WOMEN & WINE[/caption]
ShortsFest Weekend, Seattle International Film Festival’s celebration of short films, that takes place every year over Memorial Day Weekend, announced this year’s Jury Award winners. This year’s Festival which runs May 18 to June 11, features 163 short films, including 22 World, 12 North American, and 19 US premieres.
Films
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WOMEN & WINE, REFUGEE and PUSSY Win Seattle International Film Festival ShortsFest Jury Awards
[caption id="attachment_22532" align="aligncenter" width="1158"] WOMEN & WINE[/caption]
ShortsFest Weekend, Seattle International Film Festival’s celebration of short films, that takes place every year over Memorial Day Weekend, announced this year’s Jury Award winners. This year’s Festival which runs May 18 to June 11, features 163 short films, including 22 World, 12 North American, and 19 US premieres.
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THE REAGAN SHOW, A Doc Look at the First TV President, Opens June 30 in NY & LA | Trailer
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THE REAGAN SHOW[/caption]
Pacho Velez’s and Sierra Pettengill’s THE REAGAN SHOW is an all-archival documentary about the original performer-president’s role of a lifetime: Leader of the Free World. A hit at the recent Tribeca Film Festival, the movie will open in New York at the Metrograph Theater and in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Monica Film Center on Friday, June 30, with a national rollout to immediately follow. It will also become available on VOD on July 4.
Teasing apart the spectacle at the heart of finger-on-the-button global diplomacy, THE REAGAN SHOW follows Ronald Reagan’s rivalry with charismatic Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, tracing how the Communicator-in-Chief uses his public relations chops to overcome Soviet mistrust, the objections of a skeptical press corps and the looming threat of WW III. Chock full of wit and political irony, and told solely through 1980s network news and videotapes created by the Reagan administration itself, the film explores Reagan’s made-for-TV approach to politics as he faced down the United States’ greatest rival.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07BHVGm-Y6s
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Award-winning LGBT Documentary POLITICAL ANIMALS will be Released on DVD and VOD on June 6th | Trailer
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Political Animals[/caption]
The award-winning LGBT documentary Political Animals, directed by Jonah Markowitz (Shelter), and co-directed by Tracy Wares (DP: Bomb It, Gay Republicans), will be released on DVD and VOD on June 6th in the U.S. and Canada via Gravitas Ventures.
Documentary Political Animals is an inspiring portrait of four defiant California politicians – all out women – who bravely fought hatred and homophobia through pioneering legislative efforts in California to make political history, paving the way for success in the fight for Equality, and to create lasting and significant social change.
Political Animals celebrates the legendary civil rights victories of the first four openly gay elected California state politicians – who were all women: Carole Migden, Sheila Kuehl, Jackie Goldberg, and Christine Kehoe. An inspiring portrait of four defiant politicians who refused to let hatred and homophobia stop them from making history and achieving legal recognition for LGBT people throughout California and the United States.
Political Animals documents the tough struggles they endured together, and celebrates their pioneering success in the fight for Equality and the sweet victories these unforgettable women created to pave the way for lasting and significant social change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ9jikA5Ip4
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Watch the Green Band ‘Clean’ Trailer for THE LITTLE HOURS
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Alison Brie, Kate Micucci and Aubrey Plaza appear in The Little Hours by Jeff Baena.[/caption]
The Little Hours directed by Jeff Baena which debuted at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, has released the new green band trailer.
The film starring Alison Brie, Dave Franco, Kate Mucucci, Aubrey Plaza, John C. Reilly, Molly Shannon, Fred Armisen, Jemima Kirke, Nick Offerman, Adam Pally, Jon Gabrus, Lauren Weedman will open in New York and Los Angeles on June 30th.
