Cameraperson

  • Film Society of Lincoln Center to Spotlight Female Cinematographers in ‘The Female Gaze’

    [caption id="attachment_26747" align="aligncenter" width="1200"]Forrest Goodluck, Sasha Lane and Chloë Grace Moretz appear in The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Desiree Akhavan, an official selection of the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2018 Sundance FIlm Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Jeong Park. Forrest Goodluck, Sasha Lane and Chloë Grace Moretz appear in The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Desiree Akhavan.
    Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Jeong Park.[/caption] The Film Society of Lincoln Center will host The Female Gaze (July 26 – August 9), spotlighting the amazing work of such accomplished international female cinematographers as Agnès Godard, Natasha Braier, Kirsten Johnson, Joan Churchill, Maryse Alberti, Ellen Kuras, Babette Mangolte, and Rachel Morrison. Laura Mulvey’s landmark 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” suggested an imbalance of power in film dominated by the male gaze and heterosexual male pleasure; this series poses the question: is there such a thing as the “Female Gaze”? This year, Morrison made history as the first woman nominated for the Best Cinematography Oscar for Mudbound, a triumph that also underscored the troubling issue of gender inequality in the film industry. Few jobs on a movie set have been as historically closed to women as that of cinematographer—the persistence of the term “cameraman” says it all. Despite this lack of representation, trailblazing women have left their mark on the field through extraordinary artistry and profound vision. As seen through their eyes, films by directors like Claire Denis, Jacques Rivette, Chantal Akerman, Ryan Coogler, and Lucrecia Martel are immeasurably richer, deeper, and more wondrous. The Female Gaze opens with a double feature of unforgettable collaborations between Agnès Godard and Claire Denis—from the sensual gaze on male bodies in Beau travail to that of familial love in 35 Shots of Rum—launching the series’ central dialogue with Godard in person. Then on July 28, cinematographers Natasha Braier, Ashley Connor, Agnès Godard, and Joan Churchill join Film Society audiences to discuss their careers, experiences in the film industry, and their interpretations of the Female Gaze in a free talk, sponsored by HBO®. “We’re showcasing amazing cinematography in a variety of styles, from women who have worked with directors of all genders, and contemplating what a female gaze might mean,” said Florence Almozini, FSLC Associate Director of Programming. “Some have built long careers with their directors, such as Godard with Denis, while others like Alberti or Louvart have worked with a range of filmmakers from around the world. There’s also a distinctive emerging class of female DPs innovating in the field, and our series reveals how this ‘gaze’ evolves with each new partnership and generation.” Featuring 36 films shot by 23 women, the program includes blockbusters (Creed), independent American fare (Swoon, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), selections from the canon (Jeanne Dielman…), contemporary international arthouse titles (Tokyo Sonata, The Headless Woman, Holy Motors), rarities ripe for rediscovery (La Captive), and two sneak previews: The Miseducation of Cameron Post and I Think We’re Alone Now, both prizewinners at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. The complete lineup is below, arranged by DP. FILMS AND DESCRIPTIONS All screenings held at the Walter Reade Theater (165 West 65th Street) unless otherwise noted.

    Maryse Alberti

    Creed Ryan Coogler, USA, 2015, 133m The legend of Rocky lives on as Michael B. Jordan’s gutsy Adonis Johnson—son of Apollo Creed—sets out to prove he’s got what it takes to be the next champ, leaving his luxe L.A. life behind to train in the hard-knock gyms of Philadelphia with the Italian Stallion himself. After the breakout success of Fruitvale Station, director Ryan Coogler shows his facility for major budget spectacle, balancing a rousing underdog sports story with a poignant portrait of intergenerational friendship. The virtuoso lensing of Maryse Alberti astonishes in a dazzling four-and-a-half minute fight sequence that unfolds in one bruising, breathless take. Velvet Goldmine Todd Haynes, UK/USA, 1998, 35mm, 124m The birth of Oscar Wilde; the staged death of a flamboyant rock star modeled closely after David Bowie; the delirious inebriation of London at the height of the glam era: Haynes’s discourse on celebrity culture is as sprawling and multi-tracked as his previous film, Safe, had been clinically restrained. Much of Velvet Goldmine, the story of a journalist who tries to reconstruct the sordid life story of the failed glam rock star he’d idolized as a young man, was shot in London, and the move gave Haynes a chance to abandon the cloister-like suburbs of his earlier films for a much more colorful, Dionysian milieu. Haynes and cinematographer Maryse Alberti crafted one of the most visually thrilling music movies of the 1990s. An NYFF36 Selection.

    Barbara Alvarez

    The Headless Woman / La mujer sin cabeza Lucrecia Martel, Argentina/France/Italy/Spain, 2008, 35mm, 87m Spanish with English subtitles DP Barbara Alvarez imparts a restrained—and very strange—spatial texture to Lucrecia Martel’s excitingly splintered third feature, about a woman (a stunning María Onetto) in a state of phenomenological distress following a mysterious road accident. Martel’s rare gift for building social melodrama from sonic and spatial textures, behavioral nuances, and an unerringly brilliant sense of the joys, tensions, and endless reserves of suppressed emotion lurking within the familial structure is here pushed to another level of creative daring. An NYFF46 selection. 35mm print courtesy of UCLA Film & Television Archive.

    Akiko Ashizawa

    Tokyo Sonata Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2008, 120m Japanese with English subtitles What strange deceptions lurk beneath the placid veneer of the average Japanese family? Horror maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s unexpected—but wholly rewarding—foray into family melodrama-cum-black comedy quivers with an undercurrent of dread as salaryman dad (Teruyuki Kagawa) loses his job and desperately attempts to maintain the illusion that he’s still employed; his grade-school son (Kai Inowaki) rebels by secretly taking (gasp!) piano lessons; and mom (Kyōko Koizumi) finds what she’s been looking for with her own kidnapper. The elegant long shots of Akiko Ashizawa toy with the meticulous framings of Ozu as Kurosawa guides the film through a series of increasingly audacious tonal shifts. An NYFF46 selection.

    Diane Baratier

    The Romance of Astrea and Celadon / Les amours d’Astrée et de Céladon Éric Rohmer, France, 2007, 35mm, 109m At the age of 88, Éric Rohmer bid adieu to cinema with this enchanting mythological idyll, which brims with all the vitality and freshness of youth. Frequent Rohmer cinematographer Diane Baratier conjures a sun-dappled bucolic dream vision of fifth-century Gaul, where a beguiling fable of romantic misunderstanding plays out when a band of druids and nymphs intervene in the lovers’ quarrel between androgynously beautiful shepherd Celadon (Andy Gillet) and his jealous paramour Astrea (Stéphanie Crayencour). Introducing hitherto untapped themes of gender and sexual fluidity into his work, Rohmer crafts an exalted paean to love both spiritual and carnal. An NYFF45 selection.

    Céline Bozon

    La France Serge Bozon, France, 2007, 35mm, 102m French with English subtitles In the fall of 1917, as World War I rages, a lovelorn soldier’s wife (Sylvie Testud) disguises herself as a man and sets off for the front in search of her missing husband. Along the way, she meets up with a company of soldiers under the command of a gruff lieutenant (Pascal Greggory), who reluctantly allows Camille to join their ranks. From time to time, these surprisingly sensitive, introspective men break out an assortment of homemade instruments and perform original songs written for the film by Benjamin Esdraffo and the artist known as Fugu, styled after the American “sunshine pop” of The Beach Boys and The Mamas and the Papas. Exquisitely shot by Céline Bozon (the director’s sister), this unclassifiable hybrid of war movie and movie musical is truly unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. Print courtesy of the Institut Français.

    Natasha Braier

    The Milk of Sorrow / La teta asustada Claudia Llosa, Spain/Peru, 2009, 35mm, 94m Spanish and Quechua with English subtitles Fausta, the only daughter of an aged indigenous Peruvian mother, is said to have been nursed on “the milk of sorrow.” This accursed designation is bestowed on the children of victims of the former terrorist regime. Fausta has learned of her mother’s past and her own presupposed fate through invented song, which is both an art form and oral history tradition. Upon her mother’s death, she must venture beyond the safety of her uncle’s home and choose whether or not to lend her gift of song so that she can pay for a proper burial. Llosa and DP Natasha Braier capture the striking beauty of Lima’s outskirts, as well as a revelatory performance by Magaly Solier, with dignity and grace. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival. A New Directors/New Films 2009 selection. The Neon Demon Nicolas Winding Refn, Denmark/France/USA/UK, 2016, 118m Like a 21st-century Showgirls meets Suspiria, Nicolas Winding Refn’s delirious plunge into the fake plastic horror of the image-obsessed fashion industry trafficks in both high-camp excess and kaleidoscopically stylized splatter. Elle Fanning is the guileless recent L.A. transplant whose fresh-faced youth and beauty almost instantly land her a high-profile modeling contract. Whatever “it” is, she has it. And a coterie of monstrously jealous, flavor-of-last-month Hollyweird burnouts will stop at nothing to get it. Working in a supersaturated, electric day-glo palette, DP Natasha Braier fashions a sleek, freaky-seductive vision of L.A.’s dark side.

    Caroline Champetier

    The Gang of Four / La bande des quatre Jacques Rivette, France/Switzerland, 1989, 160m French and Portuguese with English subtitles Four women, a shadowy conspiracy, and a whole lot of acting exercises: we’re firmly in Rivette territory in one of the director’s most spellbinding explorations of the sometimes terrifyingly thin line between everyday life and the strangeness beneath it. A quartet of aspiring actresses live together while studying with a demanding coach (Bulle Ogier). As they rehearse Pierre Marivaux’s La Double inconstance, offstage drama creeps into their lives in the form of a menacing mystery man (Benoît Régent) with a sinister story to tell. Caroline Champetier’s moody lensing—muted reds, golds, and browns—creates the feeling of an all-enveloping universe operating according to its own paranoid logic.

    Holy Motors

    Leos Carax, France, 2012, 116m French and English with English subtitles Cinematographers Caroline Champetier and Yves Cape both lensed this unclassifiable, expansive movie from Leos Carax about a man named Oscar (longtime collaborator Denis Lavant) who inhabits 11 different characters over the course of a single day. This shape-shifter is shuttled from appointment to appointment in Paris in a white-stretch limo driven by the soignée Edith Scob (Eyes Without a Face); not on the itinerary is an unplanned reunion with Kylie Minogue. To summarize the film any further would be to take away some of its magic; the most accurate précis comes from its own creator, who aptly described Holy Motors after its world premiere in Cannes as “a film about a man and the experience of being alive.” An NYFF50 selection. Le Pont du Nord Jacques Rivette, France, 1982, 129m French with English subtitles Paris becomes a labyrinthine life-size game board in one of the most elaborate of Jacques Rivette’s sprawling, down-the-rabbit-hole cine-puzzles. Bulle Ogier and her daughter Pascale star, respectively, as a hitchhiking ex-con and a leather-clad tough girl who meet by chance on the city streets, come into possession of a curious map, and find themselves caught in a sinister cobweb of underworld conspiracy. Shooting seemingly on the fly, almost documentary-style on the streets of Paris, cinematographers Caroline Champetier and William Lubtchansky telegraph a freewheeling, anything-goes sense of play, as well as a creeping surveillance paranoia. An NYFF19 selection. 4K restoration from the 16mm negative, supervised by Véronique Rivette and Caroline Champetier at Digimage Classic, with the help of the CNC.

    Joan Churchill

    Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer Nick Broomfield & Joan Churchill, UK/USA, 2004, 93m Just months after Monster made Aileen Wuornos a household name—and Charlize Theron an Oscar darling—documentarian Nick Broomfield and co-director/cinematographer Joan Churchill unleashed this riveting portrait of the real-life serial killer. Of the two films, it remains the more chilling experience, an unflinching face-to-face encounter with a deeply damaged soul who, as she prepares for her imminent execution, is at once eager to set the record straight, angrily defiant, and increasingly delusional. Daring to find the humanity in one of the most vilified criminals of the century, Broomfield and Churchill—whose camera remains ever-alert and skillfully unobtrusive—craft a haunting, complex look at a life gone wrong.

    Ashley Connor

    Sneak Preview! The Miseducation of Cameron Post Desiree Akhavan, USA, 2018, 90m Based on the celebrated novel by Emily M. Danforth, Desiree Akhavan’s second feature follows the titular character (Chloë Grace Moretz) in 1993 as she is sent to a gay conversion therapy center after getting caught with another girl on prom night. In the face of intolerance and denial, Cameron meets a group of fellow sinners, including amputee stoner Jane (Sasha Lane) and her friend Adam (Forrest Goodluck), a Lakota Two-Spirit. Together, this group forms an unlikely family with a will to fight. Akhavan and DP Ashley Connor evoke the emotional layers of Danforth’s novel with an effortless yet considered attention to the spirit of the ’90s and the audacious, moving performances of the ensemble cast. A FilmRise release.

    Josée Deshaies

    House of Tolerance / L’Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close Bertrand Bonello, France, 2011, 35mm, 122m French with English subtitles “I could sleep for a thousand years,” drawls a 19th-century prostitute—paraphrasing Lou Reed—at the start of Bonello’s hushed, opium-soaked fever dream of life in a Parisian brothel at the turn of the century. House of Tolerance is, among other things, Bonello’s most gorgeous and complete application of musical techniques to film grammar, his most rigorous attempt to sculpt cinematic space, his most probing reflection on the origins of capitalist society, and his most sophisticated study of the movement of bodies under immense constraint. A shocking mutilation, a funeral staged to The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin,” a progression of ritualized, drugged assignations and encounters: Bonello and frequent collaborator Josée Deshaies capture it all with a mixture of casual detachment and needlepoint precision.

    Crystel Fournier

    Tomboy Céline Sciamma, France, 2011, 35mm, 82m French with English subtitles A sensitive, heartrending portrait of what it feels like to grow up different, Céline Sciamma’s beautifully observed coming-of-age tale aches tenderly with the tangled confusion of childhood. When ten-year-old Laure’s family moves to a new neighborhood during the summer, the gender-nonconforming preteen (played by the impressively naturalistic Zoé Héran) takes the opportunity to present as Mickäel to the neighborhood kids—testing the waters of a new identity that neither friends nor family quite understand. Sciamma’s warmly empathetic tone is perfectly complemented by the soft-lit impressionism of Crystel Fournier’s glowing cinematography. Print courtesy of the Institut Français.

