IFP, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the inaugural audio programming for the upcoming 42nd edition of IFP Week, which will take place virtually September 20 – 25. Unfolding over the last two days of the conference, September 24th and 25th will be, says IFP, “robust conversations and events that will explore audio storytelling, real-time decision making, and what goes on behind the scenes in the world of audio.” The programming complements the maiden edition of IFP Week’s Audible Audio Hub, which features 36 audio-only projects connecting with some of the industry’s leading producers and financiers. Industry guest speakers will include: Sean […]
I can still recall my red pill moment while watching Jennifer Abbott and Mark Achbar’s 2003 documentary The Corporation with my best friend, at the (pre-financial crisis) time an analyst at a big bank. “Corporations are people? What the hell?” I practically shouted. “Yup,” he simply responded with a weary shrug. For many clueless progressives like myself, unaware that corporate power had been spreading like the coronavirus, silently hijacking all branches of our government for decades, The Corporation was both horror film and wakeup call. The real deep-state conspiracy. Since then we’ve endured the Great Recession and our current economic calamity/health catastrophe/racial injustice awakening. […]
It’s the end of the gold mining season and time for the workers to pack up and head home. Andres (Don Melvin Boongaling) and Paulo (Bart Guingona) wait in line to receive their payment while Baldomero (Nanding Josef) daynaps in his hammock. The lifelong friends cut a deal. Baldomero arranged their voyage to the jobsite for a portion of their pay. But come payday, Andres protests: His sister is sick and he needs to buy her medication. After their manager gets his cut and the Captain and Sergeant who overlook their bayan each extort theirs, he won’t have enough money […]
When I last spoke to Nicole Reigel for Filmmaker, it was in 2014 to profile the Jackson, Ohio native for our 25 New Faces list. After a stint in the military and then time producing her own plays for theater, Riegel had arrived in Los Angeles and quickly made a name for herself as a screenwriter, with directors such as Cary Fukunaga and Justin Lin on board for her scripts. But her ultimate goal, she revealed in the piece, was to direct — an ambition realized this year with her flinty, tremendously assured and compellingly acted debut, Holler. Selected for […]
When Francesco Rosi adapted artist and activist Carlo Levi’s 1945 memoir Christ Stopped at Eboli for Italian television in 1979, contemporary observers of the director probably saw it as a strange choice. Rosi had made his name with searing, forcefully immediate studies of Italian society and politics like Salvatore Giuliano and Hands Over the City; Levi’s book about his banishment to an isolated rural town during the reign of Mussolini was as modest and personal as Rosi’s earlier films were sweeping and elaborate. Yet the memoir had in fact been a dream project of Rosi’s for decades, and the four-part, […]
Even without the pandemic, and the attendant pulling of high-market-value films from the festival circuit until it’s over (?), it’s likely Spike Lee’s David Byrne’s American Utopia would have been the opening night film of TIFF 2020. The goal of gala presentations is to sell out expensive seats, and the Q&A combo of Lee and Byrne after a concert movie would have been a surefire bet. A mostly workmanlike rendering of Byrne’s 2019 Broadway show, American Utopia opens with “Here,” one of two songs co-written with Daniel Lopatin from the fairly poky album of the same name—the least familiar selections, five in all, […]
Making its world premiere at this year’s — IRL! — Venice Film Festival, The New Gospel is the latest work of “utopian documentarism” from Swiss director/writer/critic/lecturer Milo Rau. (Though one might add “biblical provocateur.” As the newly installed artistic director of NTGent, Rau once took out classified ads in a Belgian newspaper seeking modern-day crusaders for a staging based on the city’s Jesus-themed Ghent Altarpiece. One read, “Did you fight for IS, or another religion?”) With The New Gospel, the multimedia artist tackles Italy’s ongoing migrant crisis through a most unusual form — by creating a contemporary Jesus film in […]
For me, TIFF 2020 began yesterday with a stroll from my bedroom to the computer, coffee in hand, to check whether the promised link and password to the festival’s new digital portal had arrived. It did, I logged in, noted that the streaming platform supports AirPlay, and started a calendar of screening times, as most titles are available only in 48-hour windows. (Plus, some are geoblocked here in the States.) A far cry from my usual short flight to Billy Bishop Airport, an afternoon typing P&I screening times into my phone and then looking for a party to go to. […]
Carrie Lozano — award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist, lecturer and co-founder of the International Documentary Association’s Enterprise Documentary Fund — was announced today as the new Director of the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program. She succeeds interim director Kristin Feeley and prior director Tabitha Jackson, who became the head of the Sundance Film Festival this past January. From the press release: As Documentary Film Program Director, Lozano will elevate and support nonfiction filmmakers worldwide at all stages of creating and distributing new cinematic work. She will also work to advance and elevate the health of the independent nonfiction field, ensuring that […]
From Arab Spring uprisings to Russian disinformation campaigns, social media platforms have swung from heralded saviors to all-purpose bogeymen with breakneck speed. So how did we get here? And can online life even be fixed? Was it all the inevitable result of a worldwide collective bargain with the Big Tech devil? (Nothing in life is free, and that goes double in Silicon Valley.) With Jeff Orlowski’s The Social Dilemma, which premiered at Sundance — as did the director’s 2017 doc Chasing Coral and 2012’s Chasing Ice — these consequential questions and more get addressed through a most unusual format. The […]