The haunted halls of a defunct Catskills hotel wreak psychological violence on a group of young, queer city slickers in Bad Things, the long-awaited sophomore feature from writer-director Stewart Thorndike. Arriving nearly a decade after Lyle, Thorndike’s sapphic take on Rosemary’s Baby starring Gabby Hoffmann, Bad Things similarly tackles plot points and thematic fixations of another scary movie staple—Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining—through a thoroughly queer and feminist perspective. Ruthie (Gayle Rankin) is debating whether or not to sell the now-derelict hotel her mother used to run years prior. With a decisive real estate meeting only days away, Ruthie assembles a […]

The post Let Me Be Your Shelley Duvall: Stewart Thorndike on Bad Things first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Founded in 1999 and situated in the historic arts colony on the Massachusetts Cape, the Provincetown International Film Festival has been a bastion for independent filmmakers and their projects for a quarter of a century, with classics such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Cameraperson and Coffee & Cigarettes appearing across its programming. PIFF has also long been known for its established rapport with queer directors (John Waters has returned annually to present awards and host events) and the the LGBTQ+ community that resides in the town year-round. PIFF’s 2023 edition, which begins today and runs through the 18th, is the festival’s […]

The post Executive Director Anne Hubbell on the Provincetown International Film Festival at 25 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Shockingly (as the films I adore usually fly under the radar) but deservedly, this year’s winner of the Best International Feature Documentary Award at Hot Docs, first-time feature director Christian Einshøj’s The Mountains, proved to be a prime example of my mantra that the smaller and more specific the story, the more universal the reach. Influenced by Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March (it thrills me just to type that), and also Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, the doc is equal parts oddball charming and emotionally devastating. As the (very specific) logline puts it: “Armed with 30 years of home video, 75,000 family photos […]

The post “The Result of On-Camera Conversations Spanning 15 Years”: Christian Einshøj on The Mountains first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Mark Duplass is the living patron saint of the indie filmmaker. Honest, simple, modest, positive, affirming about the work, Duplass, first with his brother Jay and now on his own, has become a household name in the film world for producing projects in a DIY style foregrounding authenticity, improvisational humor, and human connection. As an actor, both in his own productions and also series like The Morning Show, he finds a way to keep that homegrown genuineness alive in front of the camera. His latest film, Biosphere, which he co-wrote with director Mel Eslyn, is a true two-hander (with the wonderful Sterling […]

The post “I’m the Little Boy Believing That There’s a Pony in a Pile of Shit”: Mark Duplass (Back To One, Episode 257) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Maria Fredriksson’s astonishing feature debut The Gullspång Miracle isn’t just stranger than fiction—it’s batshit insane. In the broadest of outlines, the doc stars two devoutly religious Norwegian sisters, Kari and May. May visits Kari in Gullspång, Sweden, where Kari now lives. They go to an amusement park where they take a ride inside a fake whale. May finds herself stuck in Sweden for many months, so the two decide to go shopping for an apartment, and end up buying one based on a divine sign they witness there. At the closing, they meet the seller Olaug (formerly known as Lita), […]

The post “Authenticity is More Important than Anything Else”: Maria Fredriksson on Tribeca 2023 Premiere The Gullspång Miracle first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

As the lone faculty member teaching Virtual Reality in UCLA’s film program, all week, people have been asking me what I think about Apple’s promotional video for the new Vision Pro system. I created this video in response, using clips from more than a dozen VR films dating back to 1983 and highlighting largely fictional but characteristically euphoric visions of the technological utopia purported to lie just over the horizon. Apple’s nine+ minute, superlative-filled video recycles dozens of tropes and cliches drawn from the last 40 years of cinematic and televisual imaginings of virtual reality, holographic projection, and gestural interface. […]

The post Trailer Remix: The Science Fiction Behind the Apple Vision Pro first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Premiering in international competition at last year’s IDFA, where it took top prize, Lea Glob’s (2015’s Olmo and The Seagull) Apolonia, Apolonia is an intense character study of French figurative painter Apolonia Sokol. The Danish director met the artist, who is of Danish and Polish descent, while searching for the protagonist of her first doc while attending the Danish Film School, and then trailed her for the next 13 years. And while the bohemian free spirit, who was raised in a Paris underground theater founded by her eccentric parents (an old VHS tape Apolonia discovers comes with the written warning not […]

The post “This Work is a Product of Survival”: Lea Glob on Tribeca 2023 Premiere  Apolonia, Apolonia first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Each Friday I write an original Editors Letter as part of the free Filmmaker newsletter. Always original and not usually archived on the site, the letters consist of essays, thoughts, recommendations and sometimes even early versions of pieces that appear later here. This week I wrote about the Apple Vision Pro and am reposting that piece in updated form here. To subscribe for free to the Filmmaker newsletter, click here. If you watched any of Apple’s WWDC keynote on Monday, or saw any of its videos, and thought that its new AR headset, the Apple Vision Pro, looked like science […]

The post Some Thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Award-winning DP Jude Chehab’s cinematographic talents are on full display in her Tribeca-premiering feature debut Q, a haunting look at three generations of women whose lives were forever upended by a cult. In this case, the shadowy entity is the Qubaysiat—a matriarchal religious order founded in the Middle East, where the Lebanese-American filmmaker moved to from Florida at the tender age of 10—and eagerly joined upon arrival in Beirut, having fallen under the influence of a particularly devout member – her own mother. Filmmaker reached out to Chehab, a 25 New Faces 2021 alum, to learn more about her powerful cinematic […]

The post “I Cried a Lot During the Edit”: Jude Chehab on Tribeca ’23 Premiere Q first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In the new Netflix series Beef, a struggling contractor (Steven Yeun) and an affluent entrepreneur (Ali Wong) become embroiled in an escalating feud following a road rage incident.  The series fits snuggly into a very specific quadrant of cinematographer Larkin Seiple’s wheelhouse— hard-to-classify A24 projects. Though his filmography includes sports biopics (Bleed for This), thrillers (Cop Car) and prestige dramas (To Leslie and Emmy-nominated work on Gaslit), Seiple’s most distinct work has come in A24’s Swiss Army Man, Everything Everywhere All at Once and now the studio’s Beef. With the full series streaming on Netflix, Seiple spoke to Filmmaker about Incubus clinching […]

The post “TV Shows are Like Better Funded Independent Films”: DP Larkin Seiple on Beef first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.