    Agnès Godard

    Beau Travail Claire Denis, France, 1999, 35mm, 92m French, Italian, and Russian with English subtitles Denis’s loose retelling of Billy Budd, set among a troop of Foreign Legionnaires stationed in the Gulf of Djibouti, is one of her finest films, an elemental story of misplaced longing and frustrated desire. Beneath a scorching sun, shirtless young men exercise to the strains of Benjamin Britten, under the watchful eye of Denis Lavant’s stone-faced officer Galoup, their obsessively ritualized movements simmering with barely suppressed violence. When a handsome recruit wins the favor of the regiment’s commander, cracks start to appear in Galoup’s fragile composure. In the tense, tightly disciplined atmosphere of military life, Denis found an ideal outlet for two career-long concerns: the quiet agony of repressing one’s emotions and the terror of finally letting loose. An NYFF37 selection. Print courtesy of the Institut Français. 35 Shots of Rum / 35 rhums Claire Denis, France/Germany, 2008, 35mm, 100m French and German with English subtitles When is a rice cooker more than just a rice cooker? When it’s in the masterful hands of Claire Denis, who somehow transforms it into a moving metaphor for the evolving relationship between a Parisian train conductor (Alex Descas) and his devoted twenty-something daughter (Mati Diop) as he gently nudges her out of the nest and each tests the waters of new relationships. Warmed by the ember-glow of Agnès Godard’s beautifully burnished cinematography, Denis’s delicately bittersweet take on the Ozu-style family drama conveys worlds of meaning and emotion—attraction, heartache, loss, hope—in a mere glance, a gesture, and, yes, a kitchen appliance. The Intruder / L’intrus Claire Denis, France, 2005, 35mm, 130m French, English, Korean, Russian, and Polynesian with English subtitles Rich, strange, and tantalizingly enigmatic, Denis’s crypto-odyssey is a mesmeric sensory experience that haunts like a half-remembered dream. Inspired by a book by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, The Intruder skips across time and continents—from the Alpine wilds to a neon-lit Korea to a tropical Tahiti suffused with languorous melancholy—as it traces the journey of an inscrutable, ailing loner (Michel Subor) seeking a black market heart transplant and his long-lost son. An impressionist wash of hallucinations, memories, and dreams are borne along on the lush textures of Agnès Godard’s shimmering cinematography. Print courtesy of the Institut Français.

    Kristen Johnson

    Cameraperson Kirsten Johnson, USA, 2016, 102m How much of one’s self can be captured in the images shot of and for others? Kirsten Johnson’s work as a director of photography and camera operator has helped earn her documentary collaborators (Laura Poitras, Michael Moore, Kirby Dick, Barbara Kopple) nearly every accolade and award possible. Recontextualizing the stunning images inside, around, and beyond the works she has shot, Johnson constructs a visceral and vibrant self-portrait of an artist who has traveled the globe, venturing into landscapes and lives that bear the scars of trauma both active and historic. Rigorous yet nimble in its ability to move from heartache to humor, Cameraperson provides an essential lens on the things that make us human. A 2016 New Directors/New Films selection. Derrida Kirby Dick & Amy Ziering, USA, 2002, 35mm, 84m Postmodern intellectual rockstar Jacques Derrida receives an appropriately self-reflexive portrait in this playful, probing documentary. Framed by the French philosopher’s statements about the inherent unreliability of biography, it finds co-director Amy Ziering attempting to tease out the links between Derrida’s radically influential thinking (he expounds on everything from forgiveness to Seinfeld) and his own life. Even as the alternately witty and reflective Derrida remains cagey about personal matters, Kirsten Johnson’s attentive camera captures revealing flashes of the man behind the ideas. What emerges is a fascinating interrogation of filmic truth: a documentary that relentlessly deconstructs itself.

    Ellen Kuras

    Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Michel Gondry, USA, 2004, 35mm, 108m The feverish imaginations of DIY surrealist Michel Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman kick into overdrive for the great gonzo sci-fi romance of the early 2000s. When nice guy dweeb Joel (Jim Carrey) encounters blue-haired spitfire Clementine (Kate Winslet) on the LIRR, there’s a spark of attraction, but also something familiar—almost as if they’ve met before… Cue a ping-ponging, time- and space-collapsing journey through memory and a star-crossed love gone sour. The high-contrast handheld camerawork of Ellen Kuras enhances the whiplash sense of disorientation in what is, ultimately, a heart-wounding parable about the ways in which we inevitably hurt those we love most. Swoon Tom Kalin, USA, 1992, 35mm, 93m One of the most daring works to emerge from the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, Swoon offers a radical, revisionist perspective on the infamous Leopold and Loeb murder case. Channeling the spirits of Dreyer, Bresson, and Jean Genet, director Tom Kalin challenges viewers to identify with two of the most notorious killers of the 20th century, their crime—the Nietzsche-influenced thrill killing of a schoolboy in 1920s Chicago—and punishment recounted in ghostly black and white by Ellen Kuras. Throughout, Kalin cannily deconstructs the ways in which Leopold and Loeb’s homosexuality has been historically sensationalized and demonized—a provocative analogy for queer persecution in the AIDS era.

    Sabine Lancelin

    La captive Chantal Akerman, France/Belgium, 2000, 35mm, 118m French with English subtitles Chantal Akerman’s hypnotic exploration of erotic obsession plays like Vertigo filtered through the director’s visionary feminist formalism. Loosely inspired by the fifth volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, it circles around the very-strange-indeed relationship between the seemingly pliant Ariane (Sylvie Testud) and the disturbingly jealous Simon (Stanislas Merhar), whose need to possess her completely in turn renders him hostage to his own destructive desires. The coolly contemplative camera style of Sabine Lancelin imparts an unbroken, trance-like tension, which finds release only in the thunderous roil of the operatic score. Print courtesy of Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique. The Strange Case of Angelica / O Estranho Caso de Angélica Manoel de Oliveira, Portugal, 2010, 35mm, 97m Manoel de Oliveira’s sly, metaphysical romance—made when the famously resilient director was a mere 102 years old—is a mesmerizing, beyond-the-grave rumination on love, mortality, and the power of images. On a rain-slicked night, village photographer Isaac (Ricardo Trêpa) is summoned by a wealthy family to take a picture of their beautiful, recently deceased daughter Angelica (Pilar López de Ayala). What ensues is a ghostly tale of romantic obsession as Isaac finds his dreams—and his photographs—haunted by the spirit of the bewitching young woman. The crisp chiaroscuro compositions of cinematographer Sabine Lancelin enhance the film’s otherworldly, unstuck-in-time aura. An NYFF48 selection. Eastern Boys Robin Campillo, France, 2013, 128m French with English subtitles Jeanne Lapoirie’s surveillance-style camera, looking from above, masterfully follows the men who loiter around the Gare du Nord train station in Paris as they scrape by however they can, forming gangs for support and protection, ever fearful of being caught by the police and deported. When the middle-aged, bourgeois Daniel (Olivier Rabourdin) approaches a boyishly handsome Ukrainian who calls himself Marek for a date, he learns the young man is willing to do anything for some cash. What Daniel intends only as sex-for-hire begets a home invasion and then an unexpectedly profound relationship. The drastically different circumstances of the two men’s lives reveal hidden facets of the city they share. Presented in four parts, this absorbing, continually surprising film by Robin Campillo (BPM: Beats Per Minute) is centered around relationships that defy easy categorization, in which motivations and desires are poorly understood even by those to whom they belong.

    Rain Li

    Paranoid Park Gus Van Sant, USA, 2007, 35mm, 85m At once a dreamlike portrait of teen alienation and a boldly experimental work of film narrative, Paranoid Park finds Gus Van Sant at the height of his powers. A withdrawn high-school skateboarder (Gabe Nevins) struggles to make sense of his involvement in an accidental death. He recalls past events across tides of memory, and expresses his feelings in a diary—which is, in effect, the movie we are watching. The extraordinary skating scenes, filmed by cinematographers Rain Li and Christopher Doyle in a lyrical mixture of Super 8 and 35mm, depict their subjects soaring in space, momentarily free of the earthly troubles of adolescence. An NYFF45 selection.

    Hélène Louvart

    Beach Rats Eliza Hittman, USA, 2017, 95m Hittman follows up her acclaimed debut, It Felt Like Love, with this sensitive chronicle of sexual becoming. Frankie (a breakout Harris Dickinson), a bored teenager living in South Brooklyn, regularly haunts the Coney Island boardwalk with his boys—trying to score weed, flirting with girls, killing time. But he spends his late nights dipping his toes into the world of online cruising, connecting with older men and exploring the desires he harbors but doesn’t yet fully understand. Sensuously lensed on 16mm by cinematographer Hélène Louvart, Beach Rats presents a colorful and textured world roiling with secret appetites and youthful self-discovery. A 2017 New Directors/New Films selection. A Neon release. Pina [in 3D] Wim Wenders, Germany/France, 2011, 106m German, English, and French with English subtitles Wim Wenders began planning this project with legendary choreographer Pina Bausch in the months before her untimely death, selecting the pieces to be filmed and discussing the filmmaking strategy. Impressed by recent innovations in 3D, Wenders decided to experiment with the format for this tribute to Bausch and her Tanztheater Wuppertal; the result sets the standard against which all future uses of 3D to record performance will be measured. Not only are the beauty and sheer exhilaration of the dance s and dancers powerfully rendered by Hélène Louvart and Jörg Widmer’s lensing, but the film also captures the sense of the world that Bausch so brilliantly expressed in all her pieces. Longtime members of the Tanztheater recreate many of their original roles in such seminal works as “Café Müller,” “Le Sacre du Printemps,” and “Kontakthof.” An NYFF49 selection. The Wonders Alice Rohrwacher, Italy/Switzerland/Germany, 2014, 110m French with English subtitles Winner of the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, Alice Rohrwacher’s vivid story of teenage yearning and confusion revolves around a beekeeping family in rural central Italy: German-speaking father, Italian mother, four girls. Two unexpected arrivals prove disruptive, especially for the pensive oldest daughter, Gelsomina. The father takes in a troubled teenage boy as part of a welfare program, and a television crew shows up to enlist local farmers in a kitschy celebration of Etruscan culinary traditions (a slyly self-mocking Monica Bellucci plays the bewigged host). Hélène Louvart’s lensing combines a documentary attention to daily ritual with an evocative atmosphere of mystery to conjure a richly concrete world that is subject to the magical thinking of adolescence. An NYFF52 selection.

    Irina Lubtchansky

    Around a Small Mountain / 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup Jacques Rivette, France/Italy, 2009, 35mm, 84m French with English subtitles The final film from arch gamesman Jacques Rivette is a captivating variation on one of the themes that most obsessed him: the ineffable interplay between life and performance. Luminously photographed by Irina Lubtchansky in the open-air splendor of the south of France, it revolves around an Italian flaneur (Sergio Castellitto) who finds himself drawn into the world of a humble traveling circus led by the elusive Kate (Jane Birkin), whose enigmatic past becomes a tantalizing mystery he is determined to solve. In a career studded with sprawling shaggy dog epics, Rivette’s swan song is a deceptively slight grace note that contains multitudes. An NYFF47 selection. Preceded by: Sarah Winchester, Ghost Opera / Sarah Winchester, Opera Fantôme Bertrand Bonello, France, 2016, 24m North American Premiere A film to stand in for an opera unmade: Bonello’s moody, baroque meditation on the heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune plays like a ballet-cum-horror film, an ornate tapestry of enigmatic images, chilling synths, and traces of a tragic and eccentric life. An NYFF54 selection. A Grasshopper Film release.

    Babette Mangolte

    The Camera: Je or La Camera: I Babette Mangolte, USA, 1977, 88m Though perhaps best known as the cinematographer for Chantal Akerman’s groundbreaking 1970s work—as well as for her collaborations with avant-garde icons like Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, and Marina Abramović—Babette Mangolte is a singular cinematic visionary in her own right. In this structuralist auto-portrait, Mangolte allows viewers to peer through the lens of her camera as she produces a series of still photographs, first of models, then of the streetscapes of downtown Manhattan. As we experience the act of image-making through her eyes, what emerges is a heady consideration of the art and act of seeing and of the complex relationship between photographer, subject, and viewer. Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles Chantal Akerman, Belgium/France, 1976, 35mm, 201m French with English subtitles A landmark of feminist art, Chantal Akerman’s minimalist masterpiece is both a monumental and microscopic view of three days in the life of a fastidious Belgian single mother (a sphinx-like Delphine Seyrig) as she goes about her housework, peeling potatoes and washing dishes with the same clinical detachment with which she makes love to the occasional john. And then slowly, almost imperceptibly, things begin to go awry… The rigorous, relentlessly impassive gaze of Babette Mangolte’s camera is transfixing but, in the words of the director, “never voyeuristic”; it’s a uniquely feminine way of seeing made manifest by one of the most sui generis filmmaker-cinematographer partnerships in history.

    Claire Mathon

    Stranger by the Lake / L’inconnu du lac Alain Guiraudie, France, 2013, 97m French with English subtitles Alain Guiraudie’s Cannes-awarded exploration of death and desire unfolds entirely in the vicinity of a gay cruising ground that becomes a crime scene. Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) is a regular at a lakeside pickup spot, where he finds companionship both platonic and carnal. But his new paramour Michel (Christophe Paou) turns out to be a love-’em-and-leave-’em type, in the deadliest sense… Guiraudie has long been a singular voice in French cinema: anti-bourgeois, at ease in nature, a true regionalist and outsider. Here he and DP Claire Mathon capture naked bodies and hardcore sex with the same matter-of-fact sensuousness they bring to ripples on the water and the fading light of dusk. An NYFF51 selection.

    Reed Morano

    Sneak Preview! I Think We’re Alone Now Reed Morano, USA, 2018, 93m Pulling double duty as director and cinematographer, Reed Morano finds the melancholic beauty in the end of the world with this gorgeous and strange drama starring Peter Dinklage and Elle Fanning as the last people on Earth. When the film opens in a desolate upstate New York, the misanthropic Del (Dinklage) is performing rote, custodial tasks to clean up the chaos left around his hometown—and relishing his newfound solitude—until another, sprightly survivor (Fanning) arrives. Winner of the Special Jury Prize for Excellence in Filmmaking at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, I Think We’re Alone Now is a visually audacious entry in the postapocalyptic genre and an idiosyncratic take on loneliness and grief.

    Rachel Morrison

    Fruitvale Station Ryan Coogler, USA, 2013, 85m Coogler’s remarkable debut feature explores the life and harrowing death of Oscar Grant (played by Michael B. Jordan), a 22-year-old African-American man killed by police in the early hours of January 1, 2009. Six months after sweeping both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Fruitvale Station opened on the same weekend that jurors in Florida acquitted George Zimmerman in the death of Trayvon Martin. Rachel Morrison’s gripping, exploratory Super 16 on-location camerawork dramatizes the unseen complexities and personal relationships of Grant’s inner circle with a startling sense of urgency, emotion, and the unflagging awareness of a preventable tragedy too often seen in the news cycle. Sunday, August 5, 7:00pm Free Talk: The Female Gaze Join us for an hour-long conversation with cinematographers Natasha Braier, Ashley Connor, Agnès Godard, and Joan Churchill as they discuss the series and reflect on their careers and influences, and how they approach their craft. Sponsored by HBO®. Saturday, July 28, 6:30pm* Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, Amphitheater, 144 W 65th Street  

    Read more

  • 13 Films on Lineup for 2017 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival in NYC

    [caption id="attachment_21627" align="aligncenter" width="1200"]My Aunt in Sarajevo | Goran Kapetanović My Aunt in Sarajevo | Goran Kapetanović[/caption] A total of 13 films, including 6 Q&A and discussion panels with the filmmakers, will screen at the 2017 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival (BHFF) running from Wednesday, April 12 through Saturday, April 15 at two Manhattan venues. Starting things off on Wednesday, April 12 at Anthology Film Archives will be a special screening of Branko Ištvančić documentary feature film Album, a look at the Balkan wars through the memories of photos left behind, followed by a panel discussion on the subject of post-Yugoslav cinema. The festival’s competition program will be held at SVA Theater on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, from April 13-15, and will consist of four narrative feature films, four narrative shorts and four documentary films. Films in competition are: Films selected to screen at the 14th Annual BHFF competition program are eligible to win a number of honors including the Golden Apple audience and jury awards.

