Locarno Film Festival 2024
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“Cinema Forever” (?): Locarno Film Festival 2024
The biggest headline of the 77th Locarno Film Festival wasn’t a movie but a man: Bollywood megastar Shah Rukh Khan, who attended to receive a career achievement award as a reminder (none is needed) of the role red carpet celebrity plays in drawing money and attention to festivals which can then, aspirationally, redirect both towards smaller title. But even as the whole idea of “cinema” requires increasingly vigilant caretaking, those festivals themselves are nearly all in financial trouble. When I got this job at Filmmaker a decade ago, companies who’d invested a lot of time and money in VR were […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 19, 2024 -
“America is Desperate for a Narrative”: Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez on Invention
Following a decade of work in experimental and documentary cinema, director Courtney Stephens steps into fiction for the first time with Invention, a remarkably resourceful microbudget drama that nonetheless resists strict categorization. Starring and co-conceived by Callie Hernandez, the film draws upon the actress’s real-life relationship with her late father, a medical doctor turned small-time huckster who made a name for himself on local television talk shows and public access programs in the ’90s and 2000s. In this fictionalized telling set in the Berkshires, VHS footage of those TV appearances weave through a story in which Hernandez, playing a version […]
by Jordan Cronk on Aug 15, 2024
