Welcome to the winter 2024 issue of Filmmaker. If my editor’s letter last issue felt tentative in places, that was because, as I noted, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes were underway, and I, like many, had given up predicting when they would end. Happily, as we now go to press, both strikes have been resolved, although the SAG-AFTRA membership vote, 78% in favor, evidenced some opposition to the contract’s AI provisions, which grapple with issues around artificial intelligence and “synthetic performers”—concepts that might have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago and are now very real issues in […]
The Sundance Institute announced today the 2024 Sundance Film Festival short film lineup and the 40th Edition Celebration Screenings and Events — programming featuring alumni artists looking back on the festival’s four-decade history. The 40th Edition events will take place the second half of the festival (January 23 – 26) and will include brand-new 4K restorations of Napoleon Dynamite (20th anniversary) Go Fish (30th anniversary), Three Seasons (25th anniversary), and an extended version of DIG! (20th anniversary), featuring over 30 minutes of additional footage, titled DIG! XX. Also showing will be The Babadook and Pariah, and restorations of Mississippi Masala […]
The Sundance Institute today announced the 91 feature films, episodic and New Frontier works that comprise the 2024 40th edition of the Sundance Film Festival. Premieres by Steven Soderbergh, Lana Wilson, Nathan Silver and the Zellner Bros. join debuting filmmakers such as Jazmin Renée Jones, Haley Elizabeth Anderson and River Gallo at the festival, which runs January 18 – 28, 2024 in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah. A selection of the film’s programming will also be available online from January 25 – 28. Sundance received a record 17,435 submissions this year from 153 countries, with 4,410 being feature […]
It might seem strange for an actor to have a breakout year at age 54. To those who witnessed Colman Domingo’s star rise on the New York theater scene in the early aughts and would cringe at now labeling the actor a “discovery”—I don’t disagree! I first encountered Domingo’s stage work in summer 2008, in the Broadway premiere of Passing Strange that would be filmed a few days later by Spike Lee. (Looking over Domingo’s earlier theater credits, I realize now that I would’ve first seen him in the 2003 Shakespeare in the Park production of Henry V, but the […]
You might know Robbie Tann from Preacher, The Deuce, or when he played Billy on Mare of Easttown, or Whitty in the “Mazey Day” episode of the latest season of Black Mirror. Currently he plays Shipley in this year’s most exciting and original sci-fi film, The Creator. On this episode, he tells how the run-and-gun style of shooting on that production, combined with the cast and crew’s infectious passion for the project, helped with all aspects of his work. He explains why he now bypasses a straightforward “roadmap” of preparation, focusing instead on letting the role seep into his unconscious. […]
Originally published during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, our interview with Sean Price Williams and Nick Pinkerton about their recommended feature, The Sweet East, is being reposted today as the film is in theatrical release from Utopia. America’s fraught political present meets the less savory corners of cinema’s past in The Sweet East, the first feature directed by celebrated cinematographer Sean Price Williams. Penned with typically acerbic wit by film critic Nick Pinkerton, The Sweet East stars Talia Ryder in a should-be-star-making performance as Lilian, a high school senior who impulsively runs off while on a class trip to Washington, […]
Terra Long’s exquisite debut feature film, Feet in Water, Head on Fire, is at once cine-essay, landscape film and sensory investigation into the production of space. The space in question is the Coachella Valley of Southern California, on traditional Cahuilla territory, a place produced and transformed over multiple eras by overlapping mythologies, migrations and capital accumulation strategies. Arid, hot and prone to tectonic trauma, the landscape is challenging to many kinds of harvest, save the tenacious date palm, a species widely cultivated across North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia with roots in Arabia stretching back millennia. That the […]
SFFILM has announced the 17 recipients for the 2023 SFFILM Rainin Grant, awarded in partnership with the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, which includes $425,000 in funding and professional support for narrative projects at different stages of production. From the press release: The SFFILM Rainin Grant program is the largest granting body for independent narrative feature films in the US, and supports films that address social justice issues—the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges—in a positive and meaningful way through plot, character, theme, or setting. Awards are made to multiple projects once a year, for screenwriting, development, and post-production. Recipients are offered […]
Brandon K. McLaughlin remembers the exact moment he knew he wanted to work in the movie business. It was Halloween night and McLaughlin was eight years old. His uncle—a special effects technician—had invited him to set to watch the Disney adventure The Rocketeer being made. “I got to see them blow up the zeppelin while the Rocketeer was running on top of it,” McLaughlin said. “From that point on, I never wanted to do anything else. I was fascinated with everything that went into the magic of moviemaking, and the special effects department creates that magic, tricking the audience into […]
Introducing Time of the Heathen on day two of the inaugural FILM FEST KNOX, artistic director Darren Hughes teased that “75 minutes from now, you will be among the hundreds—or perhaps thousands—who have seen this movie.” Access to something otherwise difficult to view is at least part of the premise for any film festival; in the case of 1961’s Heathen, Hughes noted that this might be not just the North American premiere of the restoration (following Il Cinema Ritrovato) but possibly of the film itself. Despite its very regional American origins (the performance of Milton Babbitt protege Lejaren A. Hiller […]