    FEATURE FILMS

    Nika | Slobodan Maksimović | 92 min A young girl’s determination to become a racecar driver against the wishes of her mother evokes themes of teenage rebellion and generationalism. My Aunt in Sarajevo | Goran Kapetanović | 58 min An 18-year-old girl convinces her father to take her to the land of his birth, Bosnia, where the pair discovers their roots and comes to terms with the past. A Good Wife | Mirjana Karanović | 94 min A woman’s life is shaken when she discovers that her husband may have participated in war crimes. Death in Sarajevo | Danis Tanović | 85 min Calamity erupts at a hotel in Sarajevo on the 100th anniversary of Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassination.

    DOCUMENTARY FILMS

    Cameraperson | Kirsten Johnson | 102 min Documentarian Kirsten Johnson uses work ranging across her 25-year career to examine the ethics of documentary filmmaking. City of Elephants | Marko Mijatović | 29 min The mountains of Bosnia form a stunning backdrop for an exploration into the lives of three people struggling to make a living in an economically-deprived mining town. Man With the Will of Steel | Amar Spahic | 16 min Nadir Hajro defies the odds by fighting through his cerebral palsy to become a bodybuilder. No Smoking in Sarajevo | Gianluca Loffredo | 75 min The iconic Bosnian rock band No Smoking is examined with rare footage in a look at one of the most famous bands in Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia.

    NARRATIVE SHORT FILMS

    Game | Senad Alihodžić | 7 min A man’s daily routine is shaken up when he becomes entangled in a unique and surreal game. Refugee 532 | Goran Kapetanović | 14 min A young refugee living alone in Sweden must adopt to his new country while seeking news from his family in Bosnia. I Remember | Elma Tataragić | 15 min A woman repeatedly returns to her family home, probing her own memories and grappling with her recollections of the beginning of the Bosnian War. The Dragon | Ivan Ramadan | 10 min Innovative animation methods explore the myths of Bosnia through the journey of the legendary dragon Aždaja. The 2017 edition of the BHFF will also introduce a new jury award for Best Acting Performance, awarded to an actor or actress in a lead or supporting role in any of the narrative short and feature films. The nominees for the BHFF 2017 Jury Award for Best Acting Performance are: Milan Dragišić, lead actor in the role of Zlatan in “My Aunt in Sarajevo” Sadžida Šetić, supporting actress in the role of Radmila in “My Aunt in Sarajevo” Mirjana Karanović, lead actress in the role of Milena in “A Good Wife” Alena Džebo, lead actress in the unnamed role in “I Remember” Snežana Vidović, lead actress in the role of Lamija in “Death in Sarajevo” Faketa Salihbegović-Avdagić, supporting actress in the role of Hatidža in “Death in Sarajevo”

    Read more

  • MOONLIGHT and LOVE & FRIENDSHIP Lead Nominations for London’s Critics’ Circle Film Awards

    [caption id="attachment_12014" align="aligncenter" width="1200"]Love & Friendship Love & Friendship[/caption] Barry Jenkins’ drama Moonlight and Whit Stillman’s comedy Love & Friendship lead the nominations for the 37th London Critics’ Circle Film Awards, garnering seven nominations each. Both are up for Film of the Year, as well as multiple acting honors. The gala ceremony will be held on Sunday January 22nd, 2017,  in London, at The May Fair Hotel. Following close behind is Maren Ade’s German comedy Toni Erdmann with six nominations, while La La Land, Manchester by the Sea and American Honey have five citations each. The winners will be voted on by 140 members of The Critics’ Circle Film Section. The nominations were announced at The May Fair today by actress Chloe Pirrie and actor-filmmaker Craig Roberts. The 22nd January ceremony will again be hosted by actor-filmmakers Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, who won the critics’ Breakthrough Filmmakers prize in 2012 for their screenplay for Sightseers and have gone on to write and direct Prevenge and Aaaaaaaah!, respectively. “Our critics nominated more than 160 titles for Film of the Year alone, representing the range of wide opinions and the sheer number of movies critics watch each year,” says Rich Cline, chair of the Critics’ Circle Film Awards. “There was love for everything from Aferim to Zootropolis, including Captains America and Fantastic, plus acclaimed women from Jackie, Julieta, Moana, Christine, Krisha and Victoria to Miss Sloane and Florence Foster Jenkins. Making it onto that final list of nominees is never easy.” British actors Naomie Harris, Andrew Garfield, Kate Beckinsale and Tom Bennett each received nominations both for specific performances and for their body of work in 2016. Unusually, the writer-directors of four Film of the Year contenders are also nominated for both Screenwriter and Director: Moonlight’s Jenkins, Toni Erdmann’s Ade, La La Land’s Damien Chazelle and Manchester by the Sea’s Kenneth Lonergan. In addition to Film of the Year, Gianfranco Rosi’s immigration-themed film Fire at Sea is also nominated for both Foreign-Language Film and Documentary. Also contending for Film of the Year are Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals, László Nemes’ Son of Saul and Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake. Last year’s ceremony saw George Miller winning both Film and Director for Mad Max: Fury Road, with three awards going to Andrew Haigh’s 45 Years and the Dilys Powell Award presented to Kenneth Branagh. The full list of nominees for the 37th London Critics’ Circle Film Awards: FILM OF THE YEAR American Honey Fire at Sea I, Daniel Blake La La Land Love & Friendship Manchester by the Sea Moonlight Nocturnal Animals Son of Saul Toni Erdmann FOREIGN-LANGUAGE FILM OF THE YEAR Fire at Sea Son of Saul Things to Come Toni Erdmann Victoria DOCUMENTARY OF THE YEAR The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years Cameraperson The Eagle Huntress Fire at Sea Life, Animated BRITISH/IRISH FILM OF THE YEAR American Honey High-Rise I, Daniel Blake Love & Friendship Sing Street ACTOR OF THE YEAR Casey Affleck – Manchester by the Sea Adam Driver – Paterson Andrew Garfield – Hacksaw Ridge Jake Gyllenhaal – Nocturnal Animals Peter Simonischek – Toni Erdmann ACTRESS OF THE YEAR Amy Adams – Arrival Kate Beckinsale – Love & Friendship Sandra Hüller – Toni Erdmann Isabelle Huppert – Things to Come Emma Stone – La La Land SUPPORTING ACTOR OF THE YEAR Mahershala Ali – Moonlight Tom Bennett – Love & Friendship Jeff Bridges – Hell or High Water Shia LaBeouf – American Honey Michael Shannon – Nocturnal Animals SUPPORTING ACTRESS OF THE YEAR Viola Davis – Fences Greta Gerwig – 20th Century Women Naomie Harris – Moonlight Riley Keough – American Honey Michelle Williams – Manchester by the Sea DIRECTOR OF THE YEAR Maren Ade – Toni Erdmann Damien Chazelle – La La Land Barry Jenkins – Moonlight Kenneth Lonergan – Manchester by the Sea László Nemes – Son of Saul SCREENWRITER OF THE YEAR Maren Ade – Toni Erdmann Damien Chazelle – La La Land Barry Jenkins – Moonlight Kenneth Lonergan – Manchester by the Sea Whit Stillman – Love & Friendship BRITISH/IRISH ACTOR Tom Bennett – Love & Friendship, Life on the Road Andrew Garfield – Hacksaw Ridge, Silence Hugh Grant – Florence Foster Jenkins Dave Johns – I, Daniel Blake David Oyelowo – A United Kingdom, Queen of Katwe BRITISH/IRISH ACTRESS Kate Beckinsale – Love & Friendship Rebecca Hall – Christine Naomie Harris – Moonlight, Our Kind of Traitor, Collateral Beauty Ruth Negga – Loving, Iona Hayley Squires – I, Daniel Blake YOUNG BRITISH/IRISH PERFORMER Ruby Barnhill – The BFG Lewis MacDougall – A Monster Calls Sennia Nanua – The Girl With All the Gifts Anya Taylor-Joy – The Witch, Morgan Ferdia Walsh-Peelo – Sing Street BREAKTHROUGH BRITISH/IRISH FILMMAKER Babak Anvari – Under the Shadow Mike Carey – The Girl With All the Gifts Guy Hibbert – Eye in the Sky, A United Kingdom Peter Middleton & James Spinney – Notes on Blindness Rachel Tunnard – Adult Life Skills BRITISH/IRISH SHORT FILM Isabella – Duncan Cowles & Ross Hogg Jacked – Rene Pannevis Sweet Maddie Stone – Brady Hood Tamara – Sofia Safonova Terminal – Natasha Waugh TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT American Honey – Robbie Ryan, cinematography Arrival – Sylvain Bellemare, sound design High-Rise – Mark Tildesley, production design Jackie – Mica Levi, music Jason Bourne – Gary Powell, stunts La La Land – Justin Hurwitz, music Moonlight – Nat Sanders & Joi McMillon, editing Sing Street – Gary Clark & John Carney, music Rogue One – Neal Scanlan, visual effects Victoria – Sturla Brandth Grovlen, cinematography

    Read more

  • Provincetown International Film Festival Reveals Film Lineup

    [caption id="attachment_13531" align="aligncenter" width="1280"]Captain Fantastic Captain Fantastic[/caption] The 2016 Provincetown International Film Festival (PIFF) announced its lineup of Opening and Closing night films, spotlight selections, special screenings and narrative and documentary features for its 18th edition, running June 15-19, in Provincetown, MA. The Opening Night film will be Matt Ross’ CAPTAIN FANTASTIC, starring Viggo Mortensen. Closing Night film will be the Madonna dance documentary STRIKE A POSE. Spotlight films are POLITICAL ANIMALS, directed by Jonah Markowitz and Tracy Wares; INDIGNATION, directed by James Schamus; and OUR KIND OF TRAITOR, directed by Susanna White. “We continue to be impressed with the quality of films we view each year to put together our festival lineup,” said Connie White, Artistic Director of PIFF. “In June, Provincetown will be abuzz with new talent to watch and returning artists who continue to take risks and push the boundaries of their work. We are thrilled with the variety of films we are presenting in this year’s slate from both international and US filmmakers. It truly builds on the excitement of the past 17 years of this festival.” The 2016 Provincetown International Film Festival lineup is below. OPENING NIGHT CAPTAIN FANTASTIC – directed by Matt Ross (Wednesday, June 15) CLOSING NIGHT STRIKE A POSE – directed by Ester Gould and Reijer Zwaan (Sunday, June 19) SPOTLIGHT SELECTIONS POLITICAL ANIMALS – directed by Jonah Markowitz and Tracy Wares (Thursday, June 16) INDIGNATION – directed by James Schamus (Friday, June 17) OUR KIND OF TRAITOR – directed by Susanna White (Saturday, June 18) SPECIAL SCREENINGS JOHN WATERS PRESENTS THE DEEP BLUE SEA – directed by Terrence Davies A NIGHT AT THE DRIVE-IN (DOUBLE FEATURE) CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON and LIFE OF PI – directed by Ang Lee CELEBRATION OF MODERN MASTERS FROM JANUS FILMS MULTIPLE MANIACS – directed by John Waters BLOOD SIMPLE – directed by Joel and Ethan Coen ANG LEE TRIBUTE BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN – directed by Ang Lee CYNTHIA NIXON TRIBUTE JAMES WHITE – directed by Josh Mond NARRATIVE FEATURES AWOL – directed by Deb Shoval BEING 17 – directed by André Téchiné BLOOD STRIPE – directed by Remy Auberjonois DON’T THINK TWICE – directed by Mike Birbiglia GOAT – directed by Andrew Neel A GOOD WIFE – directed by Mirjana Karanovic HUNT FOR THE WILDERPEOPLE – directed by Taika Waititi THE INNOCENTS – directed by Anne Fontaine LAZY EYE – directed by Tim Kirkman LITTLE MEN – directed by Ira Sachs LONG WAY NORTH – directed by Rémi Chayé MILES – directed by Nathan Adloff MORRIS FROM AMERICA – directed by Chad Hartigan OTHER PEOPLE – directed by Chris Kelly OUR LITTLE SISTER – directed by Hirokazu Koreeda THE PEOPLE VS. FRITZ BAUER – directed by Lars Kraume THE SAVER – directed by Wiebke von Carolsfeld SPA NIGHT – directed by Andrew Ahn SUMMERTIME – directed by Catherine Corsini A STRAY – directed by Musa Syeed WIENER-DOG – directed by Todd Solondz DOCUMENTARY FEATURES AUTHOR: THE JT LEROY STORY – directed by Jeff Feuerzeig BRILLO BOX (3¢ OFF) – directed by Lisanne Skyler CAMERAPERSON – directed by Kirsten Johnson CHECK IT – directed by Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer CLASS DIVIDE – directed by Marc Levin DON’T BLINK – ROBERT FRANK – directed by Laura Israel THE GUYS NEXT DOOR – directed by Amy Geller and Allie Humenuk JEWEL’S CATCH ONE – directed by C. Fitz THE MUSIC OF STRANGERS: YO-YO MA & THE SILK ROAD ENSEMBLE – directed by Morgan Neville OBIT – directed by Vanessa Gould OFF THE RAILS – directed by Adam Irving PETER AND THE FARM – directed by Tony Stone SONIC SEA – directed by Michelle Dougherty and Daniel Hinerfeld SONITA – directed by Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami SUITED – directed by Jason Benjamin TICKLED – directed by David Farrier and Dylan Reeve THE TRANS LIST – directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders UNCLE HOWARD – directed by Aaron Brookner UNLOCKING THE CAGE – directed by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker Additionally, on Saturday, June 19, two-time Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee will be honored with the festival’s annual Filmmaker on the Edge Award and Emmy, Tony and Grammy Award-winner Cynthia Nixon will be presented with the Excellence in Acting Award. Filmmaker Effie T. Brown will provide the keynote address at the Evan Lawson Filmmakers’ Brunch on Sunday, June 19.