Medieval nuns Alessandra (Alison Brie), Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza), and Ginevra (Kate Micucci) lead a simple life in their convent. Their days are spent chafing at monastic routine, spying on one another, and berating the estate’s day laborer. After a particularly vicious insult session drives the peasant away, Father Tommasso (John C. Reilly) brings on new hired hand Massetto (Dave Franco), a virile young servant forced into hiding by his angry lord. Introduced to the sisters as a deaf-mute to discourage temptation, Massetto struggles to maintain his cover as the repressed nunnery erupts in a whirlwind of pansexual horniness, substance abuse, and wicked revelry.
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FilmRise to Release Ramona S. Diaz’s Sundance Winning Documentary MOTHERLAND | Trailer
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Motherland[/caption]
Ramona S. Diaz’s documentary Motherland which world premiered earlier this year at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, will be released in the Summer by FilmRise.
Motherland, which won the World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Award for Commanding Vision at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, takes us into the heart of the planet’s busiest maternity hospital in one of the world’s poorest and most populous countries: the Philippines. The film’s viewer, like an unseen outsider dropped unobtrusively into the hospital’s stream of activity, passes through hallways, enters rooms and listens in on conversations. At first, the surrounding people are strangers. But as the film continues, it’s absorbingly intimate, rendering the women at the heart of the story increasingly familiar. Three women—Lea, Aira and Lerma—emerge to share their stories with other mothers, their families, doctors and social workers. While each of them faces daunting odds at home, their optimism, honesty and humor suggest a strength that they will certainly have to summon in the years ahead.
Diaz said: “I’m very much looking forward to partnering with FilmRise on the release of our film after successful premieres at festivals both in the U.S. and abroad. We feel strongly that the film will strike a chord with viewers, all the more so in today’s political and cultural climate.”
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Award-winning Documentary, A CAMBODIAN SPRING to US Premiere at Brooklyn Film Festival | Trailer
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A Cambodian Spring[/caption]
The award-winning documentary, A Cambodian Spring, from UK video journalist/filmmaker Chris Kelly, will have its US premiere at the Brooklyn Film Festival.
The film won the Special Jury Prize earlier this year at 2017 Hot Docs in Toronto.
A Cambodian Spring is an intimate and unique portrait of three people caught up in the chaotic and often violent development that is shaping modern-day Cambodia. Spending 9 years on the film (shooting for 6 of those years) the film charts the growing wave of land-rights protests that led to the ‘Cambodian Spring’ and the tragic events that followed. This film is about the complexities – both political and personal, of fighting for what you believe in.
“A Cambodian Spring is for me a deeply personal film, which took 9 years to complete,” says director Chris Kelly. “It is an exploration of what motivates us, what gives our lives meaning, and what happens when our personal desires colour and shape our actions. It is an unapologetically subjective portrait of my time in Cambodia, of the people who shared their lives with me and of the shifting landscapes, both physical and emotional, that I found there.”
The film also includes a riveting original soundtrack by the UK’s best known electronic music artist James Holden.
2017 Brooklyn Film Festival Screening Time and Location
showtime: 7:30 pm | Wednesday June 7 | Wythe Hotel
showtime: 8:30 pm | Sunday June 11 | Wythe Hotel
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Award-Winning Argentinian Film PAULINA Will Open in NY on June 23 | Trailer
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Paulina[/caption]
Santiago Mitre’s award winning film Paulina will open Friday, June 23, 2017, at New York’s Spectacle Theater (located on 124 S 3rd St, Brooklyn, NY), before a national expansion during summer 2017.
Santiago Mitre’s (El Estudiante) Paulina is the winner of the Nespresso Grand Prix Award and the Fipresci Award at Cannes (Critics’ Week) – as well as eight Best Actress awards given to Dolores Fonzi (Truman, The Aura, Plata Quemada).
Both a remake and a “potent update” (Eye for Film) of Daniel Tinayre’s La Patota (1960), Paulina is a complex exploration of the ethics of political action and a provocative character study of a social justice activist – and her unsettling choices in the face of violence and social discrimination. Set in a racially and politically marginalized community in Argentina’s Northeast, the film tackles the moral ambiguities of those who seek to aid and ally themselves with the disadvantaged from their positions of privilege.
