A document is always an outsider’s view. –John Berger It had been five years since I attended CPH:Forum, with a pandemic in between. I’m having a lot of trouble recognizing once-familiar things in general but I know CPH:DOX well, having attended off and on for over 12 years, and I know that it used to stand for something unique in the nonfiction landscape. And while vestiges are still there, it felt this edition (March 15 – 26 in Copenhagen, Denmark) as if the whole enterprise was at a tipping point in terms of growth. Don’t misunderstand: What the team there accomplishes, […]

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For three decades, Julio César Cedillo has been delivering authentic, nuanced, fully realized performances in films and television series such as Sicario, Cowboys and Aliens, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Narcos Mexico, and the new Netflix film Chupa, to name just a few. In this hour, he generously shares what he’s learned from being a “lunchbox actor,” doing this work he loves. He talks about why, as an actor who happens to be Mexican, his first read of a script is a “search for traps.” Through stories detailing his experiences on set, he explains why it’s better to ask for forgiveness […]

The post “You Alone Are Not Making Anything Happen; It’s a Collective Experience”: Julio César Cedillo (Back To One, Episode 248) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The trailer for A24’s latest buzzy horror title, twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou’s Talk To Me,  has finally landed after a pretty extensive festival run. The film had a special preview screening last year at the Adelaide Film Festival in the brothers’ native Australia, followed by its world premiere at Sundance back in January. It’s since screened at SXSW and was the secret screening at the Overlook Film Festival a week and a half ago. Despite receiving raves from audiences, the first trailer for Talk To Me is keeping specific plot details under wraps. Without spoiling too much, here’s […]

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Today, BAVC Media (formerly Bay Area Video Coalition) announces their 2023 MediaMaker Fellowship cohort, comprised of emerging and mid-career artists embarking on social documentary projects. All seven participants will receive $10,000 in unrestricted funding as well as mentorship, feedback sessions and workshops during a nine-month period. The fellows are Paige Bethmann (Remaining Native), Aurora Brachman (Dear You), ilana coleman (The Inventory, also a 25 New Faces of Film from 2017 and co-writer of fellow 25 New Face Juan Pablo González‘s 2021 film Dos Estaciones), Tommy Franklin (You Don’t Know My Name), Cyrus Moussavi (Somebody’s Gone), Hannah Myers (Daddy) and tashi […]

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All of Joe Dante‘s films revolve around distinctly American paranoias—consumerism, threats to the nuclear family, suburban NIMBY sensibilities—but none feel more entrenched in a tangible era of American anxiety than Matinee. Now 30 years old, the film takes place during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, centering B-movie shlock jockey Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman, riffing big time on William Castle), who lands in a panicked Key West, Florida for a promotional screening of his radioactive new horror film Mant (half-man, half-ant, all monster!) Both enraptured and horrified by the real-world implications Woolsey’s film hints at (nuclear disfigurement, neighborhoods-turned-warzones, the […]

The post “Self-Aware Doesn’t Work for Us”: Joe Dante on The Movie Orgy, Matinee at 30 and William Castle’s The Tingler first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes last year, the U.S. trailer arrives today for Belgian directors Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch’s The Eight Mountains, adapted from the novel of the same name by Italian author Paolo Cognetti. The film stars Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi as, respectively, Pietro and Bruno, two childhood best friends who first meet in the Italian Alps and then re-connect later in adulthood. The Eight Mountains will be released stateside this spring by Sideshow and Janus Films. The film’s official synopsis reads: Pietro, a city boy who visits the tiny mountain village of Grana […]

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Winner of the Queer Palm at Cannes last year, writer-director Saim Sadiq’s feature debut Joyland depicts a blooming love between closeted married man Haider (Ali Junejo) and Biba (Alina Khan), a trans erotic performer who employs Haider as one of her (heretofore untrained) back-up dancers. The film chronicles the ever-shifting dynamics between Biba, Haider, his wife Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) and their intensely patriarchal immediate family. A ban on the film in Sadiq’s native Pakistan occurred due to Joyland‘s queer explorations. In a public statement, a right-wing government pundit stated that the film was “against Pakistani values,” adding that “glamorizing transgenders […]

The post “A Fear of the Freedom That You Thought You Wanted”: Saim Sadiq on Joyland first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A favorite on the festival circuit last year, the U.S. trailer arrives for Argentine filmmaker Laura Citarella’s Trenque Lauquen, which took six years to make. Co-written by Citarella and Laura Paredes (who stars), the film totals 262 minutes and follows a woman also named Laura who has disappeared in the titular town (which the filmmaker has familial roots in). This is the second film of Citarella’s that revolves around the Laura character, the first being 2011’s Ostende. Notably, Trenque Lauquen was one of Film Comment’s Best Undistributed Films of 2022, and will now get a North American theatrical release courtesy […]

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The Overlook Film Festival announces today the films that won both Jury and Audience Awards during the 2023 edition. The seventh iteration of the horror-fueled festival took place from March 30 through April 2 in New Orleans, featuring over 50 films from 12 countries. This was an especially vital year for the festival, boasting 45 sold out screenings, 110 filmmaker guests appearing in-person and approximately 5,000 audience members in attendance. Two feature films were granted Audience Awards this year: first place went to Australian filmmakers Colin Cairnes and Cameron Cairnes ’70s TV talkshow spoof Late Night with the Devil. The […]

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Another trailer drops today for a film featured in our most recent issue, this time for the docu-fiction hybrid Dry Ground Burning from directors Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós. This is the first film that Pimenta and Queirós have co-directed together, but the duo previously collaborated on Queirós’s 2017 film Once There Was Brasilia, which employed Pimenta as the cinematographer. Vadim Rizov wrote about the film during TIFF back in September: The plot revolves around two half-sisters who get involved in manufacturing and distributing gas illegally, and its title is a description, not a metaphor—the fuel’s potency is demonstrated to […]

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