Documentary
-
‘LIFE 2.0? AT STRANGER THAN FICTION
For enthusiasts of Second Life, a 3-D virtual world that enables users to interact with each other through avatars, all the hype surrounding Avatar must have seemed kind of overblown. After all, they’d been living their own science fiction fantasies for years, and their virtual world reflects the fantasies of millions of people, not just Mr. Cameron’s. Last night, Stranger Than Fiction featured a screening of Life 2.0, a dreamy documentary that explores what happens when people start living a Second Life. Director Jason Spingarn-Koff explores the phenomena from the inside – his filmmaker avatar straps on a digital camera and […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on May 12, 2010 -
Shirin Neshat, Women Without Men
Shirin Neshat doesn’t shy away from complexity. Her internationally lauded photography and video installation work takes as its primary subject matter the epistemology that informs how we view Muslim women and the real world forces which shape there lived experiences. She challenges stereotypes and received knowledge in all of her works, a quality that has not gone unnoticed by the international art world. A pair of major installations in the late 1990’s, Turbulent (1998) and Rapture (1999), both of which received prizes at the Biennial of Venice, long ago cemented her place as one of the world’s most compelling visuals artists. That claim […]
by Brandon Harris on May 5, 2010 -
“PIN GODS” AT STF
It may be hard to imagine, but there was a time when documentaries about off-brand sporting events and competitions were a rare thing. In this pre-Spellbound era, Pin Gods managed to make a small bowling-ball sized splash at the Toronto festival, only to fall through the cracks of the distribution system (a fact bemoaned last night by one of Pin Gods’ biggest fans, Stranger Than Fiction programmer Thom Powers). A film about what its director Larry Locke calls, “the small dream,” Pin Gods is an endearingly humane look at four men, each one trying to make a life out of professional […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on May 5, 2010 -
“KIDS” OPENS L.A. FILM FEST; LINE-UP ANNOUNCED
Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids are All Right will open the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival, which announced its line-up today. The Focus Features release, due out in July, stars Annette Benning, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Mia Wasikowska in a story of a lesbian couple and their children, who search for their sperm donor father. The closing night film will be Despicable Me, a 3D comedy-fantasy directed by Chris Renaud and Pierre Coffin. The festival, organized by Film Independent, will be the first held in downtown L.A.’s L.A. Live complex. Rebecca Yeldham is the Director of the festival and David […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 4, 2010 -
NOTES FROM TRIBECA
With Tribeca wrapping up this weekend I thought this would be the right time to give some of my highlights from what I saw this year. Sadly, I didn’t get out to as many movies as I would have liked (but Howard Feinstein did, and he writes about some of them in his preview and at the half way point) but here’s some notes from my vantage point. Best Performance Melissa Leo in The Space Between. Leo plays a grumpy airline stewardess who after her flight is grounded on 9/11 has to watch over one of her passengers, a Pakistani-American […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Apr 30, 2010 -
TRIBECA WINNERS
The winners of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival were announced tonight. Feo Aladag‘s When We Leave received the fest’s top honor, the Founders Award for Best Narrative. The film follows a woman and her son as they try to escape her husband’s abuse and finds shelter with a family in Berlin. Best Documentary went to Alexandra Codina‘s Monica & David, which highlights a couple living with Down syndrome. Other winners include Dana Adam Shaprio‘s Monogamy taking home the New York Competition category and the outlandish comedy Spork won the first ever Best Feature in the Tribeca Film Festival Virtual category. […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Apr 29, 2010 -
SPARROW SONGS, GOD, KAROKE AND BANKSY
Sparrow Songs is a documentary project by filmmaker Alex Jablonski and d.p. Michael Totten, who are making and posting one short doc film per month on their site for a whole year. They are six episodes in, and the films are quite wonderful. Averaging about eight minutes, they are poetic essays that capture the essences of specific places, people, and moments, and that then, without pretension, build these observances into larger statements about love, truth, community, and the ways we are choosing to live our lives. The films include Porn Star Karoke, about the crowd that gathers weekly at an […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 29, 2010 -
“CLEANFLIX” at STF
Despite being born and bred on our shores, Mormonism is still something of a fringe religion. For a lot of Americans, there’s something vaguely worrying about its army of clean-cut, nametag wearing missionaries. Neither Hollywood nor the independent film scene have helped the Mormon case for normalcy – their portrayals tend to fixate on the church’s checkered history with polygamy. Last night’s Stranger Than Fiction featured Cleanflix, a sympathetic look at the more mainstream side of Mormon culture. Directed by Andrew James and Joshua Ligairi, two filmmakers who grew up in the tradition (James is no longer practicing, but Ligairi […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Apr 28, 2010 -
TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL, PART TWO
Some good, or at least interesting, films surfaced at Tribeca this year—I’ll get to a few a couple of paragraphs down, and I wrote about others here last week—almost in spite of the umbrella organization itself. You can’t help but wonder: What is the template for this festival, which has been struggling to find its identity since its inception? Toronto, Sundance, Cannes, Berlin? San Francisco, Denver? Answer: It’s not cast from a festival mold at all, in spite of the invaluable input of former artistic director Peter Scarlet and David Kwok, as far as I can tell the only current […]
by Howard Feinstein on Apr 26, 2010 -
DOUG BLOCK’S “THE KIDS GROW UP” AT STF
Last night’s Stranger Than Fiction screening of Doug Block’s The Kids Grow Up was a homecoming of sorts. Block’s previous foray into personal documentary 51 Birch Street was actually the first ever film to be screened in the series, a fact announced by its organizer, Thom Powers, when he introduced it (and his new baby) to the audience. In 51 Birch Street, Block recounted how his mother’s death and his father’s subsequent remarriage crystallized doubts he’d always had about his parent’s marriage. Block’s latest outing, The Kids Grow Up, is similarly a family affair — it weaves archival footage of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 21, 2010
