499, the fourth feature film from “25 New Face” alum Rodrigo Reyes, is an epic, enchanting road movie that travels seamlessly through time (a 500-year-old journey reenacted in the present day) and space (across Mexico, from coastal Veracruz to the nation’s capital — or what used to be called Tenochtitlán back when the Aztecs claimed it as their own). Cemented by Eduardo San Juan Breña’s gripping performance as a Spanish conquistador who finds himself washed up into the future and onto modern day Mexico’s shores, the film recreates the path taken by Hernán Cortez in his 1621 quest to conquer the […]

Patrick Wang (a 25 New Face alum) takes a painstakingly nuanced, intimate approach to delicate subjects, specifically the ways in which we deal with — and don’t deal with — loss and the rippling effects in life after a death. His first feature, the breathtaking, Independent Spirit Award-nominated In the Family, and 2015’s Cannes and SXSW-screening The Grief of Others, which will finally be hitting theaters November 2nd, would make for a great marathon viewing alone. (Provided it came with a big box of Kleenex.) And now Wang has created a work that is simultaneously lighter in tone, and his […]

Filmmaker‘s annual 25 New Face screening night at the IFC Center takes place next Monday, September 22 at 8:00 PM in New York City. We’ve got an especially strong line-up this year, including never-before-seen short films, and four filmmakers will join me after for a panel discussion on the art, economics and distribution of short film filmmaking. Here’s the program: Charlotte Glynn’s Immaculate Reception. “Rarely have the complexities and disappointments of young masculine sexuality been so deftly portrayed,” wrote Brandon Harris in his 25 New Face write-up of Glynn and her Rust Belt-set, coming-of-age tale that turns on Franco Harris’s […]

Click here to see Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of Film 2014.

The latest episode of High Maintenance, 25 New Faces duo Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld’s popular web series, relies on situational humor rather than one-liners.  Featuring Dan Stevens as a stay at home dad cum cross-dressing screenwriter, “Rachel” refers not to the protagonist’s alter ego, but his preferred designer. Enjoy one of the final episodes of Cycle Three above.

“If you happen to know a brave fifteen-year-old, that’s not too embarrassed to act in an emotional teenage role, that deals with things teenagers deal with — please have her contact me. Most of the kids I’ve been seeing can only handle a part that’s an idealized version of how they want to be perceived. It’s kind of incredible that parents would let their children perform in some totally exploitative slasher movie, but tense up at the opportunity to be a part of a fictional yet emotionally truthful coming-of-age film.” * * * Eliza Hittman posted the aforementioned on the […]

In recent years, the island of Cyprus has become something of an unforgiving melting pot. The often life-threatening emigration of Iranians and Syrians to the once predominately Greco-Turkish enclave presents a tense social fabric that is poetically probed in Iva Radivojevic’s debut documentary Evaporating Borders. Radivojevic adopts an aesthetically meandering and unique approach to the film, which is almost paradoxically structured into character-based chapters. Filmmaker spoke with the Yugoslavian-born Radivojevic about her personal connection to Cyprus, the process of voicing the film’s narrator and other traditionally fiction form elements at work in the film. Evaporating Borders premieres today in the Visions section at […]

Unlike nearly everywhere else in the culture, bigger is not necessarily better at the Eastern Oregon Film Festival. It’s a slender event in a small town. Eleven features and 21 shorts across three days and two venues. Still, they don’t call this stretch of fully enclosed valley “La Grande” for nothing. Despite only containing about 12,000 souls, this mountainous hamlet, like Ian Clark and Benjamin Morgan’s program, leaves you plenty of room to explore. The festival opened on a Thursday night in late February, commencing with a dinner for its supporting members in the town’s recently renovated arts center. Over beer, […]

Following in the footsteps of his debut The Men of Dodge City, Nandan Rao has released his second film Hawaiian Punch for free on Kentucker Audley’s No Budge site. (Just because Kentucker is no longer making independent films, doesn’t mean he can’t afford to support them.) The 66-minute tropical excursion tracks two Mormons (Nicholas Boissonneault, Tor Kristian Anestad) through quotidien, Minimalist circumstances. Though Rao runs Simple Machine, which connects filmmakers with theatrical screening opportunities, at least a fraction of his loyalties appear to lie online.

Filmmaker is delighted to be streaming exclusively Ian Clark’s third feature, MMXIII, on our site until February 27. Clark was one of our “25 New Faces” in 2012, off the back of his gorgeous short Searching for Yellow. A resident of La Grande, Oregon, where he also co-programs the Eastern Oregon Film Festival, Clark beautifully captures, in quiet moments and small details, the essence of small-town life in the Pacific Northwest. Clark previously made the features Pool Room and Country Story, and now with MMXIII has made an expansive third feature that was described as follows on the EOFF website: An experimental self-portrait, […]