Slamdance Film Festival 2021
-
“The Strange Beauty of our World, the Strange Disaster of Our World”: Chris Peters on His Slamdance AI Short, 24,483 Dreams of Death
A spectral and hypnotic entry in this year’s Slamdance Film Festival is Chris Peters’s “film experiment,” 24,483 Dreams of Death, which uses a Mario Bava film (Mask of the Demon) as the sole source material for an A.I.’s imagination of our visual world. Over six days, Peters — a filmmaker, painter as well as software engineer — fed the frames of the film into the computer, producing images that represent, he writes, “… the machine’s neural network forming in real time, not footage in the traditional sense of photographed scenes, but footage of the internal experience of a new intelligence […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2021 -
“There’s Nothing I Can Write That’s as Good as What These Kids are Going to Come Up With”: Frederic Da on Slamdance 2021 Premiere Teenage Emotions
“Being a teenager…is fuckin lit”: The individually colored letters of Teenage Emotions’s title appear one by one against a black screen, filled out by the increasing roar of its young subjects’ voices in mixed-together chorus. But the title, opening aggregation of “emotional time of your life” sentiments and a subsequent left-to-right pan of a crowded high school courtyard soundtracked by Mozart’s Mass in C Minor seem to portend something more histrionic than what follows, a faultlessly realistic, unexpectedly pleasant, funny and relentlessly up-to-date immersion into high school life that (almost) never leaves campus. Frederic Da’s no-budget first feature, Teenage Emotions was shot in collaboration […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 12, 2021 -
Trailer Watch: Slamdance 2021 Premiere Teenage Emotions
One of the highlights of this year’s forthcoming Slamdance, Frederic Da’s feature debut Teenage Emotions was shot during lunch breaks at the high school Da works at as a film teacher. Even with production was cut short by COVID, the results are lively, extremely of-the-moment, immersive and funny. We’ll be publishing an interview with Da on Friday, but for now here’s the trailer.
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 10, 2021 -
Slamdance Announces 132 Features, Shorts and Episodics; Fest Passes Free Until December 31
The Slamdance Film Festival announced today the 132 features, shorts and episodic programs that will comprise its hybrid 2021 edition. Running February 12-25, the festival is billing the program “its most accessible festival ever,” and with good reason. All films, Q&A’s and panels will be available on Slamdance.com, AppleTV, Roku, Firestick and YouTube; “early adopter” passes will be free until December 31; and regular passes are only $10. Additionally, there’s a new section, Unstoppable, showcasing creators with disabilities. The festival’s live component will consist of a two-night drive-in presentation in Joshua Tree open to the public on February 13th and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 30, 2020
