The Grand Jury and Audience Awards of the 2019 Florida Film Festival were presented at the Awards Ceremony on Saturday, with the Grand Jury Award for Best Narrative Feature going to Chained for Life directed by Aaron Schimberg, and the Grand Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature went to Roll Red Roll directed by Nancy Schwartzman.
Eleven feature films, including eight first and three second films along with fifteen short films, have been selected for the 2019 Cannes Critics’ Week. Litigante, the second film by Colombian director Franco Lolli, will open the 58th edition, which will close with the first part of a trilogy, Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (Chun jiang shui nuan), the first film from the young Chinese prodigy filmmaker Gu Xiaogang.
Mark Blanchard’s award winning independent film A World Away will screen at the upcoming Myrtle Beach International Film Festival 2019 on Saturday, April 27, 2019. A World Away is Official Winner of Chicago Independent Film Festival 2019 for Best Film Feature, Best Ensemble Cast, Audience Choice For Best Film.
Nearly $40,000 in prizes and awards were presented to the winners of the juried Golden Gate Award (GGA) competitions at the 2019 San Francisco International Film Festival. The top prizes New Directors Award and $10,000 cash prize went to The Chambermaid, directed by Lila Avilés and Documentary Feature Award and $10,000 cash prize went to Midnight Traveler directed by Hassan Fazili.
Director Yu Gu follows several former cheerleaders through their legal and personal journeys in a David and Goliath fight, as they fight for minimum wage and end 50 years of inequality inflicted by the NFL in her new documentary A Woman’s Work: The NFL’s Cheerleader Problem. The documentary will have its World Premiere at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival on Saturday, April 27, 2019.
Julian Kim and Peter S. Lee wrote and directed Happy Cleaners, a true independent film, funded via Kickstarter with the support of KoreanAmericanStory that tackles the subject of growing up in an immigrant household. Happy Cleaners, starring Charles Ryu, Hyanghwa Lim, Yeena Sung, and Yun Jeong, will have its World Premiere at the 2019 Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and is also screening at the 2019 CAAMFest in San Francisco.
HBO Documentary Films is currently in production on a documentary series exploring the NXIVM organization, by Oscar(R)-nominated, Emmy(R)-winning directors Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer (“The Square,” “Control Room,” “Startup.com”).
For more than two decades Dr. Larry Nassar was the osteopathic physician for the U.S. women’s Olympic gymnastics team, as well as a physician at Michigan State University (MSU). During that time, he sexually abused hundreds of female athletes.
Film Independent has selected 13 filmmakers and eight projects for its 2019 Documentary Lab, an intensive two-week program designed to help filmmakers who are currently in post-production on their feature-length documentary films.
Following in the footsteps of Jeanne Moreau, Woody Allen, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jane Fonda, Clint Eastwood, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Manoel de Oliveira, Agnès Varda and Jean-Pierre Léaud, in 2019, the Cannes Film Festival will award Alain Delon the legendary actor who starred in Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard (Palme d’or, 1963) with an Honorary Palme d’or to pay tribute to his presence in the history of film.
The Hungarian film, Eternal Winter, the true story of an unlikely romance in a Soviet labor camp, won the Golden Reel Award for Best Film at the 2019 Tiburon International Film Festival in Tiburon, California. Eternal Winter also won the awards for Best Director for Attila Szasz, Best Actress for Marina Gera along with Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography.
Metrograph Pictures will release The Raft, the documentary about the 1970’s infamous social experiment known as “The Sex Raft.” The film directed by Marcus Lindeen (Regretters, Glorious Accidents); and winner of the Grand Jury Award at 2018 CPH: DOX and Silver Hugo Award at 2018 Chicago International Film Festival will open Friday, June 7 at Metrograph in NY with nationwide expansion to follow.