An initiative of the Doha Film Institute, Qumra is a focused event that connects Qatari and international directors who are receiving different stages of DFI-funded support with industry delegates from across the spectrum of the film world as well as a handful of heavy-hitting “Masters” in a mentor-like capacity who meet with emerging talents and engage in public conversations.  After earning the Berlinale’s Golden Bear for Fire at Sea (2016), an unconventional exploration of the refugee crisis’s impact on the island of Lampedusa, Italian filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi has become one of the most talked about documentarians in the world. Speaking […]

Our new “Recommended on a Friday” column is meant for us here at Filmmaker to throw some attention on films we love that perhaps we haven’t covered online and in print, but this week we’re just going to start by piling on a pick that you’ve already heard quite a bit about: Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight. Jenkins’s previous film, Medicine for Melancholy, was a Filmmaker cover back in 2009, and we’ve been eagerly awaiting his next film since. Moonlight — a bracingly tender, ambitiously realized and wisely provocative character study about the construction of African-American masculine identity — demands to be […]

With his last film, 2013’s Sacro GRA, Italian Gianfranco Rosi became the first documentarian to win the Golden Lion at Venice. He was also the first doc director to win the Golden Bear at Berlin with Fire At Sea, a disciplined, urgent look at the migrant crisis anchored on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, whose proximity to the African coast has made it a target destination for those fleeing their countries. It takes a while before the migrants appear onscreen: initially, Rosi divides his attention among various islanders, including a radio DJ whose tunes are heard all over the island […]

Every film not only tells a story but is a story. Lumping several movies together to find commonality is a perilous pursuit. For example, we have to determine if shared traits operate at the level of content, plot or characters. Or might they be more in the vein of form — style, perhaps, or generic membership? Last week, zeroing in on what I consider the six finest features screening in the first third of the New York Film Festival led me to a marked thematic thread, which we can file under “loneliness and the attempt to escape it.” From the […]

Away from the spotlight of the Berlinale’s (increasingly arbitrary-looking) pick of films competing for the Goldener Bär, the festival’s Forum section sits pretty as a well-established delivery system for reliably bold films that can range anywhere from quirky American character studies to rigorous, avant-garde documentaries. Many Forum artists and filmmakers are unknown quantities in North America, and walking into most of the screenings is as close I get lately to genuine tabula rasa cinema experiences; you really don’t know what you’re going to get here. Lately, the Teutonic-favored American artist/filmmaker James Benning has been taking his feature-length works to the […]