film & TV Festival will shift to the role of Director Emeritus. Film Festival Programming Director Claudette Godfrey will now assume leadership of the SXSW Film & TV Festival. The 2022 edition of the SXSW Film & TV Festival marked Pierson’s 15th year as Festival Director. Her 45-year career has included various roles in the independent film landscape, notably as exhibitor, producer’s rep, executive producer and segment producer and segment director of IFC-Criterion’s Split Screen. According to a press release announcing […]
Two long, anxious years of ever-shifting pandemic regulations, shutdowns and travel obstacles turned the expansive, buoyant and super-social Camden International Film Festival into a largely local and virtual affair. Though the festival—an essential annual magnet for the nonfiction film community—did a stellar job meeting the challenge, any Zoom subscriber knows the workarounds get wearying. There’s nothing like the real thing. No doubt that accounted for the “extra” vibe at this year’s gathering, the first full-fledged staging of the festival since 2019. As always, the 18th edition was situated in a cluster of picturesque towns in north coastal Maine: Camden, Rockland […]
Today, the nonprofit Sundance Institute announced the 35 projects that will receive a total of $1,396,500 in unrestricted grant support through this year’s Sundance Institute Documentary Fund. The grantees are in various stages of production: Five in development, 15 in production, 10 in post-production and 5 actively pursuing audience engagement and social impact campaigns. The Open Society Foundations, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Gucci, the Kendeda Fund and Luminate came together to make this year’s grants possible. 2022 marks the 20th anniversary of the Documentary Film Program (DFP), and the grantees receiving funding this year prove how […]