Taxi
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2015 in Ten Double Features
Every cinephile knows the curatorial bliss of a great double feature. A flexing of film nerd muscles while sitting on your ass for three to five hours, a double bill brings two films into dialogue with one another based on style, subject, theme, or whatever connective tissue you can find. Double features, like well-sequenced mixtapes, require the instincts of a programmer. Thanks to streaming, digital rentals, and the perennial ease of sneaking into a second film at your local AMC, the work of making a double bill happen has never been easier. Below, I rally through 10 great double features from […]
by Soheil Rezayazdi on Jan 5, 2016 -
Cinema Eye Honors Announces 2016 Heterodox Award Nominees
Cinema Eye, which presents the Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking as part of the annual Cinema Eye Week, today announced the five nominees for its annual Heterodox Award. The Heterodox Award honors a narrative fiction film that imaginatively incorporates nonfiction strategies, content and/or modes of production. The five films nominated this year for the Cinema Eye Heterodox Award are: Arabian Nights: Volume 1 —The Restless One directed by Miguel Gomes God Bless the Child directed by Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck Tangerine directed by Sean Baker Taxi directed by Jafar Panahi The Tribe directed by Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy With the announcement of […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 18, 2015 -
Dispatches from Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, True/False & Thessaloniki
Sundance SCOTT MACAULAY Check it out: the two top prize winners at Sundance this year, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, both feature as central elements teenagers who stage and film their own versions of classic movies. There’s even overlap between the two films, although Moselle’s Manhattan shut-ins incline more towards Tarantino and Freddy Krueger, while Gomez-Rejon’s teen Pittsburgh auteurs shirk the Romero roots of their hometown for deep dives into the Criterion Collection. For film lovers of a certain age, both Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Wolfpack […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2015 -
Watch: Two Scenes from Jafar Panahi’s Taxi, the Iranian Director’s Third Feature Made During a 20-Year Ban
“Either you have to escape the country or start hoping to go back to jail,” a woman sitting in the passenger seat tells Jafar Panahi in the first clip shared from the Iranian director’s latest feature Taxi. Driving a cab through Tehran and conversing with passengers, Panahi is again the star in his third feature since a 20-year-ban on filmmaking imposed by the Iranian government. In another clip, a young girl reels off a checklist of guidelines necessary to make a distributable film in Iran (headscarves on women, no relations between the genders). The winner of the Berlin Film Festival’s […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 17, 2015 -
Berlinale 2015: Jafar Panahi, Promising Newcomers and the Decline of Terrence Malick
In the weeks leading up to this year’s Berlin Film Festival, the festival’s press office revealed an increasingly enticing succession of titles competing in its main slate, generating very high expectations. Somewhat incredibly, they were met. While the Berlinale’s Competition customarily offers a few good films amongst a lot of mediocrity, the trend was reversed this time around, with easily the most outstanding selection in recent memory. In an equally welcome turn, the prizes awarded by Darren Aronofsky’s jury fully reflected the program’s quality, rewarding the most deserving entries while confirming the Berlinale’s avidly nurtured reputation as the most politically […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 17, 2015 -
Previewing Berlinale 2015: Malick, Herzog, Panahi and More
Given that Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel kicked off the Berlinale the last two years, the response was less than enthusiastic when Isabel Coixet’s Nobody Wants the Night was announced as this year’s opening film (though, predictably, many a Twitter wag delighted in the film title’s pliability for expressing what it is that nobody wants). The Greenland-set period drama stars Juliette Binoche as Josephine, the wife of arctic explorer Robert Peary, and follows her attempt to rejoin her husband on his mission to reach the North Pole. When an Inuit woman comes to her aid on […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Feb 4, 2015
