6579 Results for “production”
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“The Empathy Machine”: The 2024 CPH:FORUM
CPH:FORUM, CPH:DOX’s international financing and co-production event, is growing in terms of attendance and international interest. Its overall remit is promoting and amplifying development and financing for risk-taking, visually strong projects leaning towards nonfiction—but impact journalism features, as well as a deep interest in science and technology, are equally vital, making for an interesting mix of ambitious projects. This year was the Forum’s 16th edition and the first without the electric, dedicated and loving presence of the late, great Jess Search as the OG MC. Search dedicated her career to nurturing, caring and challenging the wider documentary community, and her […]
by Pamela Cohn on Mar 29, 2024 -
Fluid(s) Filmmaking: Lance Oppenheim and Daniel Garber on Spermworld
Like Lance Oppenheim‘s first feature, 2020’s Some Kind of Heaven, his follow-up Spermworld follows three nonfiction protagonists through a niche American context. Heaven focused on three residents of The Villages, a retirement community in Florida that’s the largest in the world, through cleanly composed, academy-ratio images of seniors who’ve self-selected to live in something like Back to the Future’s ’50s backlot suburbia writ large. Per its title and subject, Spermworld is a grimier follow-up in the wider 2.1 ratio, all sickly blue and green colors and degraded frame edges, following three main sperm donor subjects who tell themselves different stories about […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 29, 2024 -
“Nine Pages a Day of Heavy Dialogue”: Bob Byington and David Krumholtz on Lousy Carter
In 2012, Bob Byington won a Special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival for Somebody Up There Likes Me; last year, he returned with Lousy Carter. Writing about the festival, I said of the film: Introducing Bob Byington’s Lousy Carter alongside the writer-director, star David Krumholtz preemptively noted that while the film was shot and is set there, “Whatever you think of Texas, its politics have nothing to do with the film.” The disclaimer is accurate—this is another of Byington’s immaculately mean comedies with an underlying sentimental streak, a blend he’s been iterating with various degrees of sharpness for […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 28, 2024 -
“It’s a Confusing World That We Inhabit”: Ryan Martin Brown on Free Time
In Free Time, writer-director-producer Ryan Martin Brown’s debut feature, directionless office drone Drew (comedian Colin Burgess) decides to quit his job. After all, the position is hardly fulfilling (nor is he particularly gifted at it), and why spend all day bleary-eyed behind a screen when all that New York City has to offer exists just outside the door? Soon enough, Drew’s naive work-life musings are proven to be drivel, and his joblessness puts a mighty strain on his few remaining social relationships. His WFH roommate Rajat (Rajat Suresh) doesn’t seem thrilled with Drew’s daytime presence in the apartment, nor does […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 22, 2024 -
Critic’s Notebook: The 2024 Berlin International Film Festival
Off-screen at least, Berlinale was a political mess this year. The final edition of director Carlo Chatrian, who came from Locarno six years ago and brought his adventurous taste with him, was marred by conflict. The festival began with prominent and necessary protests against genocide in Gaza and controversy over the invitation (later revoked) of leaders from Germany’s far-right AfD party. And it ended ugly, when No Other Land co-director Yuval Abraham, who made his film with a Palestinian-Israeli collective of filmmakers and activists, received death threats and had his family in Israel menaced after his acceptance speech for its […]
by Steve Dollar on Mar 21, 2024 -
Critic’s Notebook: The 2023 Red Sea International Film Festival
A series of miles-long empty dirt lots lie wedged between the Ritz Carlton and the Red Sea Mall, the two primary venues of the Red Sea Film Festival in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Barren, with all signs of previous inhabitation fully erased, the site of the future Jeddah central district is a curious sight in the middle of a city of four million. When completed in 2027, it will be the cultural, industrial and touristic center of the city; for now, as endless empty space, it’s such a vertigo-inducing sight of rapid construction and development that it’s impossible to imagine anything […]
by Joshua Bogatin on Mar 19, 2024 -
“I Really Wanted Sounds and Images to Exist Independent of Each Other”: Ryusuke Hamaguchi on Evil Does Not Exist
Evil Does Not Exist, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s disquieting new film, is at once a major break from the Japanese director’s previous work and a distillation of the questions and anxieties around which his cinema has long orbited; it’s the film he seems to have been working toward his whole career. Anyone mildly familiar with Hamaguchi’s work will know the cardinal role dialogue plays in his films, which often double as symposiums—a proclivity evident long before Drive My Car’s meandering chats and late-night confessions. Pitted next to its talk-heavy predecessors, Evil Does Not Exist is a stark outlier; it may well be […]
by Leonardo Goi on Mar 18, 2024 -
Forgive My Laughter: Vera Drew on The People’s Joker
The following interview with The People’s Joker writer, director and star, Vera Drew, appears in Filmmaker issue #126 and now appears online as the film receives its U.S. theatrical release from Altered Innocence. Just as The People’s Joker was preparing to premiere at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, a “strongly worded letter” arrived that threatened immediate legal action if Vera Drew’s scrappy, bold feature debut went ahead with its multiple planned screenings. Warner Bros. was less than pleased that Drew and co-writer Bri LeRose based their film on a trademarked DC franchise, and it likely didn’t help that the […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 18, 2024 -
Credits Where Credits Are Due
Tyler Perry believes that generative AI could soon drastically reduce location filmmaking. He recently announced plans to pause an $800 million expansion of his Atlanta-based studio complex, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “I no longer would have to travel to locations. If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it’s text…. If I wanted to have two people in the living room in the mountains, I don’t have to build a set in the mountains.” But state legislatures and film offices haven’t gotten that memo. As we take our annual look at film tax incentives around the country, the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2024 -
“I Hope It’ll Be Comforting to Trans People, Because the Butterfly Narrative Leaves Out the Reality of the Experience”: I Saw the TV Glow Director Jane Schoenbrun Interviewed by Gregg Araki
“I often don’t remember my dreams, and so when I do, I’ve learned to listen to what my subconscious could be trying to tell me,” director Jane Schoenbrun told Filmmaker in the leadup to the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where their sophomore dramatic feature, I Saw the TV Glow, premiered to acclaim. That admission could be seen as something of a mission statement for Schoenbrun, one that might also have been made about their 2021 microbudget debut, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. In World’s Fair, a sinister online role-playing game haunts the internet, becoming a sort of roiling […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 18, 2024