    Read more

  • San Francisco International Film Festival Announces 2016 Golden Gate Award Winners

    [caption id="attachment_9418" align="alignnone" width="1000"]The Demons, directed by Quebec director Philippe Lesage The Demons[/caption] The 59th San Francisco International Film Festival announced the winners of the juried Golden Gate Award (GGA) competitions at an event held at Gray Area. This year the Festival awarded nearly $40,000 in prizes to emerging and established filmmakers. GOLDEN GATE NEW DIRECTORS (NARRATIVE FEATURE) PRIZE The 2016 Golden Gate Awards New Directors jury was composed of film critic Justin Chang, producer Benjamin Domenech, and IFP’s Executive Director Joana Vicente. Winner: The Demons, Philippe Lesage (Canada) * Receives $10,000 cash prize In a sunny, placid Montreal suburb in the late 1980s, before every child was attached to their parents by a cell phone, 10-year-old Félix (Edouard Tremblay-Grenier) grapples with the insecurities and confusion of impending adolescence. He harbors a crush on his teacher as a distraction from the uncomfortable sensation that everyone fits in perfectly at school except him. At home, Félix and his doting older siblings land in the middle of a scarily intense fight between their parents. Innocence is a fragile thing, easily dented and destroyed, and Félix surprises himself by inflicting cruelties on a younger boy. From the opening frames, documentary filmmaker Philippe Lesage infuses his exquisitely observed debut feature with an unsettling air of ambiguity and dread that portends greater crimes to follow. Nicolas Canniccioni’s calmly probing camera and Pye Corner Audio’s intense, judiciously placed score alert us to the incursion of an unseen danger into this pastel setting of swimming pools and playgrounds. The adults are caring but distracted, and their obliviousness—which extends to the end of the film, and presumably beyond—enables unexpected malevolent forces.  The Demons evokes the close escapes and inevitable traumas that speckle the path to adulthood, culminating in a gentle entreaty to love your children well. In a statement, the jury noted: “The Demons is an extraordinarily perceptive and structurally daring exploration of childhood in all its terrors and anxieties, both real and imagined.” Special Jury Prize: Mountain, Yaelle Kayam (Israel/Denmark) The jury noted: “The film provides a rigorous and multifaceted character study that becomes a bold statement about the role of women in physical and psychological confinement.” GOLDEN GATE AWARDS FOR DOCUMENTARY FEATURES The GGA Documentary feature competitions jury was comprised of journalist, film critic and programmer Eric Hynes; Sundance Institute’s Director of the Documentary Film Program Tabitha Jackson; and documentarian Jeff Malmberg. [caption id="attachment_11488" align="alignnone" width="1000"]Cameraperson, Kirsten Johnson Cameraperson[/caption] Documentary Feature Winner: Cameraperson, Kirsten Johnson (USA) * Receives $10,000 cash prize Simultaneously an astute observation of nonfiction filmmaking’s dilemmas, and a wonderfully creative autobiographical collage, Cameraperson is a must-see for all documentary enthusiasts. As the cinematographer for acclaimed documentaries such as Citizenfour, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Darfur Now, Kirsten Johnson has seen the world from behind her camera lens. Here she assembles moments from 25 years of location shoots—including a birthing clinic in Nigeria, a Bosnian farm, a detention center in Yemen and a boxing ring in Brooklyn—and stitches together an illuminating, emotional patchwork memoir. It’s abundantly clear that Johnson loves her work and values the experience of filming with people from all walks of life. Along with editor Nels Bangerter and co-editor Amanda Laws, Johnson draws out the similarities of seemingly different people all over the world, and elicits the question of the observer’s responsibility to the observed. Rather than employ the obvious tool of narration, Johnson cannily places statements made by interview subjects and crew members into contexts that reflect the complex challenges she feels herself, as a professional who can chronicle extensively, but interfere minimally. Amid the exotic and the foreign, Johnson weaves her own home movies of her young children and Alzheimer’s afflicted mother, bringing her experience of her own personal world into focus. The jury noted in a statement: “We honor Cameraperson for its compassion and curiosity; for its almost tangible connection to subjects and humble acknowledgment of its own subjectivity; for its singular enfolding of memoir, essay and collage; for its perfect expression of the vital collaboration between director and editor; and for its disarming invitation for us to participate in the meaning and construction of the work, and by extension the meaning and construction of documentary cinema itself.” Special Jury Prize: Notes on Blindness, Peter Middleton, James Spinney (UK/France) The jury noted: “We extend a special mention to Notes on Blindness, in recognition of an audaciously ambitious, formally inventive and yet fully realized film that somehow manages to translate an intensely interior experience into compelling, even revelatory cinema, ingeniously articulating what it means to see and be seen.” [caption id="attachment_12753" align="alignnone" width="1200"]The Return The Return[/caption] Bay Area Documentary Winner: The Return, Kelly Duane de la Vega, Katie Galloway (USA) * Receives $5,000 cash prize In 1994, California voters enacted the Three Strikes law, mandating a sentence of at least 25 years to life for third-time felons. In 2012, voters amended that law with Prop. 36, which added a provision for non-violent offenders and the radical demand that currently incarcerated prisoners be re-sentenced. “Overnight,” the filmmakers explain, “thousands of lifers became eligible for release.” The Return chronicles what happens next—on an individual and statewide scale. Weaving together the confessional musings of newly freed men, interviews with cautiously hopeful family members and on-the-ground coverage of lawyers working to free eligible lifers, filmmakers Kelly Duane de la Vega and Katie Galloway (Better This World, SFIFF 2011) build a case against long prison terms for crimes driven by poverty, addiction and mental illness. Whether following Bilal Chatman—who served 11 years of a 150-to-life sentence—on his bike ride to work or Michael Romano—a lawyer who co-authored Prop 36 and heads Stanford’s Justice Advocacy Project—mustering resources to help clients transition to life outside of prison, the film illuminates the long, fraught, and joyful journey from incarceration to resettlement. The jury noted: “We are honoring a film that starts where others would stop, that addresses the inhumanity of America’s criminal justice system through patient and humane observation, handling the complexities of its subjects not as matters to work around, but to embrace as a pathway to deeper feeling and understanding.” GOLDEN GATE AWARDS FOR SHORT FILMS The GGA Short Film jury consisted of festival programmer Laura Thielen; Fandor’s Vice President of Film Acquisitions Amanda Salazar; and independent media writer, producer and creative consultant Santhosh Daniel. Narrative Short Winner: Night Without Distance, Lois Patiño (Portugal/Spain) * Receives $2,000 cash prize Documentary Short Winner: The Send-Off, Patrick Bresnan, Ivete Lucas (USA) * Receives $2,000 cash prize Animated Short Winner: Manoman, Simon Cartwright (UK) * Receives $2,000 cash prize Special Jury Prize: Glove, Alexa Lim Haas, Bernardo Britto (USA) New Visions Short Winner: My Aleppo, Melissa Langer (USA) * Receives $1,500 cash prize Bay Area Short First Prize Winner: Extremis, Dan Krauss (USA) * Receives $1,500 cash prize Bay Area Short Second Prize Winner: In Attla’s Tracks, Catharine Axley (USA) * Receives $1,000 cash prize The shorts jury noted: “These well-wrought miniatures connected us to the world and our own humanity in urgent and unexpected ways. We were impressed by the 29 storytellers in competition, and we thank them for sharing their visions with San Francisco audiences. We look forward to seeing what they do next.” GOLDEN GATE AWARD FOR FAMILY FILM The Family Film jury consisted of Betsy Bozdech, Executive Editor, Ratings & Reviews at Common Sense Media; animator and filmmaker Jim Capobianco; and animation director Simon J. Smith. Winner: Bunny New Girl, Natalie van den Dungen (Australia) * Receives $500 cash prize The jury noted: “Bunny New Girl was recognized for its great, relatable message of acceptance and solidarity in a new community — as well as technical achievement, strong talent direction, and able storytelling that builds to a powerful and entertaining ending.” Special Jury Prize: Simon’s Cat: Off to the Vet, Simon Tofield (UK) The jury noted: “We recognize this film for its pure entertainment value, great observational comedy, laugh-out loud jokes, and clear cat knowledge.” GOLDEN GATE AWARD FOR YOUTH WORK The Youth Works jury was comprised of bay area high school students Sophia Anderson, Karla Mandujano and Kyle Wolfe, with adult supervisor Aldo Mora-Blanco of Film School Shorts at KQED. Winner: Elliot, Dennis Kim (South Korea/USA) * Receives $1,000 cash prize — including $500 donated by Vancouver Film School. The winner will also receive a one week scholarship, including tuition and accommodation, to one of the Vancouver Film School’s Summer Intensive Programs. The jury noted: “In another filmmaker’s hands, the story may have been an old hat. But in this filmmaker’s craft, what emerges is a meticulously crafted, well thought-out narrative that is engaging and beautiful to look at.” Special Jury Prize: Lucky Numbers, Chester Milton (USA) * Receives $500 cash prize donated by Vancouver Film School The jury noted: “Lucky Numbers is a crowd pleasing black comedy that managed to balance humor and morbidity perfectly.” GOOGLE BREAKTHROUGH IN TECHNOLOGY AWARD The Google Breakthrough in Technology Award jury was comprised of members of Google’s Computer Science in Media and Industry Relations teams, including: Courtney McCarthy, Strategist in Computer Science in Media and Julia Hamilton Trost, Account Executive, Google Media Sales. Google presents the Breakthrough in Technology Award for the best use or display of technology and innovation. The award honors filmmakers who go the extra mile to highlight the use of technology to solve a problem and make the world a better place, and aspires to promote diversity in tech while disrupting negative stereotypes in STEM fields. Winner: From My Head to Hers, Maria Alvarez (USA) * Receives $500 cash prize donated by Google Inc.

    Read more

  • Rooftop Films Reveals First Batch of Films, Opens with WEINER Doc

    [caption id="attachment_11832" align="aligncenter" width="1200"]WEINER, Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg WEINER[/caption] Rooftop Films announced the Opening Weekend lineup and the first batch of feature film programming for the 20th Annual Summer Series. The 2016 Rooftop Films Summer Series opens on Wednesday, May 18th with a special sneak preview screening of 2016 Sundance U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize Winner Weiner on the rooftops of Industry City. The official opening night will follow on Friday, May 20th, with “This is What We Mean By Short Films,” a collection of some of the most innovative, new shorts from around the world. The 2016 Rooftop Films Summer Series continues through August, with screenings of some of the best independent films of the past year in a variety of exciting and engaging outdoor locations across all five boroughs. This year’s slate includes phenomenal works of non-fiction such as Jerzy Sladokowski’s thoughtful and intimate IDFA winner Don Juan, Roger Ross Williams’ critically acclaimed Life, Animated; Kirsten Johnson’s form-challenging and deeply poetic Cameraperson; Jesse Moss’ Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham doc, The Bandit, David Farrier’s stranger than fiction film, Tickled, Joe Berlinger’s Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru, and many more. The 20th Summer Series also includes exceptional fiction films, such as Elizabeth Wood’s self-reflective and provocative White Girl; Bernardo Britto’s timely surveillance culture satire, Jacqueline, Argentine; Taika Waititi’s off-kilter comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople; Matthew Brown’s understated and intimate teen drama In the Treetops; among others. In addition to feature and short film programming, this year’s series will include a number of unique events and partnerships, including: the return of the Rooftop Films Storm King Art Center Cinema Ramble featuring multiple film installations, and specialty programming with International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), The Sundance Film Institute, and SXSW Film. Rooftop Films 20th Annual Summer Series Opening Weekend Wednesday, May 18, 2016 Industry City, Sunset Park, Brooklyn Weiner (Elyse Steinberg & Josh Kriegman | USA | 100’) Sexts, lies, and Carlos Danger: watch the wildest political meltdown in recent history. Presented in Partnership with: Sundance Selects Friday, May 20, 2016 The Bushwick Generator, Bushwick, Brooklyn This is What We Mean by Short Films Celebrate our 20th anniversary with short films chock-full of the stuff of summer: dancing, swimming, and hanging with old friends. THE FILMS: Stations (Roddy Hyduk); The Position (Black Eye Symphony pt. 1) (Steve Collins); METUBE 2 — August Sings Carmina Burana (Daniel Moshel); Avant Garde (Black Eye Symphony pt. 3) (Steve Collins); Temporary Color (John Wilson); Thunder P. (Black Eye Symphony pt. 4) (Steve Collins); The Hanging (Geoffrey Feinberg); Mining Poems or Odes (Callum Rice); AN ECSTATIC EXPERIENCE (Ja’Tovia Gary); Bad at Dancing (Joanna Arnow); Dr. Meertz (Black Eye Symphony pt. 4) (Steve Collins). Feature Documentaries (more films, dates and venues to be announced soon) The Bandit (Jesse Moss | USA | 82′) Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham recount the strange, wild making of Smokey and the Bandit. Presented in Partnership with: CMT Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson | USA | 102′) Cinematographer Kirsten Johnson’s deeply poetic memoir, culled from footage shot for other films. Presented in Partnership with: The Film Collaborative Danny Brown Concert Documentary (Title TBA) (Andrew Cohn | USA) An intimate, behind-the-scenes adventure with Detroit-rapper Danny Brown during a hometown show. Presented in partnership with: House of Vans Don Juan (Jerzy Sladkowski | Sweden/Finland | 92′) A 4-sided love triangle, complete with autism & neuroses in the Russian city Nizhny Novgorod Presented in Partnership with: IDFA and Swedish Film Institute Goodnight Brooklyn – The Story of Death by Audio (Matthew Conboy | USA | 82′) The origins, influence and ultimate closure of one of Brooklyn’s best DIY music venues. In Pursuit of Silence (Patrick Shen | USA | 81’) A contemplative meditation that explores our relationship with silence, sound, and the impact of noise on our lives. The film will be presented as a special silent screening, with the audience listening to the film on headphones. [caption id="attachment_12369" align="aligncenter" width="1350"]Life, Animated Life, Animated[/caption] Life, Animated (Roger Ross Williams | USA | 91′) A young man with autism discovers a way to make sense of world via classic Disney animated films. Presented in Partnership with: The Orchard, in theaters July 8 Los Punks: We Are All We Have (Angela Boatwright | USA | 79′) All thrash, noise, and pits; meet the fans and bands of the thriving backyard punk scene in LA. Presented in partnership with: House of Vans [caption id="attachment_10139" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble The Music of Strangers: Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble[/caption] The Music of Strangers: Yo Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble (Morgan Neville | USA | 96′) The extraordinary story of the renowned international musical collective which was created by famed cellist, Yo-Yo Ma. Presented in Partnership with The Orchard, in theaters June 10 Tickled (David Farrier & Dylan Reeve | New Zealand | 92′) The shadowy world of competitive tickling is exposed in this stranger than fiction tale. Presented in Partnership with: Magnolia Pictures Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru (Joe Berlinger | USA | 115′) Go behind the scenes of renowned life and business strategist Tony Robbins in a revelatory cinema verite by renowned director Joe Berlinger. Presented in Partnership with: Netflix Fiction Feature Films Donald Cried (Kris Avedisian | USA | 85′) Stranded in his hometown, a favor from Peter’s old friend becomes a long van ride into the past. The Fits (Anna Rose Holmer | USA | 72′) A tomboy’s desire for a dance team’s acceptance warps when its members fall prey to mysterious spasms. Presented in Partnership with: Oscilloscope Laboratories, in theaters June 3rd Hunt For the Wilder People (Taika Waititi | New Zealand | 101′) Raised on hip-hop and foster care, a defiant city kid starts new in the New Zealand countryside. Presented in Partnership with: The Orchard, in theaters June 24 Hunter Gatherer (Josh Locy | USA | 85′) A darkly comic tale of unlikely friendship with an indelible central performance by Andre Royo. In the Treetops (Matthew Brown | USA | 78′) Driving all night, packed in a car, 5 high school friends avoid their final destination: home. Jacqueline, Argentine (Bernardo Britto | USA | 87′) A playfully mysterious whistle-blower comedy from Film Fund Grantee Bernardo Britto. [caption id="attachment_12849" align="aligncenter" width="1200"]White Girl White Girl[/caption] White Girl (Elizabeth Wood | USA | 88′) A NYC college girl goes to wild extremes to get back her drug dealer boyfriend. Presented in Partnership with: FilmRise and Netflix, in theaters this September

