Opening a film festival with Leos Carax’s Holy Motors shows sullen optimism, of which the 53rd Thessaloniki International Film Festival had plenty. The 10-day event in mid-November brimmed with hope and sunshine, but also what felt like bone-weariness from six years of producing both the international and the spring documentary festival with declining resources in a country where bankers and politicians are determined to spiral into further decline. Past parallel events, such as filmmaker master classes and a daily convocation of directors called “Just Talking,” were missed. Neither a first-time festivalgoer nor the crowds would notice: Capacity was reported at […]
The Brazilian drama Neighboring Sounds made it onto many critics’ best-of lists for 2012 and recently won Best Feature at the Cinema Tropical Awards in New York, which recognize excellence in Latin American cinema. The film’s director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, was in town to accept the award and to attend a screening at the Museum of the Moving Image of short films he produced over the last decade. The first of these shorts was made in 2002, the year Fernando Meirelles’ urban epic City of God burst onto the international scene and Madame Satã played at Cannes. In the decade […]
Receiving its international premiere in Rotterdam, Big Boy is photographer and filmmaker Shireen Seno’s lovingly lo-fi, Super 8-shot tale of a young boy, pressured by his family to “grow” — not emotionally but physically. Set in the 1950s, Seno intriguingly remembers in Big Boy a childhood in the Philippines she did not experience. Taking her inspiration from family tales as well as the visual traces previous generations have left behind, Big Boy, in the words of the Rotterdam programmer, is about a Filipino past that is “not only nostalgic, but also about the violence often hidden just below the surface.” […]
Red Giant is known for their effects software, including Magic Bullet Looks, Colorista and Trapcode Particular. But they are also developing a name for themselves with a series of short films that are both entertaining and great demos of how-to-do effects on a budget. It probably doesn’t hurt that they also demonstrate how to use their software too! Director Seth Worley and Aharon Rabinowitz, director of Communities at Red Giant, spoke at a recent meeting of the Boston Creative Pro Users Group about the production of their latest short, Tempo. Worley first came to Red Giant’s attention when the company […]
The Dirties may very well be some kind of terribly depressing cautionary tale or it may just be that the joke is on us, but this debut film from Matt Johnson, who also stars and co-wrote, couldn’t be more topical. It’s bound to cause much discussion should it find larger audiences, and perhaps even if it doesn’t, as the spectre of school shootings hangs heavy in many hearts this winter.The most talked about film at this year’s Slamdance even before winning the festival’s Grand Jury Prize at a ceremony last night at Park City’s Treasure Mountain Inn, Johnson’s film is […]
The Film Society of Lincoln Center announced today the lineup for the upcoming 13th edition of Film Comment Selects (February 18-28), Film Comment magazine’s eclectic film festival. The roster is hand-picked by the magazine’s editors and contributors from their travels around the international festival circuit. Highlights include 104-year-old Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira’s Gebo and the Shadow, Antonio Campos’s engrossing portrait of a serial killer-in-the-making Simon Killer, Marco Bellocchio’s compelling drama Dormant Beauty starring Isabelle Huppert, Sergei Loznitsa’s gritty World War II drama In the Fog and James Benning’s Stemple Pass, which contemplates the life of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Exciting new […]
Nearly a decade after winning Sundance with his startlingly original Primer, SHANE CARRUTH returns with a haunting and powerful look at love and regeneration, Upstream Color.
“Sundance is our annual tradeshow,” a friend remarked to me at one of the very crowded parties this year. Indeed, it is a place to catch up, even if that short conversation is in line at a theater or at Starbucks instead of the kind of proper sit-down you’d have at Cannes or Berlin. Here are a few of the folks I bumped into at Sundance, beginning with, above, director Jehane Noujain, snapped on Heber Street just hours before the premiere of her latest documentary, The Square. I was knocked out by the film, which is a vivid and expertly […]
Premiering in Rotterdam, the disarming and oddly delightful Towheads is the feature debut of artist and experimental filmmaker Shannon Plumb. Exploring and extending aspects of her short-form Super-8 work within a feature context, Towheads is, on the surface, a familiar story of a bored housewife whose creative aspirations are stifled by the pressures of domesticity and the disinterest of a work-obsessed husband. But these frustrations are just the catalyst for a charmingly playful series of episodes in which Plumb’s character adopts various guises — a drag king, a pole dancer and many more — in an attempt to explore alternative […]
A genuine meditation on male friendship, the absurdities of indie moviedom and many different kinds of loyalty, Daniel Schechter’s Supporting Characters, a surprise hit at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival, sneaks up on you, its seeming limitations becoming its strengths over the course of its easy-going 87 minutes. Despite being shot in a fashion that recalls a comedy you might find on FX, Supporting Characters maintains an old-fashioned, craftsman-like quality about it; it’s written with feeling and humor that rings with truth, offering us characters whose lives are as complicated and full of ambiguity as our own. Alex Karpovsky and newcomer Tarik Lowe have […]