While “stunning directorial debut” is an overused description that seldom lives up to the Sundance hype, in the case of Brittany Shyne’s Seeds it’s also quite precise. The lush, B&W-shot doc is a gorgeous portrait of what may very well be the last in a long line of generational Black farmers in rural Georgia, one in which Shyne’s camera serves as both portal and means of preservation. By quietly and patiently embedding with two extended families in the small town of Thomasville, Shyne is able to capture everything from the languid rhythm of daily work, from harvesting cotton to repairing […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 25, 2025A video gaming experience therapeutic for both players and its grief-stricken creator, That Dragon, Cancer can currently be purchased for use on your Mac/PC and other devices. Created by Colorado-based developer Ryan Green, the independent video game serves as a reflection of a tragedy he and his family recently experienced: the death of Green’s young son, Joel, who passed away after a sustained battle with cancer. Working on the project as Joel was receiving treatment, Ryan and his family incorporated very real moments of personal history into That Dragon, Cancer, even going as far as to sample Joel and his family’s actual voices […]
by Erik Luers on Mar 18, 2016TORONTO 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, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 28, 2015In 2009, a bill was proposed in the Ugandan parliament that would outlaw homosexuality, making the offense punishable by death. In response, the newspaper The Rolling Stone began outing members of the LGBT community with the headline “Hang Them.” The LGBT activist David Kato, the first openly gay man in the rapidly anti-gay nation of Uganda, took the publication to court to prevent them from further printing the names and pictures of gay people — and won. Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worral’s remarkable documentary Call Me Kuchu chronicles the brave battles of Kato and his comrades, as they very publicly seek to protect […]
by Nick Dawson on Jun 14, 2013The Tribeca Institute’s artist program Tribeca All Access, now 10 years old, today announced 11 new projects that it is supporting. Two of these are by 2012 “25 New Faces” alums: Long Year Begin, a doc project co-helmed by Malika Zouhali-Worrall (Call Me Kuchu), and Terence Nance’s political thriller The Lobbyists, a very intriguing follow-up to An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. Other promising projects already on my radar that TAA is funding include Roots & Webs, a mushroom-themed doc produced by Beasts of the Southern Wild‘s Josh Penn; Obvious Child, Gillian Robespierre’s edgy rom com; and Pilgrim Song director Martha Stevens’ third feature, Papaw Easy. Commenting on Tribeca All Access’ […]
by Nick Dawson on Mar 14, 2013The funny thing about film festivals is that there never seems to be enough time to talk about the films you’ve just seen. Distribution strategies, yes, industry gossip, most definitely, but the actual creative decisions and approaches involved in making the films themselves – barely! So the Grand Cinema’s mini-festival celebrating Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in Tacoma, WA, last month felt like a truly rare treat. Bringing together 14 of the actors and filmmakers or filmmaking teams on the list, including myself and Katherine Fairfax Wright, my directing partner on Call Me Kuchu, The Grand Cinema scheduled […]
by Malika Zouhali-Worrall on Sep 5, 2012In 2008, Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall were both in a New York bar to celebrate the birthday of a mutual friend, producer Valentina Canavesio (the wife of another of this year’s 25 New Faces, Omar Mullick). While waiting for the main party to arrive, they began chatting and discovered they had a similar worldview and had both lived, worked and traveled in Eastern and Central Africa. Eighteen months later, Zouhali-Worrall contacted Fairfax Wright about a documentary she wanted to make on the LGBT community in Uganda, where a bill was being put forward to make homosexuality punishable by […]
by Webmaster on Jul 19, 2012The strength of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival is also its weakness. This year’s 23rd edition boasts 16 doc and fiction flicks from 12 countries – yet most fall firmly in the category of solid ITVS fare (in fact, only three are narrative features). Like with the agribusiness detailed in Micha X. Peled’s Bitter Seeds, about the epidemic of farmer suicides in India, variety is often an illusion – especially when U.S. or U.S. co-productions are in the majority. This is another way of saying that, yes, the chances of seeing a stinker at HRWFF are slim, but there’s […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 7, 2012