Mario Patrocínio’s Maria Vitória is the writer-director’s first narrative feature, but it brings the chops of his documentary background to ground the story of the titular young woman (Mariana Cardoso). Under the relentless eye of her controlling father Nacho (Miguel Borges), Maria is subjected to a rigorous soccer training regimen that makes having a social life nearly impossible. When her estranged brother Bruno (Miguel Nunes) unexpectedly returns to their small Portuguese village, the film expands from a father-daughter duo to a fraught triangle. Bruno’s queerness challenges his father’s stereotypical machismo; her brother’s former absence and her father’s constant presence are […]

Source

Gabrielle Brady’s The Wolves Always Come at Night follows Davaa and Zaya, a rural Mongolian couple with four young daughters whose dream to continue the traditional herding way of life they’d always known is upended by a cataclysmic storm; which forces them, like so many of their friends and neighbors before, to finally relocate to the outskirts of the urban capital Ulaanbaatar in search of work. It’s a deceptively simple tale of loss — of both livelihood and identity — poignantly and cinematically captured by the talented Australian filmmaker’s lens. Yet what makes the docufiction drama, crafted with a primarily […]

Source

Recipient of DOC NYC 2024’s Lifetime Achievement Award (as well as the 2025 Pennebaker Career Achievement Award at the upcoming Hamptons Doc Fest), the “virtuoso of essayistic documentary” Alan Berliner (Letter to the Editor, First Cousin Once Removed) returns to this year’s fest with BENITA, an unconventional portrait of an even more unconventional artist. Benita Raphan was a NYC filmmaker (and a MacDowell fellow in 2004 and a Guggenheim fellow in 2019) best known for her own short portraits of eccentric artists, from John Nash, to Buckminster Fuller, to Emily Dickinson. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts, Raphan […]

Source

Steal This Story, Please! is a compelling and often unexpected look at the multi-award-winning investigative journalist (and author and syndicated columnist) Amy Goodman, best known as the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, which airs on over 1500 public television and radio stations worldwide. Since its inception nearly three decades ago, the daily, global news broadcast has been unwaveringly dedicated to telling the stories of those on the “end of the trigger.” And shockingly, it’s been doing so entirely supported by audience dollars: no government funding, corporate sponsorship, underwriting or advertising revenue required (or allowed). Just a lot of […]

Source

Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl is an arresting and deeply disturbing all-archival portrait of the titular Third Reich actor-director, responsible for some of the most innovative filmmaking of the 20th century as well as horrific war crimes (though Riefenstahl would go to her grave insisting she knew nothing of the mass murder taking place all around her, let alone the power of her propaganda). That said, Hitler’s cinematic mouthpiece would undoubtedly agree that great art requires great sacrifice — just not her own. The film is made up entirely of materials excavated from the 700 boxes Leni Riefenstahl bequeathed to the Prussian […]

Source

The nonprofit Sundance Institute today announced in a press release details for the 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s annual fundraiser, Celebrating Sundance Institute: A Tribute to Founder Robert Redford, taking place on Friday, January 23, 2026, at the Grand Hyatt Deer Valley in Utah. From the press release: The evening will honor Sundance Institute’s Founder, Robert Redford — his legacy, vision, and enduring mission to support independent storytellers. In paying tribute this year, the inaugural Robert Redford Luminary Award will be established and presented to Ed Harris and Gyula Gazdag, two artists deeply dedicated to the Sundance Institute labs and committed […]

Source

When Andrew Jarecki (HBO’s The Jinx, Capturing the Friedmans) and Charlotte Kaufman (a producer on The Jinx, Part Two) first stepped inside the secretive Alabama prison system they were there to shoot a revival meeting — an uplifting event that church ministries hold in prison yards throughout the state. What they stumbled upon instead was a far different story, one of horrific abuse, sweeping coverups and even murder at the hands of those charged to enforce the law. Making ample use of the evocative footage shot over six years on contraband phones by the incarcerated men who risked their lives […]

Source

In 2021, the Tokyo International Film Festival decided to leap out of mediocrity. It was, acquaintances told me, previously the kind of place where they’d show Princess Diaries 2 for red-carpet celebrity purposes, and in terms of its relationship to local fare, The Hollywood Reporter’s Gavin J. Blair wrote that the other TIFF “faced criticism in the past that it was run mostly by, and for the benefit of, the ‘big four’ Japanese studios” (Toho, Toei, Shochiku, Kadagawa). With the 2021 appointment of programming director Ichiyama Shozo, Tokyo—like the Busan International Film Festival—is now designed to be a launching pad for […]

Source

Tom Bateman has delivered wonderful performances in Thirteen Lives, Death on the Nile, Murder on the Orient Express, and Peacock’s dark comedic thriller series Based on a True Story, alongside Kaley Cuoco and Chris Messina, to name a few. For his latest, Hedda, he got to work opposite Tessa Thompson and Nina Hoss. On this episode, he explains what made that production special, starting with the 2 weeks of rehearsal that director Nia DeCosta insisted on. He takes us through his beginnings in the theater, how Shakespeare is the gift that keeps on giving, gives examples of direction that ignited […]

Source

After a tragic loss, college dropout Emily (Zola Grimmer) is desperate for some distance in CAMP, the sophomore feature from 22-year-old writer-director Avalon Fast. While her father (Michael Tan) is patient and supportive, the comfort of returning home only seems to make Emily regress into a volatile depression. On a lark of sorts, he suggests that she apply to work as a counselor at a summer camp deep in the Canadian wilderness. Though skeptical of the overt Christian slant espoused on the promotional pamphlet, something draws her in. When she arrives after a long journey, she is surprised to see […]

Source