Shot on richly textured three-perf 35mm, Alec Moeller’s Empath follows Kate (Betsey Brown), who’s prone to uncontrollable tears at the slightest provocation, e.g., seeing a clown drawing made by her psychiatrist’s son. “He must be such a sad little boy to paint such a very good clown,” she bawls. The doctor thinks she needs mood stabilizers, but Kate seeks out more meaningful help at a support group for “hyper-empaths,” who describe themselves as simply feeling too much. The group is run by a suspiciously controlling doctor (Michele Simms), and the short derives tension from the increasingly hard-to-pin-down motivations of its […]
Tij D’oyen’s Lollygag—which received a Grand Jury Honorable Mention at its Outfest premiere this year—is a blackly comic reminiscence of a formative teen summer. In flatly enunciated Greek voiceover, a girl (Gaby Slape) recalls the season she spent spying from her bedroom window on the boy next door (Isaac Powell). Already aware that she wasn’t attracted to men, the anonymous narrator nonetheless found herself staring at her neighbor and his seemingly endless string of visiting lovers as he “lounged and drank and swam and smoked.” “Sometimes the way he acted gave me a funny feeling,” she recalls. “The feeling that […]
Dolly de Leon is a Filipina veteran actor of film and TV who is now, due to her outstanding performance in Triangle of Sadness, being spoken about with words like “newcomer” and “breakthrough.” That might have something to do with the “I’m the captain now” nature of the role she plays in the Palme d’Or winning film. It’s like the character and the actor are both saying “I have arrived.” In this episode, she describes the dark place she was in right before auditioning for the part, how director Ruben Ostlund’s collaborative approach sparked her dynamic creativity, why watching the […]
Watch the trailer for 84-year-old Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo, the director’s first film in seven years. The titular donkey is originally part of a traveling circus troupe (under the loving care of a young woman named Kasandra) before he’s shuttled off to a string of different owners. These subsequent caretakers oscillate between cruelty and tenderness, randomly determining the sweet donkey’s quality of life. Greatly influenced by Robert Bresson’s 1966 film Au Hasard Balthazar, Eo premiered at Cannes earlier this year, where it tied for the Jury Prize with Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains. In his […]
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 […]
The extended trailer has arrived for Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s Bones and All, which stars Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet as nomadic cannibal lovers traversing Reagan’s America. The screenplay was written by David Kajganich (who previously collaborated with Guadagnino on A Bigger Splash and Suspiria) and is based on the 2015 novel of the same name by Camille DeAngelis. The film premiered at this year’s Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Silver Lion for best direction. The latest trailer reveals finer plot details, including background as to why Maren (Russell) is forced to go on the run in […]
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 […]
The American Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland has announced the eight feature film projects selected for the 12th edition of the U.S. in Progress co-production forum, taking place November 9 – 11, 2022 at the festival. Invite-only work-in-progress screenings of American independent films in their final editing stages, curated from a record number of submissions, will be screened for European and Polish film professionals, festival programmers and buyers. Additionally, projects will compete for in-kind awards of post-production service pcckages. The selected projects are: Crooked Finger directed by Julia Halperin and Jason Cortlund, produced by Julia Halperin and Todd Remis Falling […]
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 […]
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 […]