If there’s one thing we can be sure of about Kathy Murphy, the middle-aged woman at the center of the moving debut feature, For the Birds, by director Richard Miron, it’s that she loves animals. Birds in general, ducks and turkeys in particular. Kathy has been “collecting” them for years now on her small makeshift farm in Upstate New York alongside her begrudging husband, Gary. Less an obsession than an inherent need, Kathy values her birds above all else, and as crowding and cleanliness prompt local animal sanctuaries to threaten legal action of behalf of the wellbeing of Kathy’s feathered […]

The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today the ten documentaries selected for the 2016 IFP Filmmaker Labs, IFP’s annual yearlong fellowship for first-time feature directors. The creative teams of the selected films are currently attending the first week’s sessions – The Time Warner Foundation Completion Labs – taking place May 11-15 in New York City. As of 2015, the 196 projects that have gone through the program include such critically acclaimed films as the recent documentaries (T)error by Lyric Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe (Independent Lens), Nanfu Wang’s Hooligan Sparrow (POV), Sharon Shattuck’s From This Day Forward (POV), Leah […]

TORONTO by Scott Macaulay High Rise has long been considered one of the J.G. Ballard’s most “adaptable” books, with the author’s dispassionate meditations on disassociation, inner and outer space, and the psychologies and paraphilias unleashed by 20th-century life encased within the sturdy confines of a modern apartment building and a class-based tale of survival. Nonetheless, High Rise has taken decades to reach the screen, despite the attachments of numerous directors, including Vincenzo Natali, Bruce Robinson and, revealed producer Jeremy Thomas at a talk at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, interest from Nicolas Roeg. Premiering at the festival in Platform, […]