Oscar winning director Oliver Stone will receive the Founder’s Directing Award at the 54th San Francisco International Film Festival scheduled to run April 21 – May 5, 2011. The Founder’s Directing Award is presented each year to a master of world cinema and is given in memory of Irving M. Levin, visionary founder of the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1957.
The Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization behind the annual Academy Awards, voted on Thursday to establish a new executive structure for the organization, replacing retiring executive director Bruce Davis with former Film Independent head Dawn Hudson and long-time Academy executive Ric Robertson, who will become the organization’s CEO and COO respectively. Robertson will report to Hudson in the new leadership tandem.
The Kings Of Leon’s Pentecostal background is featured in a new documentary, which will premiere at the upcoming Tribeca Film Festival in New York. The new film “Talihina Sky : The Story of Kings of Leon” shows never-before-seen home video footage of brothers Nathan, Caleb and Jared Followill surprisingly growing up in rural Tennessee and being the sons of a Pentecostal preacher.
The Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) today announced the HBO Fellowships of the inaugural TFI Documentary Fund. Three fellowships were awarded today, and will receive a total of $100,000 in fellowships and grants toward their documentary projects.
BLANK CITY opens today, April 6, in New York City. The film documents the No Wave film movement of the 70’s and 80’s in New York City where the likes of Steve Buscemi, Jim Jarmusch and John Waters got their start.
Blank City is at once nostalgic, in its look back towards a time and place that was full of raw energy and desperate creativity; eye-opening, with its fantastic clips of experimental films that few people today have probably seen; and very timely, since it speaks directly to our current culture of artists, hipsters and struggling indie filmmakers scraping by in contemporary New York, a city very different from the one portrayed in this film, but the same city nonetheless. Celine Danhier’s documentary is all of these things, and more. It explores the films and music being made in New York in the late 1970s and early 80s, leading to the art boom of the 80s and 90s, the spread of punk and hip hop, and the rise of independent film. The time and place is portrayed by the use of film clips, musical performance footage, and honest and humorous recollections of the people who experienced it. The people interviewed include familiar celebrities, such as Jim Jarmusch, Debbie Harry, and Steve Buscemi, and lesser known artists like Amos Poe, Vivienne Dick, and Nick Zedd.
The official poster of the 64th Cannes Film Festival was unveiled and it features a photo of Faye Dunaway taken by Jerry Schatzberg in 1970. Jerry Schatzberg is a filmmaker from New York who won the Palme d’Or in 1973 for Scarecrow.
The 2011 Micromax IIFA Awards, officially the 12th International Indian Film Academy Awards aka the Bollywood Oscars announced the films nominations. Milan Luthria’s mafia gangster film, Once Upon A Time In Mumbai, leads the field with 12 nomination, followed by Dabangg, an action film starring Salman Khan, with 11 nominations.
The 2011 Tribeca Film Festival (TFF) has added two more films to its feature lineup: a world premiere of Tony Kaye’s drama Detachment and a work-in-progress screening of Stephen C. Mitchell’s Talihina Sky: The Story of Kings of Leon. The 10th edition of the Festival will take place from April 20 to May 1 in lower Manhattan, New York.
The ninth annual Garden State Film Festival, announced its 2011 winners at its awards dinner Sunday. “Expecting Mary” was a big winner taking home both the Audience Choice award and the Bud Abbott Award for Feature-Length Comedy. The comedy-drama film directed by Dan Gordon and starring Elliott Gould and Linda Gray, tells the story of a pregnant young Mary, who has had all the trappings of an upscale life, but it’s only when she finds herself in a small New Mexico town, in a down-trodden trailer park, that she learns the real meaning of love, sacrifice and family.
A record-breaking audience of more than 78,000 people attended this year’s 35th Cleveland International Film Festival, but, there was no closing-night film.
The Sundance Film Festival 2011 documentary, REBIRTH, directed by Jim Whitaker was acquired and will be released by Oscilloscope Laboratories and Showtime Networks. Oscilloscope will release REBIRTH in theatres in August 2011. SHOWTIME will broadcast REBIRTH on the 10th anniversary of the events of September 11th.