Moderated by Amy Emmerich, President & Chief Content Officer at Refinery29, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s “Refinery29 + Level Forward Present Shatterbox,” a program of seven quite diverse shorts followed by a post-screening discussion, was presented at the comfy SCAD Museum of Art theater on an industry-heavy Monday afternoon. The event featured Parisa Barani (Human Terrain), Tiffany J. Johnson and Adrienne Childress (Girl Callin), Kantú Lentz (Jack and Jo Don’t Want to Die), Channing Godfrey Peoples (Doretha’s Blues), and Lizzie Nastro (the Chloë Sevigny-directed White Echo) onstage to discuss their work – as well as working with Refinery29 and Level Forward’s […]

“Come for the glitz. Stay for the substance,” really should be the tagline on my SCAD Savannah Film Festival T-shirt, I thought to myself during this year’s 22nd edition of the US’s largest university-run film festival. Along with the twice Oscar-nominated Alan Silvestri, attending to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award for Composing, the fest invited a dozen high-profile and up-and-coming actors (Aldis Hodge, Daniel Kaluuya, Danielle Macdonald, Samantha Morton, Elisabeth Moss, Valerie Pachner, Olivia Wilde, Kaitlyn Dever, Beanie Feldstein, Jharrel Jerome, Mena Massoud, and Camila Morrone) to accept an array of accolades. (It also hosted decidedly not-famous journos like myself […]

Once again, this year’s not-to-be-missed event at the 22nd edition of the SCAD Savannah Film Festival (October 26-November 2), the nation’s largest university-run film fest, was the Wonder Women Panel Series. Now in its third year, these always informative discussions highlight female power in the cinematic arts, from directing, to producing, to writing, to the below-the-line crafts. And for me one of the standouts was Wonder Women: Directors, featuring seven ladies behind the lens currently upending every preconceived notion about chick flicks in impressively eclectic ways. Taking place on a laidback, late Tuesday morning at a packed Gutstein Gallery, and […]

The 21st SCAD Savannah Film Festival (October 27 – November 3) featured a strikingly eclectic abundance of Specialty Series discussions and workshops this year. There was “In Conversation” (one with Barry Jenkins, another with Armie Hammer), a three-part Below the Line Panel Series (Casting, Costume Design and Production Design), and Animation Corner: Art in Motion. There was also the TV Sidebar (Starz’s Outlander was the focus, with creators and cast from the show in town — even a costume exhibit at the SCAD Museum of Art), and a Writers Guild of America-affiliated program (Writers on Writing: The Front Runner featured […]

Celebrating its fifth edition, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable is the number one reason I’ve been making the late October pilgrimage to Georgia’s charming city of (Spanish moss-draped) squares for the past few years. (That and the festival’s abundance of southern hospitality, of course. In addition to being the only fest I’ve ever been to that provides buffet-style breakfasts, lunches and dinners, guests are treated to some truly top-notch lodging. In my case, it was the lovely, Savannah River-adjacent Kimpton Brice Hotel, a mere five-minute walk from the fest’s Marshall House headquarters and the majority of […]

This year’s 20th anniversary edition of the SCAD (Savannah College of Art and Design) Savannah Film Festival, which lays claim to being the largest university-run film fest in the world, continued its two-decades-long tradition of mixing Hollywood wattage with downhome southern hospitality. Once again the fest honored an eclectic mix of celebrity guests of all ages (elder statesmen and women included Richard Gere, Sir Patrick Stewart, Aaron Sorkin, Salma Hayek Pinault, Holly Hunter, and Kyra Sedgwick, while the “youngsters” featured the likes of John Boyega, Zoey Deutch, Robert Pattinson, Andrea Riseborough, and Willow Shields). The festival also played host to […]

One of the most intriguing aspects of this year’s Savannah Film Festival’s Docs to Watch Roundtable, which I wrote about a couple months back, was the lively back-and-forth that occurred when the subject of the Oscar shortlist came up. From all appearances it seems that a documentarian’s chances of making that Holy Grail cut are “predetermined” — i.e., if your film didn’t debut at one of a narrow number of A-list fests, well, forget about it. However, Roger Ross Williams, a member of the Documentary Branch of the AMPAS board of governors, took vigorous issue with that assessment. Which intrigued […]

Though the 19th edition of the Savannah Film Festival took place just a couple weeks after Hurricane Matthew forced festival staff to evacuate their offices, this year’s event ended up running every bit as smoothly as the effortlessly gracious, charming city itself. Hosted (and founded) by the Savannah College of Art and Design – SCAD seems to be the South’s answer to Parson’s or RISD – the festival is jam-packed with A-list flicks screened at gorgeous venues, attended by an eclectic mix of topnotch guests. For example, I caught sight of the adorably grateful Molly Shannon at the daily breakfast […]

Few festivals do a better job of rounding up the year’s most enticing documentaries than the always charming Savannah Film Festival. During its 18th edition last fall, the festival — largely curated by publicist Steven Wilson and entertainment reporter Scott Feinberg on behalf of the Savannah College of Art and Design — brought many of the leading lights in documentary filmmaking to the northeastern corner of Georgia for its second annual “Docs to Watch” sidebar. The culmination of the program is a panel, moderated by Feinberg, that includes a smorgasbord of directors whose movies will figure prominently in the award season races to […]

I first heard the term “southern circuit” while talking to former New York Times film critic, The Treatment radio host and venerated international playboy Elvis Mitchell. Over lunch in Krakow several years ago, he described the series of spring and fall film festivals throughout the American south. After a relatively quiet summer, come late August a festival seems to unfurl almost every week somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line, starting with the Sidewalk Moving Pictures Festival in Birmingham, Alabama. While high-profile southern fests such as SXSW, Atlanta, Oxford, Little Rock and Nashville take place during the spring, an even larger share […]