When the film begins, Paulina (Dolores Fonzi, in a searing performance) leaves a promising legal career in the shadow of her politically-powerful father to work as a school-teacher in a rural village, on the border with Paraguay and Brazil. Paulina speaks no Guaraní and her teenage students artfully parry her attempts to lift them into political consciousness.
These uneasy encounters, and subtly observed civics lessons, echo disturbingly in the aftermath of a violent sexual assault by a group of young men. Paulina’s decisions in its wake, portrayed without judgment by Fonzi, mercilessly test her relationships and core beliefs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws2bP9IWB1E
Awards
Grand Prize, Cannes Film Festival (Critics’ Week – 2015)
FIPRESCI Prize, Cannes Film Festival (Critics’ Week – 2015)
Horizons Award, San Sebastián Int’l Film Festival
Grand Jury Prize, Miami International Film Festival
Torino FIlm Festival – Special Jury Award
Best Actress Winner
– Dolores Fonzi –
Premio Fenix (Mexico’s Academy Awards)
Beijing International Film Festival
Premio ACE 2017
Biarritz International Festival of Latin American Cinema
Platino Ibero-American Film Award
Argentinean Film Critics Association
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences of Argentina
Torino Film Festival
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Bill Morrison Unearths a Treasure Trove of Silent-Era Cinema in DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME | Trailer
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First Avenue in Dawson City, 1898. – DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME[/caption]
Bill Morrison’s mesmerizing new film, Dawson City: Frozen Time will open in New York on Friday, June 9 at the IFC Center with a national rollout to follow.
Dawson City: Frozen Time pieces together the bizarre true history of a collection of over 500 nitrate film prints from the 1910s and 1920s, which were lost for decades until being discovered buried under a hockey rink in a former Klondike gold rush town. Using these rare silent movies and a rich sampling of newsreels and historical photographs, fused with an enigmatic score by Sigur Rós collaborator Alex Somers (Captain Fantastic), this haunting cinematic mosaic depicts the unique history of Dawson City by chronicling the life cycle of a singular film collection through its exile, burial, rediscovery, and salvation. In telling this story of “one of the most astonishing and unexpected bonanzas in cinematic history” (Lawrence Weschler, Vanity Fair), director Bill Morrison conjures the forgotten ties between the fledgling movie industry and Manifest Destiny in North America.
The films of Bill Morrison combine a documentarian’s thirst for uncovering hidden histories with an archivist’s obsession for recovering lost cinematic treasures. Morrison’s Decasia (2002) was heralded by Errol Morris as “the best film ever made” and critic J. Hoberman called it “the most widely acclaimed American avant-garde film of the fin de siècle.” His other notable films include The Miners’ Hymns (2011), a document of the early 20th-century coal mines of northern England, and The Great Flood (2013), a collaboration with Bill Frisell inspired by the Mississippi River Flood of 1927.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stxrwpvQZIs
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The Watergate Drama THE SILENT MAN Starring Liam Neeson Gets A September Release | Trailer
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The Silent Man[/caption]
The Silent Man, the film based on the life of Mark Felt, the secret high-ranking FBI informant during the Watergate scandal who is famously known as “Deep Throat” will be released in the Fall by Sony Pictures Classics. The Silent Man is set for a September release, as the recent political turmoil has sparked a renewed public interest in Felt’s story.
Written and directed by Peter Landesman (Concussion), The Silent Man features an all-star cast including Academy Award–nominated Liam Neeson (Schindler’s List, Taken) in the title role of Mark Felt, as well as Diane Lane (Unfaithful), Marton Csokas (The Equalizer), Josh Lucas (The Lincoln Lawyer), Tony Goldwyn (“Scandal”), Michael C. Hall (“Dexter”), Tom Sizemore (“Black Hawk Down”), Wendi McLendon-Covey (Bridesmaids), Ike Barinholtz (Suicide Squad), Bruce Greenwood (Star Trek), Brian D’Arcy James (Spotlight), Kate Walsh (“Private Practice”), Noah Wyle (W.), and Maika Monroe (It Follows).
