“She plans to continue working with ‘first-time performers in live settings’ and is developing a feature she hopes will be in production in the next year,” is how the profile of writer/director Hannah Peterson concluded for our 25 New Faces of Independent Film list in 2018. The Graduates, about a group of students returning to their high school one year after a mass shooting, is that feature, having just made its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival, winning Best Cinematography in a U.S. Narrative Feature for director of photography Carolina Costa. Co-starring John Cho, Maria Dizzia and Mina Sundwall, The […]
by Erik Luers on Jun 20, 2023The Tribeca Festival announced competition winners for its 22nd annual edition during an awards ceremony yesterday at Racket NYC. Awards were presented in the following categories: Feature Film, Short Film, Audio Storytelling, Immersive, Games, Human / Nature, AT&T Untold Stories, and Tribeca X. So Young Shelly Yo’s Smoking Tigers and Guto Parente’s A Strange Path swept U.S. and International Narrative categories, while Andrew H. Brown and Moses Thuranira’s Between the Rains won two out of four awards in the Documentary Competition. Several of this year’s award winners have been covered on the Filmmaker site, including The Gullspång Miracle (Best Editing […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jun 16, 2023The haunted halls of a defunct Catskills hotel wreak psychological violence on a group of young, queer city slickers in Bad Things, the long-awaited sophomore feature from writer-director Stewart Thorndike. Arriving nearly a decade after Lyle, Thorndike’s sapphic take on Rosemary’s Baby starring Gabby Hoffmann, Bad Things similarly tackles plot points and thematic fixations of another scary movie staple—Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining—through a thoroughly queer and feminist perspective. Ruthie (Gayle Rankin) is debating whether or not to sell the now-derelict hotel her mother used to run years prior. With a decisive real estate meeting only days away, Ruthie assembles a […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jun 14, 2023Maria Fredriksson’s astonishing feature debut The Gullspång Miracle isn’t just stranger than fiction—it’s batshit insane. In the broadest of outlines, the doc stars two devoutly religious Norwegian sisters, Kari and May. May visits Kari in Gullspång, Sweden, where Kari now lives. They go to an amusement park where they take a ride inside a fake whale. May finds herself stuck in Sweden for many months, so the two decide to go shopping for an apartment, and end up buying one based on a divine sign they witness there. At the closing, they meet the seller Olaug (formerly known as Lita), […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 11, 2023[Editor’s note: Apolonia, Apolonia opens Friday, Jan. 12, at DCTV Firehouse.] Premiering in international competition at last year’s IDFA, where it took top prize, Lea Glob’s (2015’s Olmo and The Seagull) Apolonia, Apolonia is an intense character study of French figurative painter Apolonia Sokol. The Danish director met the artist, who is of Danish and Polish descent, while searching for the protagonist of her first doc while attending the Danish Film School, and then trailed her for the next 13 years. And while the bohemian free spirit, who was raised in a Paris underground theater founded by her eccentric parents (an […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 10, 2023Award-winning DP Jude Chehab’s cinematographic talents are on full display in her Tribeca-premiering feature debut Q, a haunting look at three generations of women whose lives were forever upended by a cult. In this case, the shadowy entity is the Qubaysiat—a matriarchal religious order founded in the Middle East, where the Lebanese-American filmmaker moved to from Florida at the tender age of 10—and eagerly joined upon arrival in Beirut, having fallen under the influence of a particularly devout member – her own mother. Filmmaker reached out to Chehab, a 25 New Faces 2021 alum, to learn more about her powerful cinematic […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 9, 2023David Gutnik’s Rule of Two Walls, its title a reference to the best place to be between during bombing raids, is a unique take on an exhaustively mined (some would say extracted) story—that of the current war in Europe. Combining doc and fiction, the film follows Ukrainian artists who have chosen to stay and fight for their homeland by making art and preserving culture as a means of resistance. And that includes those involved in the crafting of this very film. To learn all about this meta look at creation in a time of destruction, Filmmaker reached out to the Ukrainian-American writer-director […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jun 8, 2023Tribeca Festival announces today its 2023 short film lineup, which arrives shortly after feature film, TV and NOW programming was revealed last week. This year’s short film slate includes 76 titles across narrative, documentary, animation and music video categories. The Festival will run from June 7-18 in New York City. Of the 91 filmmakers attached to short films at the 2023 Festival, several are actors-turned-directors. Harry Holland casts brother Tom in his latest short Last Call; Francesca Scorsese makes her directorial debut with Fish Out of Water; British actor Alex Lawther also steps behind the camera with For people in […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 25, 2023Just a few days after the Tribeca Festival feature film lineup for 2023 went live, the TV and NOW slate have been announced. Featuring eight premieres of new series and two first looks at returning favorites, the Festival will run from June 7-18 in New York City. The standout among this year’s lineup is the world premiere of Full Circle, a six-episode miniseries directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Dennis Quaid, Claire Danes, Timothy Olyphant, Zazie Beetz, and Jharrel Jerome. The series will hit streamer Max (formerly HBO Max) later this year. Celebrating its 10th anniversary, the NOW program highlights […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 20, 2023Tribeca Festival announces today the feature film lineup for its 2023 edition, which will take place from June 7 through 18. Comprised of 109 features from 127 filmmakers hailing from 36 countries, this year’s slate also boasts a Spotlight+ category that couples screenings with live events and Escape From Tribeca, a “psychotronic sidebar” of global genre movies. “Over the course of 12 thrilling days, we invite audiences to explore the magic of storytelling as a powerful tool of democracy, activism, and social awareness,” said Tribeca Festival Co-Founder and Tribeca Enterprises CEO Jane Rosenthal in a press release. “We’re also proud […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 18, 2023