    Read more

  • Ashland Independent Film Festival Unveils Lineup, Opens with HONEY BUDDIES

    [caption id="attachment_11777" align="aligncenter" width="1000"]HONEY BUDDIES by Alex Simmons Honey Buddies[/caption] The 2016 Ashland Independent Film Festival will be celebrating its 15th anniversary this April by paying tribute to the roots of independent film. AIFF will give special emphasis to the intersection of live performance and film, beginning with the opening night screening, and Pacific Northwest premiere of Honey Buddies. Filmed in Oregon, the Slamdance award-winning comedy stars Flula Borg as the relentlessly upbeat best man who convinces David Giuntoli (Grimm), after his fiancée dumps him at the altar, to take him on his Columbia River Gorge honeymoon, instead. Borg, an online musical sensation thanks to his YouTube music videos and his striking performance in the recent Pitch Perfect 2, will perform a live DJ set in the Ashland Armory following the screening. The mainstay of the festival continues to be a rich assortment of documentary and narrative feature films and shorts, including many regional and several national premieres. Magali Noel’s Addicted to Sheep, Nick Hartanto and Sam Roden’s Traveler (which will be accompanied to the festival by its subject, photographer Nicholas Syracuse) and AIFF 2015 Audience Choice award winner Alexandria Bombach’s short film How We Choose are U.S. premieres. Ten feature films that opened at Sundance in January are receiving their regional premieres at AIFF, including Werner Herzog’s essay film on the Internet’s effect on society, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World; Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise, Uncle Howard, Cameraperson, NUTS!, Hooligan Sparrow, Trapped, and The Fits, along with Sonita and Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You. There are a number of films with regional connections, including two by rising Portland filmmaker Christopher LaMarca, whose films Boone and The Pearl (co-directed by Jessica Dimmock) just premiered at the South by Southwest (SXSW)and True/False Film Festivals. Boone is a sensory and unsentimental meditation on the lives of three young goat farmers living off the land in the Little Applegate Valley near Jacksonville, Ore. The Pearl delves into the experiences of older transgender women in the Pacific Northwest. The film will be accompanied by the filmmakers and two of their most striking subjects from Oregon, Krystal and Jodi, two sisters who were formerly brothers, and unaware of each other’s gender fluidity. Bastards y Diablos, about two half-brothers who go on a journey of self-discovery to Colombia, involved a crew based mostly out of Medford, Ore., including producer and co-star Dillon Porter. For lovers of the “other” Ashland festival, there are two films that highlight Shakespeare on the 400th anniversary of his death. Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, a theater performance inventively filmed by Rodrigo Prieto, is being touted as a visually spectacular adaptation, and will be accompanied by a Skype conversation with Taymor. Bill is a Monty Pythonesque tale of William Shakespeare’s “lost years”. In addition, a program of short films will feature current and former Oregon Shakespeare Festival actors, including Anthony Heald in The Stairs; and David DeSantos and Stephanie Beatriz in Closure. “It’s going to be an exciting and stimulating five days and nights,’ said Cathy Dombi, the festival’s executive director. “More than 50 visiting filmmakers and artists will attend the festival to engage in dialogues after screenings, with several artists accompanying their films with live music, art exhibits, and even virtual reality headgear for audiences to sample.” In his Ashland debut, Richard Herskowitz, the new director of programming, will honor two key indie film institutions by paying tribute to Kartemquin Films and Women Make Movies, organizations that have built an infrastructure for indie filmmakers working outside the mainstream. Kartemquin co-founder and artistic director Gordon Quinn will be joined by filmmakers Joanna Rudnick and Maria Finitzo for three screenings honoring Karteqmquin on its 50th anniversary. Accomplished documentarians Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar of New Day Films will screen three of their latest short films and join Quinn for a TalkBack panel on Activist Film Collectives. “Independent film’s social and cultural importance has been reaffirmed lately as Hollywood’s neglect of women’s and other minority voices has become painfully apparent,” said Herskowitz. This year, 24 of the 39 independent feature films are directed or co-directed by women, and the subject of one of the festival’s three “TalkBack” panel discussions will be Women Make Indie Movies, moderated by Women Make Movies’ executive director Debra Zimmerman. Zimmerman will also introduce her company’s acclaimed new release Sonita, winner of the Grand Jury and Audience Prize for international documentaries at Sundance. Sonita is about an Iranian teenager who creates an underground rap song to protest her family’s plan to sell her as a bride. This year’s Rogue Award will go to the esteemed directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (Detropia, Jesus Camp, The Boys of Baraka), who will screen their latest documentary, Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You, an homage to the 93-year-old American social activist and creator of the TV shows All in the Family, The Jeffersons, and Maude. Barbara Hammer, the pioneering director of queer cinema, will receive the festival’s Pride Award, supported by the Equity Foundation, and will present her latest film, Welcome to this House, on the life and poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Herskowitz is introducing a new section titled Beyond, devoted to films that challenge and reinvent storytelling conventions. A highlight of this section will be MA, the debut feature by dance world sensation Celia Rowlson-Hall, a transfixing, artfully wordless narrative in which Rowlson-Hall stars as a reincarnation of the Virgin Mary. Rowlson-Hall was featured on the cover of Dance Magazine in 2014 and named one of 25 “new faces of independent film” in 2015 by Filmmaker Magazine. She is the winner of the festival’s first-ever Juice Award, given to an emerging female film director, with support from Tangerine Entertainment and the Faerie Godmother Fund of the Oregon Community Foundation. Other Beyond titles include The Fits, collective:unconscious, and He Hated Pigeons. At the TalkBack panel titled Transmedia & Virtual Reality Platforms for New Documentaries, filmmaker Helen de Michiel will present her latest transmedia projects, Lunch Love Community and Berkeley vs. Big Soda. Brad Lichtenstein will demo his virtual reality project, Across the Line, on the effect of anti-abortion protests on health centers and patients. Google VR headsets will be available for sampling after the panel. Vicki Callahan, a USC professor and an authority on digital culture and media strategies for social change, will moderate the discussion. 2016 AIFF FEATURE FILM SELECTIONS FILM; DIRECTOR Addicted to Sheep; Magali Pettier Bastards y Diablos; A.D. Freese Bill; Richard Bracewell Birth of Saké, The; Erik Shirai Boone; Christopher LaMarca Cameraperson; Kirsten Johnson Chicago Maternity Center Story, The; Jerry Blumenthal, Suzanne Davenport, Sharon Karp, Gordon Quinn, Jennifer Rohrer collective:unconscious; Lily Baldwin, Frances Bodomo, Daniel Patrick Carbone, Josephine Decker, Lauren Wolkstein Embers; Claire Carré Fits, The; Anna Rose Holmer Five Nights in Maine; Maris Curran Gesture and a Word; Dave Davidson He Hated Pigeons; Ingrid Veninger Honey Buddies; Alex Simmons Hooligan Sparrow; Nanfu Wang Hunky Dory; Michael Curtis Johnson In Pursuit of Silence; Patrick Shen In the Game; Maria Finitzo In Transit; Albert Maysles, Lynn True, Nelson Walker, Ben Wu, David Usui Light Beneath Their Feet; Valerie Weiss Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World; Werner Herzog Louder than Bombs; Joachim Trier MA; Celia Rowlson Hall Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise; Bob Hercules & Rita Coburn Whack Midsummer Night’s Dream; Julie Taymor Neptune; Derek Kimball Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You; Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady NUTS!; Penny Lane Pearl, The; Jessica Dimmock and Christopher LaMarca Secret Screening from Kartemquin Films; TBA Seventh Fire, The; Jack Pettibone Riccobono Sonita; Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami Three Hikers, The; Natalie Avital Trapped; Dawn Porter Traveler; Nick Hartanto and Sam Roden Uncle Howard; Aaron Brookner Voyagers Without Trace; Ian McCluskey Welcome to This House; Barbara Hammer Women He’s Undressed; Gillian Armstrong Short Film Programs After Hours Shorts Animated Worlds with Mark Shapiro Art Docs Ashland Actors On Screen CineSpace Family Shorts: Kid Pix Family Shorts: TweenScreen Locals Only 1: Family Friendly Locals Only 2: Woman to Man Short Stories Short Docs TalkBack Panel Discussions Activist Film Collectives: Kartemquin and New Day Films Women Make Indie Movies Transmedia and Virtual Reality Platforms for New Documentaries

    Read more

  • 20 Films to Compete for Golden Gate Awards at San Francisco International Film Festival

    [caption id="attachment_9418" align="aligncenter" width="1200"]The Demons, directed by Quebec director Philippe Lesage The Demons[/caption] The 2016 San Francisco International Film Festival taking place April 21 to May 5, announced the films in competition for the Golden Gate Awards (GGA). SFFS Executive Director Noah Cowan said “With more than a thousand new films from around the world hitting the major festival circuit each year, inevitably some great films get overlooked and some important voices go unheard. The Golden Gate Awards are here to celebrate these artists and their work, providing an additional chance for international exposure and recognition.” The GGA New Directors Prize winner will receive a cash prize of $10,000, the GGA Documentary Feature winner will receive $10,000 and the GGA Bay Area Documentary Feature winner will receive $5,000. 2016 GGA NEW DIRECTORS PRIZE (NARRATIVE FEATURE) COMPETITION As I Open My Eyes, Leyla Bouzid, Tunisia/France/Belgium Her family assumes that Farah, a high-achieving student in Tunis, will continue her studies, but she just wants to sing. When her mom hears that she’s performing politically provocative material with a group of male friends, a powerful story unfolds of female independence that stands in the face of conservative Muslim beliefs. The Demons, Philippe Lesage, Canada Documentary filmmaker Philippe Lesage’s narrative debut is an exquisitely observed portrait of a delicate 10-year-old Quebec boy grappling with the insecurities and confusion of impending adolescence. The fragility of innocence is foregrounded through minor humiliations and petty cruelties that unfold in pastel, sun-soaked locations. Infused with an unsettling air of ambiguity and dread that portends terrible crimes to follow, this restrained and coolly beautiful film is an unforgettable portrait a child forced to confront the dangers of growing up. From Afar, Lorenzo Vigas, Venezuela/Mexico When a middle-aged single man, who cruises his Caracas neighborhood for rough trade, takes a tough young boy into his home, a gritty exploration ensues as these two angry men negotiate a relationship that resides somewhere between lover and friend and a paternal father/son dynamic. Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Lorenzo Vigas’s debut feature is a tour-de-force exploration of a relationship’s darker side. Home Care, Slávek Horák, Czech Republic/Slovakia Dedicated home-care nurse Vlasta (Karlovy Vary winner Alena Mihulová) traipses around the south Moravia countryside on bus and foot tending to (and bantering with) patients too infirm or elderly to travel. When she herself is diagnosed with a serious illness, she turns to alternative therapies and the company of women healers. The Czech Republic’s Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film is a rueful, touching mix of realism, absurdity, irony and daring gallows humor. Mountain, Yaelle Kayam, Israel/Denmark Yaelle Kayam’s debut feature is strikingly shot against the tombstones of Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, where an Orthodox woman’s longing for her husband’s love sets in motion a transformational journey into a nocturnal world of pimps and prostitutes. A mesmerizing performance by Shani Klein keeps viewers riveted to a character study that is by turns tender and startling. Neither Heaven nor Earth, Clément Cogitore, France/Belgium In this suspenseful war film that uses fear of the dark to great effect, a French army contingent operating in Afghanistan is beset by mysterious disappearances. While Captain Antarès (Jérémie Renier) initially and understandably blames local villagers for the loss of his men, the real cause could be something supernatural, a force that implies the profound wrongness of these men being on soil that doesn’t belong to them. Thirst, Svetla Tsotsorkova, Bulgaria When water becomes scarce due to drought, a laundress living in rural southwest Bulgaria with her husband and son invites a dowser and his spirited daughter onto their property to search for hidden springs. Wonderfully atmospheric, the film gracefully depicts how the teenaged girl’s combative nature and the oppressive heat surrounding them all upset the family’s balance, for good and bad. Thithi, Raam Reddy, India/USA In a small South Indian village, a cantankerous centenarian keels over and dies, setting the stage for a capricious comedy of errors among three generations of dissimilar sons. Conflict, confusion, corruption and a series of ill-conceived actions all come to a head at the funeral celebration (the titular thithi). With its charming cast of non-professional actors — both human and ovine — director Raam Reddy’s feature film offers a playful portrait of intergenerational conflicts and differences. Very Big Shot, Mir-Jean Bou Chaaya, Lebanon/Qatar Two brothers are bitten by the movie bug when they conceive an idea to smuggle drugs in empty film canisters in this often hilarious satire of politics and filmmaking. With an easily manipulated director on board, their controversial storyline involving forbidden love catches the eye of local authorities and their original plan takes a backseat to their cinematic ambitions. 2016 GOLDEN GATE AWARDS DOCUMENTARY FEATURE COMPETITION Cameraperson, Kirsten Johnson, USA Simultaneously an astute observation of nonfiction filmmaking’s dilemmas, and a wonderfully creative autobiographical collage, Cameraperson is a must-see for all documentary enthusiasts. Acclaimed cinematographer Kirsten Johnson, who has lensed such acclaimed films as Citizenfour, Very Semi-Serious and Darfur Now, assembles moments from 25 years of location shoots — including a birthing clinic in Nigeria, a Bosnian farm, a detention center in Yemen and a boxing ring in Brooklyn — and stiches together an illuminating, emotional patchwork memoir. Dead Slow Ahead, Mauro Herce, Spain/France We are embedded on a massive cargo freighter as it chugs slowly across the vast Atlantic ocean in this haunting, meditative and expansively ambient film. Humanized by the melancholy of a hard-working crew as they struggle against the elements, Mauro Herce’s insightful and poetic cinematography emphasizes the smallness of human experience against the crushing and mighty mechanical grind of the ship, and the unknowable vastness of the open sea. haveababy, Amanda Micheli, USA Amanda Micheli’s stirring and suspenseful documentary follows several aspiring parents who desperately want to have a baby but are struggling with infertility and the high cost of treatments. They place themselves in the hands of Las Vegas doctor Gregory Sher and his annual contest offering a prize of a free round of in-vitro fertilization treatments — with no guarantee of pregnancy. A rollercoaster of hope and despair awaits them all. The Joneses, Moby Longinotto, USA/UK Filmmaker Moby Longinotto’s fascinating, thoroughly candid documentary invites audiences to pull up a chair at the never-dull family table in a Mississippi trailer park home. Everything is on the menu: dashed dreams, seething resentments, sexual awakenings and dollops of unconditional love. Overseeing all the tumult is unflappable, 73-year-old transgender matriarch Jheri Jones, whose dedicated ministrations keep her family going. National Bird, Sonia Kennebeck, USA Executive produced by Wim Wenders and Errol Morris, this elegant and chilling documentary provides a glimpse of what the US government doesn’t want you to know about drone warfare by focusing on three veterans whose service experience caused them to question the usage of drones in overseas combat. Notes on Blindness, Peter Middleton, James Spinney, UK/France A taped journal that theologian John Hull kept after the onset of blindness in 1980 forms the basis of this elegant and moving depiction of struggle and transcendence. Hull’s own voice provides the audio, though an actor plays the deceased writer, as he learns to negotiate his condition and endures a crisis of faith. Sublime sound design further enhances this evocative documentary, making manifest Hull’s discovery that the loss of one sense leads to the sharpening of others. NUTS!, Penny Lane, USA Penny Lane’s documentary — comprised of archival material, animated sequences and the occasional talking head — blooms into an incredible almanac of early 20th-century quackery and innovation as she focuses on JR Brinkley, an early broadcasting baron, direct-mail pioneer and an evangelical proponent of goat-testicle implants. An empire built on spurious claims and fear mongering seems unstoppable — until an obscure regional newspaper dares to question its foundations. The Return, Kelly Duane de la Vega, Katie Galloway, USA After California voters reversed the state’s Three Strikes law, thousands of inmates became suddenly eligible for resentencing and release. This provocative and touching documentary chronicles what happened next. Filmmakers Kelly Duane De la Vega and Katie Galloway (Better this World, SFIFF 2011) focus on the journeys of the newly free and their families, as well as the Stanford-based lawyers working on behalf of nonviolent offenders, illuminating the multifaceted struggle behind every transition from incarceration to freedom. Salero, Mike Plunkett, USA/Bolivia Moises Chambi Yucra and his family stand at the crossroads of time. For generations, they have has made a humble living harvesting salt from Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flat, but beneath Uyuni sit massive amounts of lithium, a mineral instrumental in powering smartphones and electric vehicles. With stunning cinematography that captures both the vibrancy and the solitude of the land and life, director Mike Plunkett captures the final days of an age-old way of life. Under the Sun, Vitaly Mansky, Russia/Latvia/Germany/Czech Republic/North Korea Shot with the permission and supervision of North Korean authorities, Russian director Vitaly Mansky’s film turns a propaganda effort into a deep-cover documentary about life inside one of the world’s most repressive nations. Its subjects — a young girl in Pyongyang and her family — rigorously stick to the ideological script, but by keeping the camera rolling between takes of their carefully staged “real life,” Mansky reveals the grinding gears of the totalitarian message machine. A Young Patriot, Du Haibin, China/USA/France Du Haibin’s insightful documentary captures five years in the life of a young Maoist zealot in northern China and provides an unforgettable portrait of China in transition. As the tumult of the country’s recent history unfolds, cracks in the armor of Zhao’s patriotism appear on multiple fronts. Communist Party corruption scandals, the rise of capitalism and the inhumane treatment of his family due to a reclamation project erode his bright optimism.

