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Sundance’s Second Virtual Festival Puts Art Films in an Online Bind
“Heartbreaking,” “disappointed,” “crushing”—those are just some of the ways that filmmakers described the news that the 2022 Sundance Film Festival was going entirely virtual for a second year in a row. While lots of producers, directors, and sales agents were counting on in-person presentations to elevate their premieres in the buzzy environment of Park City, the shift to online-only was particularly stinging for filmmakers and sellers with artier, cinematic, or more challenging films that may get lost amid the Netflixification of the festival. “It’s a bummer,” admits Sam Green, director of opening night film 32 Sounds, which is described as […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jan 11, 2022 -
Watch: David Ehrlich’s 25 Best Films of 2021
Indiewire critic David Ehrlich is back with what is always the most beautifully realized and most pleasurable to take in “best films of the year” list — his annual video countdown of the year’s best cinema. As always, much of the joy comes from Ehrlich’s unexpected editorial rhythms, ingenious match cuts and savvy music choices, drawn from the year’s films, which here range from the Sparks’s Annette score to Louis Armstrong. Last year, in order to justify the huge amount of time it takes Ehrlich to make these videos, he decided to urge viewers to support a charity chosen by […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 10, 2022 -
Color Congress, a National Collective, Launches, Announces Funding and Support for POC-Led and Supporting Documentary Organizations
Color Congress, a national collective of majority people of color (POC) and POC-led organizations aimed at centering and strengthening nonfiction storytelling by, for and about people of color in the US, has launched in advance of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Founded by documentary impact and field-building strategists Sahar Driver and Sonya Childress, the collective will invite POC-led doc-serving organizations to apply for unrestricted two-year funding from a $1.35 million fund, and later in the year, they’ll be invited to join the Congress and direct over $1 million in grants aimed at addressing field challenges. Of the selection criteria for the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 10, 2022 -
Gessica Généus’s Freda: A Female Gaze on Life in Haiti
The making of Freda, the narrative feature debut of actor, singer and documentarian Gessica Généus, shot between lockdowns in the endlessly troubled streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was “like a sprint,” says Généus, “I was rushing, I didn’t sleep.” Freda is a family drama masterfully set against the backdrop of the chaos of life in Haiti. With a wry eye on societal issues, Freda offers a heartbreaking and complex female gaze on life in a machismo culture. Freda received a standing ovation at its Un Certain Regard screening at the 2021 Cannes festival and was only the second Haitian film to […]
by Annie Nocenti on Jan 7, 2022 -
The Year in Nonfiction Cinema: 21 Highlights of 2021
A highly personal hodgepodge of interviews, essays, coverage and quotes that stayed with me throughout (despite) this information overloaded year. Crime and Punishment Jon Alpert’s HBO doc Life of Crime: 1984-2020 (DOC NYC curtain raiser for Hammer to Nail) Thirty-six years following three street criminals in Newark, NJ culminates in one powerful, tightly-edited, two-hour journey. Stanley Nelson and Traci A. Curry’s Showtime doc Attica (interview with Curry for Filmmaker magazine, interview with former inmate Al Victory for Documentary magazine) A clear-eyed revisitation of the five-day, real-life, made-for-TV event that resulted in “the deadliest violence Americans had inflicted on each other in a single day since […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 6, 2022 -
Sundance Cancels the In-Person Portion of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival Due to Omricon Surge
Sundance announced today that the in-person portion of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival has been cancelled. As in 2021, the festival will occur this year online, in a virtual edition on Sundance’s bespoke platform. When Sundance announced the return of its live edition back in August, 2021, Festival Director Tabitha Jackson announced a vaccination requirement, and, in recent days, Sundance reupped its protocols, requiring boosters for some attendees as well as offering on-site boosters in addition to the testing already planned. But Jackson also wrote, “Health and safety is paramount… We will continue to assess other elements of health and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 5, 2022 -
Trailer Watch: Michel Franco’s Sundown
Michel Franco’s Sundown is unsettling tale of existential drift, one that upends the way in which the concept of family is often thematized in narrative films. It’s now given a suitably eerie trailer by its distributor, Bleecker Street. The story involves a brother (Tim Roth) and sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) vacationing at a Mexican resort when sad news arrives from abroad. The sister leaves, the brother stays, and the film’s mysteries concern the brother’s inscrutable motivations. Spasms of violence are expected in any film by the New Order director; those are hinted at by the trailer’s concluding sequence of flash cuts […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 4, 2022 -
Indie Camera of the Year: Blackmagic Delivers Small in a Big Way
Since forever, I’ve gotten the question, “What camera should I buy?” This always comes from someone not in the market for an Alexa Mini or 8K RED, but instead something recent, capable, and cheap. Did I mention cheap? There’s no slam-dunk answer to this question, obviously, and never will be. No single camera is right for everybody or every situation. But among the wonderments of our 4K moment is the fact that virtually all 4K cameras make good pictures, taking into account their intended markets and price points. To wit, you only have to reach for that iPhone Pro in […]
by David Leitner on Dec 31, 2021 -
Newsletter of the Year: Why Screenwriters Should Read George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life
Each Friday I write an original Filmmaker newsletter, which is free to all. Always original and not archived on the site, they consist of various musings, thoughts, link recommendations and sometimes even early versions of pieces that appear later here. And while yesterday’s “Top Ten New Posts of 2021” was determined using Google Analytics, I’ve chosen today’s “Top Newsletter of 2021” purely empirically. Forget Mailchimp open rates, this newsletter about George Saunders’s book on writing and Russian literature, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life, is […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 30, 2021 -
Filmmaker‘s Top Ten New Posts of 2021
If you’re not a daily visitor to Filmmaker, reading this piece, our annual “top ten,” will be a process of discovery as you can scan through the articles that received our highest traffic in 2021. But, increasingly, compiling this article is a discovery process for us as many of its entries are simply not ones we would have guessed. There are articles that kick up conversation across Twitter, or that I receive emails and calls about, and then there are quiet traffic-getters that only surface when the Google Analytics button is hit. The top post here is no surprise, as […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 29, 2021
