The 8th annual Montclair Film Festival (MFF) taking place May 3 to 12, 2019, in Montclair, NJ will feature over 150 films, events, discussions, and parties. The festival will open on Friday, May 3, with Tom Harper’s WILD ROSE, and on Saturday, May 11, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ TONI MORRISON: THE PIECES I AM will screen as the festival’s Closing Film.
After showcasing 213 feature films, 237 short films, 15 virtual reality films, and 3 interactive media projects, the winners of the competitions and awards of the the 43rd Cleveland International Film Festival (CIFF) were announced at the Closing Night Ceremony on Sunday. Princess of the Row, directed by Van Maximilian Carlson won the Roxanne T. Mueller Audience Choice Award for Best Film.
St. Louis Superman is a new documentary short chronicling Bruce Franks Jr., a Ferguson activist and battle rapper who was elected to the overwhelmingly white and Republican Missouri House of Representatives, and must overcome both personal trauma and political obstacles to pass a bill critical for his community.
The first trailer is here for the new documentary Gay Chorus Deep South chronicling The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus’ life-changing Lavender Pen Tour through five southern states in the fall of 2017.
The 5th Annual Bentonville Film Festival will open on Wednesday, May 8, with Tom Donahue’s documentary THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING, executive produced by Geena Davis, and featuring her, along with Meryl Streep, Reese Witherspoon, Natalie Portman, Zoe Saldana, Rosario Dawson, Cate Blanchett, and many others as it takes an incisive look into the history, empirical evidence, and systemic forces that foster gender discrimination and thus reinforce disparity in our culture.
Picture Character, a documentary about emojis, will have its World Premiere at the 2019 Tribeca Film Festival. Directors Martha Shane and Ian Cheney take us deep into the world of Emojis (Japanese for “picture character”), from the private non-profit international consortium that standardized emoji offerings and decides on the introduction of new ones, to the campaigns for new emojis such as those depicting menstruation and Argentinian mate, and to the very beginnings of emojis in Japan.
The Spy Behind Home Plate, the film from award-winning documentary filmmaker Aviva Kempner about Moe Berg, the baseball player turned spy, premiered the official trailer. The Spy Behind Home Plate is set for national release on Friday, May 24.
Marshall Curry is a three-time Academy Award nominated documentary filmmaker. His documentary feature Street Fight followed Cory Booker’s first run for mayor of Newark, N.J., and was nominated for an Oscar® and an Emmy®. This year, Curry was nominated for an Academy Award® for his short documentary A Night at The Garden, about a Nazi rally that filled Madison Square Garden in 1939.
William, an interesting indie sci fi film directed by Tim Disney, follows star academics, Doctors Julian Reed and Barbara Sullivan, who fall in love with each other and with the idea of cloning a Neanderthal from ancient DNA. The film starring Will Brittain, Waleed Zuaiter, Maria Dizzia, and Beth Grant opens in theaters on Friday, April 12.
The dance documentary If the Dancer Dances which follows one of New York City’s top modern dance companies preparing for a major performance, released the official trailer and poster. The documentary, directed by Maia Wechsler, opens theatrically in New York (The Quad) on Friday, April 26th and in Los Angeles on Friday, May 3rd (Laemmle Music Hall) with a national release to follow.
Documented with uncensored access to Christo and his team, Andrey Paounov’s Walking on Water is a cinema vérité look at the celebrated artist and his process, from inception to completion of 2016’s most visited art event—The Floating Piers, a stretched 2-mile dahlia-yellow walkway that allowed over 1.2 million visitors to safely walk across stretches of Italy’s Lake Iseo to experience the sensation of floating and walking on water. Walking on Water opens in theaters beginning May 17.
This incredibly insightful film General Magic from directors Matthew Maude and Sarah Kerruish, that premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, looks at the rise and fall of the most influential Silicon Valley company you have never heard of called General Magic.