    Read more

  • Under the Shadow Kicks Off Lineup for 2016 New Directors / New Films

    [caption id="attachment_11872" align="aligncenter" width="1100"]Under the Shadow Under the Shadow[/caption] The Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art have announced the complete lineup for the 2016 New Directors / New Films (ND/NF), taking place March 16 to 27 in New York City.  Opening the festival is Babak Anvari’s debut feature Under the Shadow, about a mother and daughter haunted by a sinister, largely unseen presence during the Iran-Iraq War. Brimming with a mounting sense of dread until its ominous finish, this expertly crafted, politically charged thriller was a breakout hit at Sundance.. The Closing Night selection is Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, a remarkable chronicle of the cinematographer-turned-director’s life through her collaborations with documentary icons Laura Poitras, Michael Moore, and others. A self-described memoir, Johnson’s first solo directorial effort examines the delicate, complex relationship between filmmaker and subject and is one of nine festival features and four shorts directed by women. This year’s slate includes a number of films that have won major awards on the festival circuit, including Josh Kriegman and Elyse Sternberg’s Sundance Grand Jury Prizewinner Weiner; Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour, for which the main cast shared Locarno’s Best Actress award; Avishai Sivan’s Tikkun and Pascale Breton’s Suite Armoricaine, winners of the Locarno Special Jury and critics’ prizes, respectively; and Bi Gan’s Kaili Blues, which took home both the Golden Horse Award for Best New Director and Locarno’s honors for Emerging Artist and Best First Feature. Among the feature debuts are Zhang Hanyi’s Life After Life, executive-produced by Chinese master Jia Zhangke; Anita Rocha da Silveira’s psychosexual coming-of-age story Kill Me Please; Tamer El Said’s Cairo-set film within a film In the Last Days of the City; and Ted Fendt’s Short Stay, the only film in the festival to screen on 35mm. FILMS & DESCRIPTIONS Opening Night Under the Shadow Babak Anvari, UK/Jordan/Qatar, 2016, 84m Farsi with English subtitles It’s eight years into the Iran-Iraq War, but the troubles of wife and mother in Tehran have only just begun. Shideh (Narges Rashidi) is thwarted in her attempts to return to medical school because of past political activities. And as Iraqi bombs close in, her husband is sent off to serve in the military, neighbors begin to flee, and she is left alone with her young daughter, Dorsa, who refuses to be separated from her favorite doll. At first, Dorsa’s tantrums seem to simply be the complaints of a cranky child. But soon she’s in conversation with an invisible woman—no imaginary friend, this one—and the cracks in the walls and ceilings of their apartment could just be the result of something more than air raids. And what is that she sees down the hall, from the corner of her eye? Though Shideh is a woman of science, she begins to suspect that a malevolent spirit, a djinn, is stalking them. A political horror story that rises up from the rubble of war, Babak Anvari’s feature debut boasts a terrific performance by Rashidi as a woman with more than one war going on in her home and in her head, who must save her daughter from dangers both physical and supernatural. Closing Night Cameraperson Kirsten Johnson, USA, 2015, 102m How much of one’s self can be captured in the images shot of and for others? Kirsten Johnson may be a first-time (solo) feature-film director, but her work as a director of photography and camera operator has helped earn her documentary collaborators (Laura Poitras, Michael Moore, Kirby Dick, Barbara Kopple) nearly every accolade and award possible. Recontextualizing the stunning images inside, around, and beyond the works she has shot, Johnson constructs a visceral and vibrant self-portrait of an artist who has traveled the globe, venturing into landscapes and lives that bear the scars of trauma both active and historic. Rigorous yet nimble in its ability to move from heartache to humor, Cameraperson provides an essential lens on the things that make us human. The Apostate / El apóstata Federico Veiroj, Spain/France/Uruguay, 2015, 80m Spanish with English subtitles With wry humor and deep conviction, Uruguayan filmmaker Federico Veiroj (A Useful Life, ND/NF 2010) observes a young Spaniard’s maddening efforts to abandon the Catholic Church. Petitioning the local bishop in Madrid to hand over his baptismal records, the philosophy student is soon confronted with a stubborn bureaucracy and comically agonized tests of his fidelity and patience. Scenes of pithy theological discussion (performed by the film’s excellent ensemble cast) are interspersed with oneiric flights of imagination, cohering to produce a work that is by turns seriously philosophical and irreverently funny. While Veiroj’s tone may be more gently ironic than that of Luis Buñuel (his spiritual forebear), The Apostate nonetheless traces in bracing fashion the competing forces of conformity and rebellion, spiritual yearning and carnal desire, at war within us all. Screening with: Concerning the Bodyguard Kasra Farahani, USA, 2015, 10m This stylish adaptation of Donald Barthelme’s story, narrated by Salman Rushdie, takes on the power structures of a dictatorship with brio. Behemoth / Beixi moshuo Zhao Liang, China/France, 2015, 91m Mandarin with English subtitles Political documentarian Zhao Liang draws inspiration from The Divine Comedy for this simultaneously intoxicating and terrifying glimpse at the ravages wrought upon Inner Mongolia by its coal and iron industries. A poetic voiceover speaks of the insatiability of desire on top of stunning images of landscapes (and their decimation), machines (and their spectacular functions), and people (and the toll of their labor). Interspersed are sublime tableaux of a prone nude body—asleep? just born? dead?—posed against a refracted horizon. A wholly absorbing guided tour of exploding hillsides, dank mine shafts, cacophonous factories, and vacant cities, Behemoth builds upon Zhao’s previous exposés (2009’s Petition, 2007’s Crime and Punishment) by combining his muckraking streak with a painterly vision of a social and ecological nightmare otherwise unfolding out of sight, out of mind. Winner of the environmental Green Drop Award at the Venice Film Festival. North American Premiere Demon Marcin Wrona, Poland/Israel, 2015, 94m English, Polish, and Yiddish with English subtitles Newly arrived from England to marry his fiancée Zaneta, Peter has been given a gift of her family’s ramshackle country house in rural Poland. It’s a total fixer-upper, and while inspecting the premises on the eve of the wedding, he falls into a pile of human remains. The ceremony proceeds, but strange things begin to happen… During the wild reception, Peter begins to come undone, and a dybbuk, that iconic ancient figure from Jewish folklore, takes a toehold in this present-day celebration—for a very particular reason, as it turns out. The final work by Marcin Wrona, who died just as Demon was set to premiere in Poland, is an eerie, richly atmospheric film—part absurdist comedy, part love story—that scares, amuses, and charms in equal measure. Winner of Best Horror Feature at Fantastic Fest. An Orchard release. Donald Cried Kris Avedisian, USA, 2016, 85m Trust me, you can’t go home again. Kris Avedisian’s unhinged first feature is a brilliant twist on the family-reunion melodrama and the classic buddy comedy. Returning after 20 years to Warwick, Rhode Island, for his grandmother’s funeral, Peter Latang (Jesse Wakeman), now a slick city financier, has to endure a blast from the past and relive some very cringeworthy moments when hanging out with his former high-school bestie, the obnoxious Donald Treebeck (Avedisian). By turns depressing and funny while subtly shifting our sympathies thanks to sharp dialogue and extremely well-written characters, Donald Cried can perhaps best be summed up as The Color Wheel meets Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Eldorado XXI Salomé Lamas, Portugal/France, 2016, 125m Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara with English subtitles Salomé Lamas’s Eldorado XXI immerses the viewer in the breathtaking views and extreme conditions of La Rinconada in the Peruvian Andes, the highest-elevation permanent human settlement in the world. Here, some 17,000 feet above sea level, miners face misery and lawlessness in the hopes of striking gold, chewing coca leaves to stave off exhaustion. They toil for weeks without pay under the inhumane lottery system known as cachorreo, gambling on an eventual fortune if they can survive the despoiled landscape long enough. Life in this remotest outpost of civilization seems to unfold in the grip of an illusion, and the film itself frequently resembles a hallucination, not least in an extended tour-de-force shot that reveals an endless stream of miners trekking up and down the mountain as we hear radio reports and stories of their daily lives. Full of unforgettable images and sounds, Eldorado XXI is a transporting, fundamentally mysterious experience that renews the possibilities of the ethnographic film. North American Premiere Evolution / Évolution Lucile Hadžihalilović, France, 2015, 81m French with English subtitles On a remote island, populated solely by women and young boys, 10-year-old Nicolas plays with other children, but not in a carefree manner. And while the women may have maternal instincts, something is awry: they gather on the beach at night for a strange ritual that Nicolas struggles to understand, and the boys are taken to a hospital regularly for mysterious treatments. And water is everywhere. This is the stuff nightmares are made of, and Nicolas appears to be living out one of his own. In the follow-up to her directorial debut, Innocence, Lucile Hadžihalilović continues her exploration of growing up—where we’re going and what we’re leaving behind. As Nicolas discovers more, feelings of fear, melancholy, and also eroticism bubble to the surface. Hadžihalilović has created a dark fantasy that we are invited to explore and make our own discoveries, however macabre they may be. An Alchemy release. The Fits Anna Rose Holmer, USA, 2015, 72m The transition from girlhood to young womanhood is one that’s nearly invisible in cinema. Enter Anna Rose Holmer, whose complex and absorbing narrative feature debut elegantly depicts a captivating 11-year-old’s journey of discovery. Toni (played by the majestically named Royalty Hightower) is a budding boxer drawn to a group of dancers training at the same rec center in Cincinnati. She begins aligning herself with one of the two troupes, the Lionesses, becoming immersed in their world, which Holmer conveys with a hypnotic sense of rhythm and a rare gift for rendering physicality—evident most of all when a mysterious, convulsive condition begins to afflict a number of girls. Set entirely within the intimate confines of a few familiar settings (public school, the gym), and pulsating with bodies in motion, The Fits encourages us to recall the confused magic of entering the second decade of life. An Oscilloscope release. Happy Hour Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Japan, 2015, 317m Japanese with English subtitles Four thirtysomething female friends in the misty seaside city of Kobe navigate the unsteady currents of their work, domestic, and romantic lives. They speak solace in one another’s company, but a sudden revelation creates a rift, and rouses each woman to take stock. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s wise, precisely observed, compulsively watchable drama of friendship and midlife awakening runs over five hours, yet the leisurely duration is not an indulgence but a careful strategy—to show what other films leave out, to create a space for everyday moments that is nonetheless charged with possibility, and to yield an emotional density rarely available to a feature-length movie. Developed through workshops with a cast of mostly newcomers (the extraordinary lead quartet shared the Best Actress award at the Locarno Film Festival), and filled with absorbing sequences that flow almost in real time, Happy Hour has a novelistic depth and texture. But it’s also the kind of immersive, intensely moving experience that remains unique to cinema. In the Last Days of the City / Akher Ayam El Madina Tamer El Said, Egypt/Germany/Great Britain/United Arab Emirates, 2016, 118m Arabic with English subtitles This film within a film is a haunting yet lyric chronicle of recent years in the Arab world, where revolutions seemed to spark hope for change and yield further instability in one stroke. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Khalid Abdalla (The Kite Runner, The Square) plays the protagonist of Tamer El Said’s ambitious feature debut, a filmmaker in Cairo attempting to capture the zeitgeist of his city as the world changes around him—from personal love and loss to the fall of the Mubarak regime. Throughout, friends send footage and stories from Berlin, Baghdad, and Beirut, creating a powerful, multilayered meditation on togetherness, the tactile hold of cities, and the meaning of homeland. Shot in 2008 and completed this year, the film explores the weight of cinematic images as record and storytelling in an ongoing time of change. North American Premiere I Promise You Anarchy / Te prometo anarquía Julio Hernández Cordón, Mexico/Germany, 2015, 100m Spanish with English subtitles Miguel (Diego Calva) and Johnny (Eduardo Eliseo Martinez) are in deep. Badass skater-bros, crazy-in-love blood hustlers, they’re flowing inevitably toward a sea swimming with narco-sharks. This is Mexico City today, and for two boys from different worlds but the same house—Johnny is the son of Miguel’s family maid—there is no future. On the days they do have at their disposal, they will live as hard as they can, even if it means total destruction for everyone around them. A harrowing vision of the 21st century replete with garishly lit sex scenes, inebriated slow motion, and an exhilarating, eclectic pop soundtrack, and winner of numerous prizes at festivals in Latin America, Julio Hernández Cordón’s film is exploding with beats, sweat, and pain—an ecstatic and anguished portrait of youth teetering on the brink of nihilism. U.S. Premiere Kaili Blues / Lu bian ye can Bi Gan, China, 2015, 113m Mandarin with English subtitles A multiple prizewinner at the Locarno Film Festival and one of the most audacious and innovative debuts of recent years, Bi Gan’s endlessly surprising shape-shifter comes to assume the uncanny quality of a waking dream as it poetically and mysteriously interweaves the past, present, and future. Chen Sheng, a country doctor in the Guizhou province who has served time in prison, is concerned for the well-being of his nephew, Weiwei, whom he believes his thug brother Crazy Face intends to sell. Weiwei soon vanishes, and Chen sets out to find him, embarking on a mystical quest that takes him to the riverside city of Kaili and the town of Dang Mai. Through a remarkable arsenal of stylistic techniques, the film develops into a one-of-a-kind road movie, at once magical and materialist, traversing both space and time. U.S. Premiere Kill Me Please / Mate-me por favor Anita Rocha da Silveira, Brazil/Argentina, 2015, 101m Portuguese with English subtitles Anita Rocha da Silveira’s vibrantly morbid debut feature is a coming-of-age story in which passive aggression on the handball