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Sleep Dealers: Engineering Dreams with AI
Saelyx Finna told me about a dream she had. In it, the filmmaker was trying to alter the dream itself by typing prompts into an AI interface. She wanted to change the dream while she was dreaming it, but it wasn’t working and the dream went dark. When she woke up, she thought about the logic of her dream. “Of course it didn’t work,” she said about the AI intervention. “I was trying to access an external tool to change my internal experience.” Finna’s dream points to something very contemporary: how quickly our inner lives are becoming entangled with changing […]
by Deniz Tortum on Jun 18, 2025 -
Editor’s Letter
Welcome to the summer 2025 edition of Filmmaker. As that sentence connotes, Filmmaker is a quarterly publication, and our publishing cadence is such that, for our print edition (as opposed to the web), we can step outside the frenetic daily news cycle a bit. Yes, we try to sync up the films we feature to their release cycles, but we were happy to make one of our occasional exceptions for Vadim Rizov’s interview with Wes Anderson about The Phoenician Scheme, which will have been in theaters for a few weeks by the time you read this. We’ve been trying to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 18, 2025 -
Chapter Break: Eva Victor on Sorry, Baby
Sorry, Baby opens with a wide shot of a lone house on a quiet New England country night—an image that could be the height of snoozy serenity or scary isolation. Writer-director Eva Victor remembers this being a genuine issue in the edit of her first feature. “It ended up feeling like the beginning of a horror movie. I was like, ‘I don’t really care that it does.’ And everyone else was like, ‘Is that what we’re doing?’” The same thoughts might occur to viewers at the beginning of any movie dealing with the trauma at Sorry, Baby’s core while also […]
by Nicolas Rapold on Jun 18, 2025 -
Independent Rescue Mission: The Future Film Coalition’s Ecosystem-Saving Activism
Indie Avengers, unite! OK, perhaps the MCU isn’t the best analogy for an all-volunteer group working to keep independent film alive, but as Future Film Coalition producer and board member Sanjay Sharma says, “The streamers have lobbyists, the studios have the MPAA, but there really isn’t a nationwide nonprofit that is looking after this ecosystem, so we need the Avengers of indie film. Nobody else is fighting for us.” Announced during the Sundance Film Festival, the Future Film Coalition was formed to create a bulwark against threats to the field by, as described on the organization’s Substack, the “business practices […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jun 18, 2025 -
The Hypocrite: James N. Kienitz Wilkins on Cine-phobia and Film School
I’m a bit of a hypocrite: I hated school but now advocate for the experience. I force my kid to do her nightly homework when I failed to do mine. I failed art class in high school (and later dropped out of high school) but ended up with a BFA. This is because (I’ve been told) I possess a Protestant work ethic. I believe deeply in the power of education, but I’m unsure anything can truly be taught beyond what one is willing to teach oneself. Despite abhorring being told what to do, I teach full-time in an undergraduate media […]
by James N. Kienitz Wilkins on Jun 18, 2025 -
Uniting Home and the World: A Report From the 2025 Play-Doc International Film Festival
Each year, the Play-Doc International Film Festival brings a modest but well-curated selection of classic and contemporary films to Tui, Galicia, a historic border town that sits on the banks of the Miño River separating Spain and Portugal. As its name implies, Play-Doc is ostensibly dedicated to nonfiction cinema, though like other festivals with a similar remit (True/False, Visions du Réel, etc), it takes a liberal approach to what constitutes a documentary. The festival’s 21st edition, which ran from May 7 to 11, went further in this regard than ever before. Alongside two competitive programs, one for new and recent international […]
by Jordan Cronk on Jun 18, 2025 -
DC/DOX 2025: So Many Reality Checks
“Well, we really needed that,” the woman in front of me said to her companion as we all left the opening night screening, Steal This Story, Please! at DC/DOX Film Festival. Co-founders Sky Sitney and Jamie Shor in fact seem to have offered up a timely slate, designed to inspire us in dark times and to provide examples of democratic action. And Washington, D.C. audiences embraced it. Their timing couldn’t have been better—the festival, in downtown D.C., occurred around the “No Kings” demonstrations accompanying Pres. Trump’s military parade. Steal This Story, Please!, by longtime Michael Moore collaborators Tia Lessen and […]
by Patricia Aufderheide on Jun 18, 2025 -
Watch: As IFC Center Turns 20, Joe Stankus’s Short Film, Marquee
New York’s IFC Center celebrates its 20th anniversary this week. Here, writer, director and projectionist Joe Stankus shares with Filmmaker a short film he made, shot by Ashley Connor, about the work that goes into the theater’s essential old-school touch: its non-digital marquee. Back in 2013 I was working as a projectionist at the IFC Center and was grappling with what seemed at the time like a moment of great change. Most cinemas had just finished the transition from 35mm exhibition to DCP, and there was no longer any doubt that the increasingly cheaper and more accessible digital cameras would […]
by Joe Stankus on Jun 18, 2025 -
“If I Get Specific About What I’m Doing, Why I’m Doing It, the Humor Will Be There”: Tim Bagley, Back To One, Episode 346
Tim Bagley has so much experience doing comedy on television that his credits read like a comprehensive list of every sit com over the past 30 years. But his depiction of Brad Schraeder on the HBO series Somebody Somewhere is on another level. It’s beautiful, truthful, restrained work, that is often hilarious and sometimes very moving. Few performances on television this year have impacted me more. On this episode, he talks about how the collaborative nature of that show helped so much with his work, the big part logic plays in his comedy, why it’s important to keep challenging himself, and […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Jun 17, 2025 -
The Los Angeles Film School: Where Your Next Chapter Starts (Sponsored)
Breaking into the entertainment industry can be a tough process, especially if you don’t know where to start, lack the proper skills, or even know what fields that are available to make your dreams into a reality. Since 1999, The Los Angeles (L.A.) Film School has been at the forefront of producing the next generation of entertainment industry professionals, through serving its mission of fostering creativity, collaboration, and exploration among its students. The L.A. Film School’s approach to learning takes the student out of the classroom–and their comfort zone–and places them onto sets, behind cameras, and in-front of industry standard […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jun 16, 2025
