Ventriloquist demons go viral in Talk To Me, the feature film debut of twin brothers and co-directors Danny and Michael Philippou. While the A24 horror venture marks their first official foray into feature filmmaking, the duo have been uploading action-packed videos onto their YouTube channel, RackaRacka, since 2013. Unlike Kyle Edward Ball, another YouTuber-turned-filmmaker whose chilling feature debut Skinamarink released earlier this year, the Philippou’s prior output wasn’t necessarily horror-focused. To date, their channel is mostly comprised of stunts, comedy sketches, satirical vlogs and prank videos. This decade-spanning commitment to making content is likely what primed the brothers to helm Talk […]
A new trailer lands today for Our Father, the Devil, writer-director Ellie Foumbi’s feature debut that earned her a spot on our 25 New Faces of Film list last year. Selected for funding through the Venice Biennale College Cinema in December 2019, the film first screened as a “work in progress” at Venice in 2021 before premiering a final cut at Tribeca in 2022, where it won the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature. Here’s the plot of the film, per an official synopsis: Nominated for the 2023 Best Feature Independent Spirit Award, Ellie Foumbi’s elegant moral thriller and debut feature […]
Critic, curator and sometime Filmmaker Magazine contributor Darren Hughes is the Artistic Director of the new FILM FEST KNOX, which will be holding its inaugural edition from November 9 to 12, 2023. Among the new festival’s sections will be an American Regional Film Competition section designed to highlight work produced outside of New York and Los Angeles. From the press release: In response to an announcement that the Knoxville Film Festival would no longer be taking place after a 19-year run, Visit Knoxville will now be producing a new film event. FILM FEST KNOX is an international film festival in […]
“To get a good script is a thrilling thing,” said Oscar®-nominated actor Lesley Manville during this month’s SCAD Lacoste Film Festival. “It was a privilege when a good script would plop through the letterbox—it now pings through your email.” Manville’s good humor and insights infused the event, which took place July 1-2 in France’s Luberon Valley at the international location of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Fittingly, the festival paid homage to tradition as it looked to the future—while having a great time in the here-and-now. “La Maison Basse, with walls dating back from the 12th century, […]
The full Venice Immersive lineup, the XR (Extended Reality) section of the 80th Venice International Film Festival, has been announced today. Described as being “entirely devoted to immersive media” and encompassing “all XR means of creative expression,” the program will be held just a short distance from the Lido on the island Lazzaretto Vecchio (dubbed Immersive Island for the fest). Press previews will be held on August 29 before opening exclusively for press and industry on August 30. The public and all other festival accredited visitors will be able to see the program between August 31 and September 9. Per […]
With many viewers struggling with subscription-itis — a costly overload of SVOD memberships that inflate credit card bills at the end of each month — it’s no wonder that the so-called FAST (free ad-supported streaming television) channels are taking off in popularity. For filmmakers, these channels offer a new revenue stream, and for viewers not only no-cost entertainment but the chance to discover many titles that for whatever market-based reasons aren’t streamable on Netflix, Amazon Prime or Criterion. Filmmaker‘s Web Editor, Natalia Keogan, and I took a look through the current offerings of the most well-recognized FAST channel, Tubi, to […]
HieronyVision, an online platform that aims to “establish a new creative ecosystem across independent and alternative movies, music and art,” has announced the 30 filmmakers selected as part of a Film Independent partnership. The filmmakers, chosen from five film schools as well as an application process, will “get a chance to develop, fund and distribute their projects with HieronyVision and learn the HV ORIGINALS model.” Explains HieronyVision in a statement, “For film projects, our team describes it as ‘Y Combinator meets The French New Wave.’Creatively the projects have to provoke, inspire or entertain. On the business side HieronyVision follows a […]
Pittsburg-based director Charlotte Glynn, who made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces in 2014, is now running a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for her debut narrative feature, The Gymnast. The film, which was actually discussed at the end of Brandon Harris’s profile, is set in a former mill town and is about “a 14-year-old aspiring Olympic gymnast and her die-hard ‘gym dad’ [who] must reinvent themselves after a potentially career-ending injury.” Elaborates Glynn on the Kickstarter page: The Gymnast is a film about loss and perseverance in the face of extreme odds, and the making of the film has mirrored that […]
Director Vladan Nikolic is currently in post-production on his latest film, Everything That Will Happen Has Already Happened, and preparing for a crowdfunding campaign to raise final costs. The filmmakers have shared with Filmmaker a teaser trailer, above, as well as the following statement about the film, which plans to premiere in festivals in 2024 Everything That Will Happen Has Already Happened, a very ambitious no budget narrative feature film is in the works. Billed as a “collaborative film,” led by filmmaker and professor Vladan Nikolic, it was made with the help of filmmakers and actors from around the world. […]
Normally on shoots, veteran documentary maker Kim Longinotto films far away from her native England, often capturing the lives of women in desperate situations over the course of a few weeks. With her latest film, Dalton’s Dream, things ran rather differently. Having watched his victory on the British X Factor in 2018, Longinotto reached out to Dalton Harris, interested in documenting his life in a new country with a new record contract. An initial three-month shoot morphed into more than four years, held up by both the pandemic and the turbulence of Harris’s life as he found himself persecuted for […]