court, jealousy among friends, and teenage angst unfold in the foreground of a slasher flick. In Rio de Janeiro’s Barra da Tijuca—a newly formed upper-middle-class neighborhood of car-lined thoroughfares, gigantic malls, and monolithic white condos—a clique of teenage girls become fearfully captivated by a string of gruesome murders. The most fascinated is Bia (Valentina Herszage), whose own sexual discoveries evolve alongside the mounting deaths in this skewed world of wild colors and transformative desires. With nods to Brian De Palma’s Carrie, Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, and the atmospheres of David Lynch, Rocha da Silveira’s contribution to the genre is nonetheless entirely her own. Life After Life / Zhi fan ye mao Zhang Hanyi, China, 2016, 80m Mandarin with English subtitles Zhang Hanyi’s exquisitely restrained ghost story combines the gentle supernaturalism of Apichatpong Weerasethakul with the clear-eyed social realism of Jia Zhangke (one of the film’s executive producers). A young boy, Leilei, becomes possessed by his late mother, Xiuying, whose spirit has wandered the Shanxi Province’s disintegrating cave homes for years. With the help of Leilei’s father (who receives his late wife’s return with matter-of-fact equanimity), they set out to move a tree from her family’s courtyard before she departs again. In ethereal, beautifully composed sequences of a barren rural-industrial village on the edge of collapse, itself a kind of purgatorial space, Zhang captures the spectral gap between life and oblivion. North American Premiere Lost and Beautiful / Bella e perduta Pietro Marcello, Italy/France, 2015, 87m Italian with English subtitles Pietro Marcello continues his intrepid work along the borderline of fiction and documentary with this beautiful and beguiling film, by turns neorealist and fabulist, worthy of Pasolini in its matter-of-fact lyricism and political conviction. Shot on expired 16mm film stock and freely incorporating archival footage and folkloric tropes, it begins as a portrait of the shepherd Tommaso, a local hero in the Campania region of southern Italy, who volunteered to look after the abandoned Bourbon palace of Carditello despite the state’s apathy and threats from the Mafia. Tommaso suffers a fatal heart attack in the course of shooting, and Marcello’s bold and generous response is to grant his subject’s dying wish: for a Pulcinella straight out of the commedia dell’arte to appear on the scene and rescue a buffalo calf from the palace. With Lost and Beautiful, a documentary that soars into the realm of myth, Marcello has crafted a uniquely multifaceted and enormously moving work of political cine-poetry. Winner of two awards at the Locarno Film Festival. U.S. Premiere Mountain / Ha’har Yaelle Kayam, Denmark/Israel, 2015, 83m Hebrew with English subtitles Atop Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives, Zvia, a Jewish Orthodox woman, lives surrounded by an ancient cemetery with her four children and husband, a Yeshiva teacher who pays scant attention to her. Yaelle Kayam’s feature debut moves beyond the symbolic landscape of a woman’s isolation to offer a subtle and finely paced entryway into the character’s surprising inner life. On a nighttime walk through the tombstones, Zvia encounters a group of prostitutes and their handlers and gradually becomes an unlikely bystander to their after-hours activities, trading home-cooked meals for companionship—an usual sort, perhaps, but one that upends her existence as a mother and wife. Shani Klein’s arresting lead performance challenges clichés of female subjectivity in the filmmaker’s own society, culminating in Zvia’s dramatic attempt to bring change to her life; throughout, keenly observed frames, by turn luminous and moody, asserts the heroine’s volition with intention and finesse. Nakom T.W. Pittman & Kelly Daniela Norris, Ghana/USA, 2016, 90m Kusaal with English subtitles When his father dies suddenly, medical-student Iddrisu (Jacob Ayanaba) leaves the good life in the city and returns home to Nakom, a remote farming village. He’s now the head of the family, and he finds he must repay a debt that could destroy them all. Over the course of a growing season, Iddrisu confronts both the tragedy and the beauty of village life and must choose between a future for himself in the city or one for his family and the entire village. Filming in the village of Nakom in northern Ghana, directors T.W. Pittman and Kelly Daniela Norris capture in exquisite detail the lives of people steeped in rural tradition but who yearn to be a part of a new world. Along with writer Isaac Adakudugu and a nonprofessional cast—many of whom are revelations—they have created in Nakom an intimate yet universal story about the search for independence while feeling the pull of tradition. North American Premiere Neon Bull / Boi neon Gabriel Mascaro, Brazil/Uruguay/Netherlands, 2015, 101m Portuguese with English subtitles A rodeo movie unlike any other, Gabriel Mascaro’s Venice and Toronto prize-winning follow-up to his 2014 fiction debut August Winds tracks handsome cowboy Iremar (Juliano Cazarré) as he travels around to work at vaquejada rodeos, a Brazilian variation on the sport in which two men on horseback attempt to bring a bull down by its tail. Iremar dreams of becoming a fashion designer, creating flamboyant outfits for his co-worker, single mother Galega (Maeve Jinkings). Along with Galega’s daughter Cacá and a bullpen worker named Zé, these complex characters, drawn with tremendous compassion and not an ounce of condescension, make up an unorthodox family, on the move across the northeast Brazilian countryside. Sensitive to matters of gender and class, and culminating in one of the most audacious and memorable sex scenes in recent memory, Neon Bull is a quietly affirming exploration of desire and labor, a humane and sensual study of bodies at work and at play. A Kino Lorber release. Peter and the Farm Tony Stone, USA, 2016, 92m Peter Dunning is a rugged individualist in the extreme, a hard-drinking loner and former artist who has burned bridges with his wives and children and whose only company, even on harsh winter nights, are the sheep, cows, and pigs he tends on his Vermont farm. Peter is also one of the most complicated, sympathetic documentary subjects to come along in some time, a product of the 1960s counterculture whose poetic idealism has since soured. For all his candor, he slips into drunken self-destructive habits, cursing the splendors of a pastoral landscape that he has spent decades nurturing. Imbued with an aching tenderness, Tony Stone’s documentary is both haunting and heartbreaking, a mosaic of its singular subject’s transitory memories and reflections—however funny, tragic, or angry they may be. Remainder Omer Fast, UK/Germany, 2015, 97m The feature debut by celebrated video artist Omer Fast is a striking, stylish adaptation of English novelist Tom McCarthy’s landmark 2005 novel. Set in London, the narrative kicks off when the anonymous protagonist (Tom Sturridge) is struck by a large object plummeting from the sky. When he comes to, he has no recollection of what happened, and a reparations settlement nets him millions of pounds. The man channels these resources toward creating preposterously ambitious reconstructions of his own dim memories, in the process raising a host of questions about the relationship between reality and simulation, the minute details essential to our perception of places and events, and the limits of artistic monomania. Fast, who has explored similar themes in his own work, adapts McCarthy’s idea-packed novel with lucidity and wit, and Sturridge is mesmerizing as an existential hero searching the void for a trace of meaning. North American Premiere Short Stay Ted Fendt, USA, 2016, 35mm, 61m Multi-hyphenate Ted Fendt delivers on the promise of his acclaimed short films without sacrificing an ounce of his singular charm and rigor. Shooting on 16mm (blown up to 35mm), the writer-director-editor here focuses on Mike (Mike MacCherone), an ambitionless resident of Haddonfield, New Jersey, who finds himself subletting a friend’s room in Philadelphia and (ineptly) covering his shifts at a by-donation walking-tour company. Mike floats, as if in a trance, from one low-key comic folly to another, each one a strange and subtle moral tale. Fendt’s economy of expression, expert handling of his nonprofessional cast, and incomparable nose for the tragicomic dimension of the everyday distinguishes Short Stay as a truly anomalous work in contemporary American cinema: a film made entirely on its maker’s terms. North American Premiere Suite Armoricaine Pascale Breton, France, 2015, 148m French with English subtitles In her first feature since her distinctive 2004 debut, Illumination, Pascale Breton returns to her native region of Brittany for this rapturous ensemble film about the persistence of the past in the present. Françoise (Valérie Dréville), an accomplished art historian, leaves Paris to teach at her alma mater in Rennes. Most of her former schoolmates never left town, it turns out, and are curiously eyeing her return. Meanwhile, Ion (Kaou Langoët), a sensitive geography student, falls in love with the blind Lydie (Manon Evenat), and clashes with his estranged, now-homeless mother, Moon (Elina Löwensohn), one of Françoise’s closest friends from the old punk-rock days… As these idiosyncratic, richly drawn characters intersect, their points of view overlap and the tricks of time and memory become apparent. Bursting with ideas and emotion, Suite Armoricaine is a work of symphonic scope and grand themes (love and death, art and beauty, language and music) that finds deep wells of meaning in the smallest and most surprising details and gestures. North American Premiere Thithi Raam Reddy, India/USA, 2015, 120m Hindi with English subtitles Raam Reddy’s bold, vibrant first feature is closer to Émile Zola than it is to Bollywood. Filmed in India’s southern Karnataka state with all nonprofessional actors, the sprawling narrative follows three generations of sons following the death of the family’s patriarch, their 101-year-old grandfather known as “Century Gowda.” The men’s respective vices—ranging from greed to womanizing to cut-and-dry escapism—bring deliciously comedic misadventures to their village in the days leading up to the thithi, a funeral celebration traditionally held 11 days after a death. This incisive portrait of a community in a time of radical change (while some are looking after their sheep, others are lost in their cell phones) yields exemplary humanist comedy. Winner of two awards at the Locarno Film Festival, the film equally affirms the advent of a new realism within Indian cinema, as well as an engaging new voice in contemporary world cinema. Tikkun Avishai Sivan, Israel, 2015, 120m Hebrew and Yiddish with English subtitles In Avishai Sivan’s intense and provocative Tikkun, a prizewinner at the Jerusalem and Locarno Film Festivals, an ultra-Orthodox Yeshiva student experiences a crisis of faith—and visions of earthly delights—when his father brings him back from the brink of death. Was the young man’s improbable survival a violation of God’s will, or was it “tikkun,” a way toward enlightenment and redemption? Sivan imbues the narrative with an indeterminate, hypnotic blend of black comedy and alienated modernism, effecting a singularly uncanny atmosphere. Nonprofessional actor Aharon Traitel, himself a former Hasidic Jew, gives a nuanced, knowing performance as the anguished prodigy, and the black-and-white chiaroscuro photography casts the devoutly private, regimented Hasidic community of old Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim in a morally shaded light. A Kino Lorber release. The Wakhan Front / Ni le ciel ni la terre Clément Cogitore, France/Belgium, 2015, 100m French and Persian with English subtitles The ingenious conceit of The Wakhan Front, a critical success at Cannes, is to transform the Afghan battlefield—dust and boredom and jolts of explosive violence—into the backdrop for a metaphysical thriller. Jérémie Renier stars as a French army commander who begins to lose the loyalty of his company, as well as his sanity, when soldiers start mysteriously disappearing one by one. Rarely is the madness of war conveyed on screen with such simmering tension and existential fear. Rarely, too, is the ignorance and mistrust between cultures—are the shepherd villagers innocent civilians or Taliban spies?—limned with such poetic insight. U.S. Premiere Weiner Josh Kriegman & Elyse Steinberg, USA, 2016, 100m Truly compelling vérité filmmaking requires several key factors to coalesce: intimate access, cinematographic acumen, genuine inquisitiveness, and fascinating subjects. Directors Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg brilliantly meld these elements to create one of the most engaging and entertaining works of nonfiction film in recent years. A truly 21st-century hybrid of classic documentary techniques and reality-based dramatic storytelling, Weiner follows the mayoral election bid of former New York Congressman Anthony Weiner in 2013, an attempted comeback that, as we all know now, was doomed to failure. By turns Shakespearean in its tragedy (it’s clear that Weiner and his inner circle have real political talent) and Christopher Guest-ian in its comedic portrayal of what devolves into a Waiting for Guffman–esque campaign, this is the perfect political film for our time. A Sundance Selects release. SHORTS PROGRAMS Shorts Program One Under the Sun / Ri Guang Zhi Xia Yang Qiu, China, 2015, 19m Chinese with English subtitles An incident of random nature entangles two families and brings their plights into sharp focus. Dirt Darius Clark Monroe, USA, 2014, 7m With an unsettling lyricism all his own, Darius Clark Monroe traces an evocative and elliptical portrait of a dirty deed. Totem Marte Vold, Norway, 2015, 20m Norwegian with English subtitles In seemingly idyllic Oslo, a couple demonstrates the discontents of intimacy with wit and biting honesty. U.S. Premiere Reluctantly Queer Akosua Adoma Owusu, Ghana/USA, 2016, 8m In a letter home to his beloved mother, a young Ghanaian man attempts to unpack his queerness in light of her love. North American Premiere Isabella Morra Isabel Pagliai, France, 2015, 22m French with English subtitles The courtyards of a housing project become a de facto stage on which unsupervised children perform, spreading rumors and shouting insults in an imitation of adulthood. North American Premiere Shorts Program Two The Digger Ali Cherri, Lebanon/France/UAE, 2015, 24m Arabic and Pashto with English subtitles With ritualistic serenity, a lone caretaker maintains ancient graves in the Sharjah Desert long after the bodies are gone. North American Premiere We All Love the Seashore / Tout le Monde Aime le Bord de la Mer Keina Espiñeira, Spain, 2016, 16m French and Pulaar with English subtitles A poetic distillation of the liminal space of refugees and migrants, developed collaboratively through encounters on the African coast of the Mediterranean. North American Premiere Of a Few Days Timothy Fryett, USA, 2016, 14m On the South Side of Chicago, final touches on one’s journey on Earth are meticulously made in a decades-old community funeral home. North American Premiere The Park / Le Park Randa Maroufi, France, 2015, 14m French and Arabic with English subtitles A series of tableaux vivants mesmerizingly locate the intersection of public space, inner lives, and social media within an abandoned Casablanca amusement park. U.S. Premiere

