6296 Results for “Open ”
-
Antonio Marziale
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, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Alex Morelli
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Darol Olu Kae
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 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
SXSW Film & TV Festival Director Janet Pierson Becomes Director Emeritus, Claudette Godfrey Promoted to Director
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 […]
by Natalia Keogan on Oct 5, 2022 -
Global Conversations: Camden International Film Festival and Points North Pitch 2022
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 […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 5, 2022 -
Sundance Institute Announces the 2022 Documentary Fund Grantees
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 […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 4, 2022 -
Anxiety of the Outspoken: Director Kathryn Ferguson and the Example of Sinéad O’Connor
It would be nearly impossible to name another musical performer deserving of a deep dive into her formative years than Sinéad O’Connor. Every step of her life — shuffled between an array of parochial schools, a childhood subject to her mother’s chaotic transference of her own abusive childhood onto her daughter — would in retrospect seem to have been an accretive stage in O’Connor’s becoming. A popular culture firebrand, demonized, her message mischaracterized to the point of parody, met with a withering disdain in the highest corners of western media, O’Connor’s own words have always spoken for themselves. Her message […]
by Evan Louison on Oct 4, 2022 -
Crafting a Life as a Filmmaker: Ashley McKenzie on Queens of the Qing Dynasty
Queens of the Qing Dynasty, the second feature from Nova Scotia’s Ashley McKenzie, is a unique work of independently produced Canadian cinema. Both a stark about-face from the hardscrabble realism of her 2016 debut Werewolf—about a pair of strung-out young lovers living hand-to-mouth on the margins of Cape Breton—and a decisive break from the docufiction trends of art cinema at large, Queens is rigorously composed and austerely dramatized, an artful fable pitched somewhere between comedy and tragedy. Starring newcomer Sarah Walker as Star, a neurodivergent teen who develops a deep connection with her caregiver An (Ziyin Zheng, also making their […]
by Jordan Cronk on Sep 30, 2022 -
14 Films (and Other Recommendations) at the 60th New York Film Festival
With the opening night of the 60th New York Film Festival upon us, Filmmaker would like to recommend 14 titles to catch during the 17-day engagement, which runs from September 30 through October 16 in-person at Film at Lincoln Center. Over the course of our previous festival coverage from this year—including Sundance, Cannes, Venice and TIFF—many of these films have been featured on our site in critical dispatches and reviews. Below, we share links and excerpts from these director interviews and festival dispatches, highlighting Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 30, 2022 -
NYFF 2022: White Noise
Can product placement ever transcend advertising? Pepsi’s vintage logo—a comically over-present staple of ’80s and ’90s commercial Hollywood filmmaking—is continuously conspicuous in Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s White Noise. As a period marker, this makes sense: the novel was published in 1985 and the film’s production design places it in the early ’80s. Thematically, it’s obviously relevant: DeLillo’s first-person narrator, J.A.K. Gladney (Adam Driver), regularly has his thoughts interrupted by lines that simply list corporate names or interpolate overheard advertising chatter. DeLillo originally thought of naming the book Panasonic, writing to his editor that “The word ‘panasonic,’ split into its component […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 30, 2022
