If there’s one thing pandemic shutdowns have proven over these past few years, it’s that (far too) many film festivals can just as easily be covered online. (Do I really need to hop on a plane and into a faraway cinema to view the latest Netflix Original?) That, thankfully, is not the case when it comes to the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, now in its 20th year  and still one of the most punk rock rebellious events around, as evidenced by e.g. the fest’s decision this edition (March 15-26) to team up with Kunsthal Charlottenborg, the palatial contemporary art […]

The post CPH:DOX 2023: The Platinum Anniversary Edition first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Featured in our recent Spring Issue, Swiss filmmaker Cyril Schäublin’s Unrest now has an official trailer. The film premiered last year during Berlinale’s Encounters section, where Schäublin won Best Director. It went on to screen at TIFF, the New York Film Festival and the Viennale, among several other international festivals. Unrest will open via KimStim on May 5 at Film at Lincoln Center in New York City and May 19 at Laemmle Monica Film Center in Los Angeles. An official synopsis for the film reads: New technologies are transforming a 19th-century watchmaking town in Switzerland. Josephine (Clara Gostynski), a young […]

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After a whole assortment of Barbies (and the actors who’ll play them) were announced earlier today, a full-length trailer has landed for Barbie. Directed by Greta Gerwig (her follow-up to 2019’s Little Women) and co-written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach (partners and frequent collaborators, most recently on Baumbach’s White Noise), the film will hit theaters this summer. Margot Robbie stars as the titular Mattel toy icon, with Ryan Gosling embodying her long-term boyfriend, Ken. While Robbie and Gosling appear as the Barbie and Ken blueprints, an ensemble cast will portray several different iterations of Barbie—like a mermaid (Dua Lipa), Nobel […]

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On this special episode, we’re talking all about voice! Neda Lahidji is an actor, singer, vocal health coach, voice teacher and a certified vocal health first aider. She specializes in the voices and vocal health of actors, VO actors, and singers, including any vocal athletes in the film industry as well as directors who use their voice tremendously throughout production. She talks about the different factors that affect the voice, gives us techniques to help maintain a vocal athlete’s optimal vocal health, shares her own stories of various vocal ups and downs, explains why it’s almost all mental, and much […]

The post “This Little Thing, That’s Like the Size of a Walnut, and the Width of Our Thumbnail, Can Do So Much.” Voice: A Special Episode of Back To One first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The tongue-in-cheek title card for The Doom Generation—“a heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki”—isn’t merely an enduring “fuck you” to homophobes. Amid a sexless and puritanical American film landscape, coupled with an equally regressive online discourse on whether sex scenes in films are ever truly necessary, the emphasis on a sexual movie by Gregg Araki, regardless of orientation, transmits a much-needed erotic jolt. Newly restored in a 4K director’s cut, with grisly moments previously nixed for an Araki-unapproved R-rated cut now restored, The Doom Generation follows a trio of heartthrobs on a road trip from hell. After a night out clubbing, teen […]

The post “Sex and Sexuality Have Been Central to All of My Movies”: Gregg Araki on Restoring The Doom Generation first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Agnès Godard films the opening sequence of her fifth collaboration (following four features and a short) with writer-director Ursula Meier, The Line (La Ligne), in static slow motion: Margaret (Stéphanie Blanchoud) hits her mother (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi), who falls and collides against the keys of her own piano, rendering her deaf in the impacted ear. A restraining order charges the eldest daughter to not to come within 200 meters of her mother—an invisible boundary she immediately ignores with abrasive attempts to make amends until her younger sister paints a literal perimeter around the house. Margaret hovers at a little hill at one […]

The post “The Search for Images is a Search That Can Last Forever”: Agnès Godard on The Line and Nenétte et Boni first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

New Directors/New Films, the annual showcase of work by emerging directors co-presented by the Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center, began this week in New York City and runs through April 9. The 2023 slate features 27 features and 11 shorts, most of them culled from top-tier festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, Locarno, and Rotterdam. As always, ND/NF’s offerings are global in scope, with over 30 countries represented, and the programmers remain admirably committed to arthouse aesthetics: conventional genre films and commercially minded crowd-pleasers are thin on the ground here. This is a festival for audiences willing […]

The post Five Highlights from the 2023 New Directors/New Films Festival first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Today, NEON exclusively premieres a nearly 14-minute featurette with Filmmaker on the making of Cornish writer-director Mark Jenkin’s experimental folk horror film Enys Men. Jenkin and the film’s star, Mary Woodvine, take viewers behind the scenes of the shoot and detail their individual processes while making the film. In his review out of Cannes, Vadim Rizov summarized the film’s loose plot and stylistic leanings: Set in 1973, Enys Men (Cornish for “Stone Island” and is pronounced—if I recall correctly—AYN-is Mayn) is an image-forward movie drenched in the kind of dense, thick film grain you can find in e.g. the work of Ben Rivers or […]

The post Watch: The Making of Enys Men (Exclusive Premiere) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Set in a shadowy world of scam artists and grifters, Sharper follows four characters through interlocking stories set in a modern-day noir version of New York City. From Park Avenue penthouses to abandoned warehouses, director Benjamin Caron builds a dangerous world filled with betrayals and double-crosses. Justice Smith plays Tom, manager of a used bookstore. A chance meeting with Sandra (Briana Middleton) leads to Max (Sebastian Stan), a self-professed con man. Max will encounter Madeline Phillips (Julianne Moore), a wealthy widow with designs on corporate titan Richard Hobbes (John Lithgow). Sharper is the feature debut for Caron, best known for his […]

The post “To Shoot on the 48th Floor is a DP’s Nightmare”: DP Charlotte Bruus Christensen on Sharper first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Last year at the 2022 Berlinale I had the uncanny experience of watching Hito Steyerl’s documentary The Empty Center (Die leere Mitte, 1998) in a 75-seat theater hidden away beneath The Sony Center. If you’re unfamiliar with The Sony Center in Berlin, take a second to Google it, or think back to the sterile postmodern backdrops of Brian De Palma’s Passion, in which architect Helmut Jahn’s eight-building complex plays a prominent role. The Empty Center is, in part, about the obscene land grab that occurred after German reunification, when multinational corporations like Sony, Daimler-Benz and ABB swept in to stake […]

The post Berlinale Forum 2023: The Trial, De Facto, Anqa, I Heard It Through the Grapevine first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.