    Read more

  • 2016 Sundance Film Fest Reveals New Frontier Program of Films, Virtual Reality Experiences, and Installations

    Cameraperson, Kirsten Johnson The 2016 Sundance Film Festival taking place January 21 to 31, 2016, celebrates the 10th Anniversary of its New Frontier program with an exhibition of new work, including immersive cinematic works, virtual reality installations, an extensive lineup of documentary and narrative mobile VR experiences and an inside look at the innovations being developed at some of world’s leading media research labs. The 2016 edition of New Frontier at the Festival includes three feature films and a live performance, as well as 30 VR experiences and eleven installations in the more than 10,000-square-foot exhibition, taking place at multiple venues. In addition to a physical exhibition at the Festival, audiences everywhere will be able to experience more than 20 virtual reality pieces on mobile VR headsets. This year’s Festival will also include a program of New Frontier short films to be announced at a later date. Robert Redford, President and Founder of Sundance Institute, said, “For me, New Frontier has always embraced risk and innovation in a way that reflects the heart of Sundance and the ever-evolving nature of film. It champions films, artists and installations that use new media technology to expand, experiment and explode traditional storytelling. Independent artists continue to fuel the broader community with artistic innovation, bold thinking and groundbreaking narratives that can change the art of film forever.” The 10th Anniversary exhibitions will also be presented with MoMA in New York City in April, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as part of Northern Spark in June. FILMS AND PERFORMANCE Cameraperson / U.S.A. (Director: Kirsten Johnson) (pictured in main image above) — By exposing her role behind the camera, Johnson reaches into the vast trove of footage that she has shot over decades around the world. What emerges is a visually bold memoir and a revelatory interrogation into the power of the camera. World Premiere The Illinois Parables / U.S.A. (Director and screenwriter: Deborah Stratman) — This suite of Midwestern parables about faith, force, technology, and exodus questions the role belief plays in national identity. In our desire to make sense of the inscrutable, who do we end up blaming or endorsing? Cast: C. Felton Jennings II, Anna Toborg, Joshua Frieman, José Oubrerie, Daniel Verdier, David Gatten. World Premiere Nari Artists: Gingger Shankar, Dave Liang, Sun Yunfan The unsung story of Lakshmi Shankar and her daughter, Viji—two extraordinary artists who helped bring Indian music to the West in the 1970s through their close collaboration with Ravi Shankar and George Harrison. This arresting, multi-generational, multimedia mash-up features animation, family archives, and a live performance. U.S. Premiere Notes on Blindness/ United Kingdom, France (Directors and screenwriters: Peter Middleton, James Spinney) — After losing his sight, John Hull knew that not understanding blindness would destroy him. In 1983, he began to keep an audio diary. His recordings represent a unique testimony of loss, rebirth, and renewal, excavating the experience of blindness and documenting his discovery of “a world beyond sight.” Project includes a mobile VR experience. Cast: Dan Skinner, Simone Kirby. World Premiere INSTALLATIONS Double Conscience Artist: Kahlil Joseph; Key Collaborator: Kendrick Lamar A lush portrait of contemporary Compton, California, set to a booming soundtrack by Kendrick Lamar, depicts everyday moments of black life suffused with creativity, joy, and sadness. From buoyant adolescent moments to ominous nighttime scenes, reality and fantasy dance to a haunting soundscape flashed across two screens. Cast: Bijan Faby, Shenelle Bullock, Chris Lewis, Rykeis Tyson, Jordan Dupree, Kamr Bailey. Escape Pod Artist: Jonathan Monaghan This seamlessly looped computer animated film chronicles a golden deer through glossy environments of wealth, power, and authority through one continuous tracking shot. The journey imagines a new reality devoid of humans, left only with material desires and ambitions. Giant Artists: Milica Zec, Winslow Porter; Key Collaborators: E.A. Donahue, Jack Caron, Todd Bryant Trapped in an active war zone, two parents struggle to distract their young daughter by inventing a fantastical tale. Inspired by true events, this immersive VR experience transports the viewer to the family’s makeshift basement shelter. As the bombs draw closer and closer, the parents’ fairy tale intensifies. Cast: Zoë Winters, Clem Mcintosh, Jordana Rose. The Holo-Cinema Artist: ILMxLab This new scenic design and experience theatre allows participants to step into iconic story moments while spatially perceiving the performing characters and exploring worlds. As they portal inside a fully immersive media environment, they experience 4-D viewing as if walking through film sets in the real world. In the Eyes of the Animal Artists: Barnaby Steel, Robin McNicholas A 360-degree virtual reality experience presented on sculptural headsets, this work is an artistic interpretation of the sensory perceptions of three British animal species. Immerse yourself into this world from the forest floor to the tops of trees, and tread carefully as you observe through the eyes of the animals. Inextinguishable Fire Artist: Cassils Using techniques borrowed from Hollywood stunts, Cassils experiences the very real terror of being lit on fire. The Leviathan Project Artists: Alex McDowell, Bradley Newman; Key Collaborator: World Building Media Lab It’s 1895, and you’re in a scientific lab inside a massive flying whale. This augmented-reality-to-VR setting, based on Scott Westerfield’s best-selling trilogy Leviathan, lets participants engage physically and emotionally with the setting and with human and animal characters. The best part is the ability to fabricate a brand-new creature. Cast: Gildart Jackson, Isabella Schloss, Austin Nimnict, A.J. Helfet, Ellis Greer, Alex Ho. Queen Rose Family (da Stories) Artist: Kalup Linzy The story of the fictitious Queen Rose family is told through episodic videos, collages, and a multimedia installation based on the “Pepper’s ghost” technique. Experience the melodrama often seen in primetime soap operas presented in an art installation. Cast: Kalup Linzy, Michael Stipe, Leo Fitzpatrick, Tunde Adebimpe, Hank Willis Thomas, James Everett Stanley. Real Virtuality: Immersive Explorers Artists: Sylvain Chagué, Caecilia Charbonnier; Key Collaborators: Bart Kevelham, David Hodgetts A multiuser immersive platform that combines motion capture with virtual reality headsets allows users to move freely within the physical space, interact with objects and other participants, and virtually visit 3-D interactive environments. Cast: Gilles Jobin, Susana Panades Diaz. The Treachery of Sanctuary Artist: Chris Milk; Key Collaborators: Brian Chasalow, Aaron Meyers, James George A large-scale interactive triptych, this story of birth, death, and transfiguration uses projections of the participants’ own bodies to unlock a new artistic language. Walden, a Game Artist: Tracy Fullerton; Key Collaborators: Todd Furmanski, Lucas Peterson, Michael Sweet In this game simulation of Henry David Thoreau’s experiment in living at Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847, players walk in Thoreau’s virtual footsteps, attend to the tasks of a self-reliant existence, discover the beauty of a virtual landscape, and engage in the ideas and writings of this unique philosopher. Cast: Emile Hirsch. VIRTUAL REALITY #100humans Artists: Daniel Schechter, Linc Gasking, Rainer Gombos; Key Collaborators: Preya McMahon, Alexander Burke, Christina Webber #100humans is the story of the first humans who walked through 8i’s doors to help invent a new medium. Using 3-D video technology to record real people for VR, this story explores a new level of emotional connections and sense of presence that brings viewers the most lifelike intimate experience. Cast: Ashley Martin Scott, Logan Paul, Young Guru, Denise Garcia, Brent Bushnell. 6×9: An Immersive Experience of Solitary Confinement Artists: The Guardian; Key Collaborators: Lindsay Poulton, Francesca Panetta Right now, more than 80,000 people are locked in tiny concrete boxes where every element of their environment is controlled. They are confined to spaces with no human contact, and the sensory deprivation they endure causes severe psychological damage. These people are invisible to us—and eventually to themselves. The Abbot’s Book Artists: Michael Conelly, Lyndon Barrois; Key Collaborators: Keith Goldfarb, William Telford Four generations of an Italian noble family are cursed by the corrupt power of an ancient book unearthed from the catacombs beneath their estate. Rich with traditional gothic-inspired mythology, the story follows a scion of this cursed family attempting to shield his heirs from the inevitable darkness. Cast: JB Blanc. Across the Line Artists: Nonny de la Peña, Brad Lichtenstein, Jeff Fitzsimmons This immersive VR experience puts the audience on the scene with anti-abortion extremists trying to intimidate patients seeking sexual and reproductive health care at Planned Parenthood. Using documentary footage and a montage of real audio, viewers gain intimate knowledge of the harassment outside and compassion inside health centers across the country. Cast: Samantha Collier, Kristina Nailen, Raegan McDonald-Mosley MD, Charles Gilbert, Lee Sherman, Joe Spence. theBlu: Encounter Artists: Jake Rowell, Neville Spiteri, Ben Vance Encounter an 80-foot blue whale while experiencing the awe, wonder, and majesty of underwater habitats, designed as beautiful moments in passing or a collection of memories. Cardboard Crash Artists: Vincent McCurley, Loc Dao A virtual reality experiment questions the ethics of artificial-intelligence algorithms in self-driving cars when they are faced with difficult decisions during an unavoidable crash event. Given varied cultural and individual ethics, who should be designing these algorithms, and how should they be chosen? Collisions Artist: Lynette Wallworth Journey to a remote desert in western Australia that is home to indigenous leader Nyarri Morgan and the Martu tribe. Nyarri’s first contact with Western culture was in the 1950s via a dramatic collision between his traditional world view and the cutting edge of modern technology. Cast: Nyarri Nyarri Morgan, Curtis Taylor. Condition One Artists: Danfung Dennis, Casey Brown, Phil McNally; Key Collaborators: Jay Brown, Andrew Delpit, Chris McClanahan Encounter a majestic jaguar deep in the jungle, lie with a nesting sea turtle on a windy beach, and fly with monarch butterflies, all before they disappear. This powerful virtual reality experience is a glimpse into the habitats of Earth’s endangered species. Defrost Artist: Randal Kleiser; Key Collaborator: Tanna Frederick In this futuristic, sci-fi virtual reality adventure, viewers are put in the seat of a woman who wakes up after being frozen for nearly 30 years to reunite with her family. The reunion is bittersweet, as the passage of time has caused her loved ones to become strangers. Cast: Carl Weathers, Bruce Davison, Tanna Frederick, Christopher Atkins, Ethan Rains, Clinton Valencia. fabulous wonder.land Artists: Toby Coffey, Lysander Ashton, Ollie Lindsey; Key Collaborator: Mahdi Yahya Fall down the rabbit hole and experience the magical and vibrant digital world of the Royal National Theater’s wonder.land stage show. Watch and listen with VR technology as the Cheshire cat hovers above like a magnificent holographic airship while serenading you to “Fabulous,” a song from the show. Cast: Hal Fowler. Hard World for Small Things Artist: Janicza Bravo A day in the life of a tight-knit community in South Central Los Angeles. Cast: Keith Stanfield, Brandon Scott, Hannah Heller, Idara Victor, Jodie Smith. A History of Cuban Dance Artist: Lucy Walker Organic, spontaneous, sexy dances progress chronologically through Afro-Cuban Santería rumba, mambo, cha-cha-chá, salsa, breakdancing, and reggaeton, with optional audio tracks reflecting the broader story of Cuban history as revealed in the moves. This live-action virtual reality documentary was filmed on location in Cuba and features Ballet de la Televisión Cubana. Cast: Ballet de la Televisión Cubana. Irrational Exuberance Artist: Ben Vance; Key Collaborators: Sam Bird, Joel Corelitz Uniquely designed for room-scale VR, this interactive art experience gives the viewer an intimate connection to the possibilities and wonders of space, where mysterious phenomena, hidden beauty, and the infinite await. Job Simulator Artists: Alex Schwartz, Devin Reimer This experience of manning an office cubicle is a unique blend of storytelling, comedy, and intuitive game mechanics that focuses on micro-interactions. Pick up a tomato, smash a glass, and explore a sandbox world with childlike wonder, while ignoring established gaming systems. Kiya Artist: Nonny de la Peña; Key Collaborator: Emblematic Group In this harrowing virtual reality story of a real-life domestic violence homicide, two sisters engage in a doomed struggle to save the third from being shot and killed by her ex-boyfriend. Utilizing audio and imagery captured at the real event, this piece transforms the audience from viewers to active witnesses. Cast: Lee Sherman, Toyin Moses, Tripp Pickell, Diana Toshiko. The Martian VR Experience Artists: Robert Stromberg, Ridley Scott; Key Collaborators: Fox Innovation Lab, RSA Films, VRC Step into the shoes of astronaut Mark Watney as he performs tasks that will facilitate his chances for survival and rescue. Viewers can fly onto the surface of Mars, steer at zero gravity through space, and drive a rover, deepening the experience of key scenes from Ridley Scott’s hit film, The Martian. Nomads: Maasai Artists: Felix Lajeunesse, Paul Raphael; Key Collaborator: Stephane Rituit Witness the Maasai tribe’s living heritage in the village of Enkutoto, Kenya, through repeated walkabout visuals in the Great Rift Valley. Watch jumping-dance competitions, the men’s unmatched hunting abilities, and the women’s skills in building mud houses, long-distance water collection, and bead artwork. Nomads: Sea Gypsies Artists: Felix Lajeunesse, Paul Raphael; Key Collaborators: Stephane Rituit, Jean-Pascal Beaudoin In this episode of Nomads, viewers share the Bajau tribe’s nomadic existence on crammed houseboats that sway to the motion of river waters. Watch as the families travel with fellow boat-dwelling relatives, always sharing a communal spirit. Notes on Blindness—Into Darkness Artists: Arnaud Colinart, Amaury Laburthe, Peter Middleton, James Spinney; Key Collaborators: Arnaud Desjardins, Béatrice Lartigue, Fabien Togman After losing his sight in 1983, John Hull began to record an audio-diary documenting his discovery of “a world beyond sight.” Hull’s original recordings form the basis of this interactive documentary, which uses real-time 3-D, virtual reality, and binaural sound to explore the world of the blind. Cast: John Hull. Perspective 2: The Misdemeanor Artists: Rose Troche, Morris May; Key Collaborator: Charles Ottaway When two men are stopped by a police officer, a simple misdemeanor spirals out of control, turning the situation rapidly antagonistic. With each party suspecting the other, no one is able to stop the chain of events that follows. Cast: Shemar Jonas, Javon Jones, Joey Auzenne, Johnny Tchaikovsky. The Rose and I Artists: Eugene Chung, Jimmy Maidens, Alex Woo; Key Collaborators: Terry Kaleas, Ryan Shore, Nick Sung An immersive, animated VR film crafted by the artists, hackers and storytellers of Penrose Studios, The Rose and I is about loneliness, friendship, love, and loss. Come meet a lonely Rose living in the unlikeliest of places, and be transported into a brand new universe. Cast: Rachael Bigelow. Sequenced Artists: Emilie Joly, Sylvain Joly, Michaël Martin; Key Collaborators: Maria Beltran Reyes, John Howe, Richard Johnson A teenage girl becomes guardian of the last city on Earth to change its fate by fusing her instinctive knowledge of nature with an AI’s benevolence, analysis, and foresight. This interactive animated series made for virtual reality relies on your focus for the story to evolve. Cast: Peter Coyote, Morgan Burch. Sisters Artists: Robyn Gray, Andrew Goldstein, Michael Murdock; Key Collaborator: Philip Eberhart Be careful where you look because someone or something doesn’t want you here. Otherworld presents two chapters in their popular horror series. Experience two sets of thrills and chills as you physically walk through a haunted house and experience a virtual reality ghost story that will scare your pants off. Cast: Julia Chalker, Greg Vogt. Sonar Artists: Philipp Maas, Dominik Stockhausen When a drone receives a faint distress call emerging from an unknown asteroid, it journeys to locate the source of the signal and ventures into a deep, ancient labyrinth that holds a secret even darker than space itself. Stonemilker Artist: Andrew Thomas Huang; Key Collaborator: Björk Guðmundsdóttir A virtual reality collaboration between Vrse.works creator Andrew Thomas Huang and Björk explores the possibilities that VR holds for performance platforms outside of the traditional music video world. Cast: Björk. Surge Artist: Arjan van Meerten An abstract meditation on the evolutionary process and its relentless march towards complexity, this virtual reality music video was produced over the course of a year, with Arjan van Meertan creating all of the music, animation, and code himself. The Unknown Photographer Artists: Loic Suty, Osman Zeki, Claudine Matte; Key Collaborators: Catherine Mavrikakis, François Lafontaine This immersive documentary unveils a journey into the heart of the First World War through hundreds of photographs that were found in the abandoned workshop of a country house in Quebec, Canada. Cast: Julian Casey, François Papineau. Viens! (Come!) Artists: Michel Reilhac, Carl Guyenette; Key Collaborators: Mélanie Le Grand, Xavier Servas, Sebastian Shorter Three women and four men, all naked, appear out of nowhere in the white, sunny space of a bright room outside of time. They meet, touch, share their energy, and are transformed spiritually; they let themselves become one with the world. Cast: Amador Jojo, Ayoti, Christophe De La Pointe, De La Fouquette, Flozif, Yumie Volupté. Waves Artists: Benjamin Dickinson, Reggie Watts, Luis Blackaller; Key Collaborators: Anthony Batt, Neville Spiteri Reggie Watts weaves a virtual reality story that is a dream-within-a-dream meta-ride down the rabbit hole, where the only constants seem to be his philosophical musings, comedic insights, and musical genius. Cast: Reggie Watts, Nathalie Emmanuel. Waves of Grace Artists: Gabo Arora, Chris Milk; Key Collaborators: Imraan Ismail, Samantha Storr, Patrick Milling Smith In this experience viewers are transported to the most populous slum in the capital city of Liberia, where Decontee Davis, an Ebola survivor, uses her immunity to help others affected by the disease. Cast: Decontee Davis.

    Read more