Launched ten years ago by the Doha Film Institute, Qumra is an industry convention held annually in Qatar’s capital city of Doha. Through panels, workshops, screenings and masterclasses, Qumra brings together a cross-section of producers, festival programmers and journalists in… Read more
With the SXSW Film Festival kicking off today in Austin, here are 11 works we’re particularly excited about and believe worthy of recommendation. The festival runs through March 16. Babes. Actress Pamela Adlon, especially beloved by this writer for voicing… Read more
Co-founded by Micah Gottlieb and Sarah Winshall, the inaugural edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies is slated to take place this April 4 through 7 in venues across east Los Angeles. Today, the festival announced its inaugural lineup,… Read more
Co-directed by an Israeli-Palestinian collective of four, No Other Land was filmed in the West Bank, in Masafer Yatta, where Israeli military and increasingly civilians have forced Palestinians out from their villages. Premiered at the 74th Berlinale, the debut feature… Read more
MoMA’s annual Doc Fortnight begins as the Berlinale winds down, allowing the fest to grab freshly premiered titles from there, Rotterdam and Sundance (from the latter, opening night selection Realm of Satan, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat and Black Box Diaries). This year’s 23rd edition has 13 features, six shorts and three “evenings with”; I was able to sample about half of the work one way or another. Days after Zhou Tao’s The Periphery of the Base Berlinale premiere, his conceptually immaculate The Axis of Big Data makes its North American premiere here. The milky grey background of the opening […]
The Sundance Institute announced today the eight storytellers who comprise the 2024 Momentum Fellows cohort. Led by the Institute’s Women at Sundance and Artist Accelerator programs, the fellowship “specifically targets mid-career artists hailing from historically marginalized backgrounds, offering them tailored support and resources.” From the press release: The fellowship supports creators working in fiction or nonfiction who have recently achieved a noteworthy accomplishment, such as a highly regarded feature film or series. Momentum provides participants with a full-year program of customized support around current goals they identify for themselves to level up in their craft and career, including an unrestricted […]
The International Film Festival Rotterdam has always been something of a grab bag. This year, at the 53rd edition, the Dutch festival showed 424 films across its various programmes — a reduction from past years due to widespread budget cuts. Still, 424 films (including 183 world premieres) is a mammoth undertaking for any one film critic at a major festival lacking an intuitive method of whittling down a schedule. This is especially true for international press less interested in the trickle-down from Cannes or Venice — Agniezka Holland’s audience award-winner Green Border, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, and Alice Rohrwacher’s La […]
Harvard’s Shorenstein Center announced today the three film professionals who comprise their Spring 2024 cohort of documentary film fellows. Producer and distributor Karin Chien, producer and former executive Amy Hobby, and former director of the Sundance Film Festival as well as Sundance’s Documentary Film Program Tabitha Jackson will, according to a press release, “join the Center under the auspices of the newly-established Documentary Film in the Public Interest research initiative and will spend the semester conducting research and engaging with the Harvard Kennedy School community about the challenges facing the field and its impact on civic life.” “The Documentary Film […]
Dream Team, the third feature by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, is another in the writer-director duo’s run of genre pastiches that double as sociopolitical parables. Here, the influence of ’90s basic cable TV thrillers is channeled into an episodic story about a pair of Interpol agents (Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai) who travel to Mexico to investigate the mysterious death of a corral smuggler. Shot by Horn in characteristically textured 16mm, the film unfolds between a variety of West Coast locales stretching from Baja California to Vancouver. As the body count rises and rumors of a physic coral […]
The SXSW Film Festival announced today 50 new films, XR projects and television programs that complete the 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival lineup. Among the world premieres are the latest from The Voyeurs director Michael Mohan, who reunites with star Sydney Sweeney in Immaculate; Dev Patel’s action thriller Monkey Man; Alice Lowe’s followup to her Prevenge, Timestalker; and a new film from The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby director Ned Benson, The Greatest Hits. Festival favorites traveling from Park City to Austin include Didi, Black Box Diaries, Love Machina, Ghostlight and I Saw the TV Glow. Of particular interest to […]