The Silent Man centers on “Deep Throat”, the pseudonym given to the notorious whistleblower for one of the greatest scandals of all time, Watergate. The true identity of the secret informant remained a mystery and source of much public curiosity and speculation for more than 30 years. That is until, in 2005, special agent Mark Felt shockingly revealed himself as the tipster. This unbelievable true story chronicles the personal and professional life of the brilliant and uncompromising Felt, who risked and ultimately sacrificed everything – his family, his career, his freedom – in the name of justice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR1IjeAdevI
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IFC Films to Release Lars Von Trier’s THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT Starring Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman
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The House That Jack Built[/caption]
Lars Von Trier’s The House That Jack Built, starring Matt Dillon, Bruno Ganz, Uma Thurman, Riley Keough and Siobhan Fallon Hogan, will be released in the U.S. by IFC Films. IFC Films also released Von Trier’s 2009 film Antichris.
USA in the 1970s. We follow the highly intelligent Jack through 5 incidents and are introduced to the murders that define Jack’s development as a serial killer. We experience the story from Jack’s point of view. He views each murder as an artwork in itself, even though his dysfunction gives him problems in the outside world. Despite the fact that the final and inevitable police intervention is drawing ever near (which both provokes and puts pressure on Jack) he is – contrary to all logic – set on taking greater and greater chance.
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Award Winning Comedy FUTURE ’38 to NY Premiere at Art of Brooklyn Film Festival
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FUTURE ’38[/caption]
FUTURE ’38, which won the Audience Award at this year’s 2017 Slamdance, will have its New York premiere on June 8 at the Art of Brooklyn Film Festival.
FUTURE ’38 from director/writer Jamie Greenberg, is a technicolor valentine to the classic screwball comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s, with a sci-fi twist. It’s a time-travel adventure which presents the exotic future-world of 2018 A.D., as imagined by the film-makers of 1938! Starring Betty Gilpin, Nick Westrate, Robert John Burke, Ethan Phillips and Sean Young.
ART OF BROOKLYN SCREENING INFORMATION:
NY PREMIERE – Thursday, June 8, 9:00pm – St. Francis College, Brooklyn
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Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Drops First Official Trailer for CANT’T STOP WON’T STOP: A BAD BOY STORY
Last night Sean “Diddy” Combs took the stage at the Billboard Music Awards to drop the first official trailer for the highly anticipated documentary Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story, that world premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival.
Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story, produced by Sean “Diddy” Combs, and Heather Parry, alongside executive producers Michael Rapino, Andre Harrell and Alex Avant, explores the passion and personalities of Bad Boy and will be available on Apple Music on June 25.
Directed by Daniel Kaufman, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A Bad Boy Story is an exclusive look behind the scenes at the history of Bad Boy through a complex portrait of the label’s mastermind, Sean “Diddy” Combs, as he tries to reunite his Bad Boy Family in the course of a frantic three week rehearsal period. As they prepare to celebrate the label’s 20th anniversary, the film traces Bad Boy’s emergence in Harlem and Brooklyn, follows it’s meteoric rise, explores the tragic killing of Biggie Smalls, and celebrates Bad Boy’s influence in reshaping music, fashion, marketing and culture.
“I knew this was a story that should be shared with the world. Heather Parry and Live Nation Productions, and Director Daniel Kaufman, helped create this very special documentary,” says Sean Combs on the making of the film. “Now I’m blessed to also be working with Apple Music to showcase the film and share Bad Boy’s history and impact with fans. The support Live Nation, Apple Music and everyone on the team has given to this project is a true testament to the Bad Boy legacy.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtqIL4L8HmE