Every Tuesday Tyler Coates publishes his new Filmmaker newsletter, Considerations, devoted to the awards race. To receive it early and in your in-box, subscribe here. In October, I told (warned?) a publicist friend that it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw some old-fashioned, Weinstein- and Rudin-style opposition campaigning this Oscar season. Back then, the prominent narrative was that the field was wide open without a clear frontrunner, and most of the studios and marketing agencies were operating with smaller budgets. By this time last week, the only controversies were about the use of AI to perfect the Hungarian accents in […]

The post Considerations: The Gascón Press Tour first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Sundance is capable of showing some fairly excruciating and/or formulaic comedy, but one alternative this year was the shaggy DIY delight of Endless Cookie. Tucked away in the World Cinema Documentary Competition, this Canadian animation from half-brothers Seth and Pete Scriver (who are white and indigenous, respectively) daisy-chains stories about their family history, from the far-flung Shamattawa First Nation community in Manitoba (where Pete lives) to 1980s downtown Toronto (where they logged time together). Stories from the past blur with the constant activity of the house and environs where Pete’s children and dogs live as Seth visits to record people’s […]

The post Nine Years of Storytelling: Seth and Pete Scriver on Endless Cookie first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In movies like Million Dollar Baby, August: Osage County, Blow The Man Down, and series like The Americans, Justified, and Sneaky Pete, “esteemed character actress Margo Martindale” loves to play people much different from herself. And she’s been so good at it for so long that she only started to get truly recognized for her work in her 60s. Three Emmys later, she’s able to pick and choose what she wants to do. Her latest, the Amazon series The Sticky, finds her number one on the call sheet and having a blast playing the bombastic maple syrup farmer Ruth Landry. […]

The post “Being Clean with the Words Gave Me More Freedom than Anything”: Margo Martindale, Back To One, Episode 329 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

German philosopher Ernst Bloch was noted for his introspection and study around what he termed the “utopian imagination.” He put forth the concept of simultaneous non-simultaneity: the possibility that people could live in different temporalities while inhabiting the same place at the same time. Moving image work, by its very nature, can illustrate this idea like no other art form can – even without special effects or CGI. From frame to frame, sequence to sequence, a collection of purpose-built images and sounds floats through their own unique space-time continuum, evoking an awakening, a recognition, creating a genre-defying ode to staying […]

The post “…How To Put Myself in a Situation Where the Outside Pain Helps Me Reach the Inside Pain…”: Stefan Djordjevic on His IFFR-Premiering Wind, Talk to Me first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Hailey Gates’s war-training satire Atropia won today the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Brittany Shyne’s Seeds, about Black farmers in Georgia and their relationship to both the land and U.S. agricultural policy, won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary. In the international categories, the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic went to Rohan Parashuram Kanawade’s UK/India/Canada production about a Western India urbanite grieving the loss of his father. Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears). Cutting Through Rocks (اوزاک یوللار), Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s documentary about the feminist teachings of a councilwoman in a small Iranian […]

The post Atropia, Seeds Win Top Prizes at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A family of four—an unnamed Dad (John Magaro), his children Ella and Charlie (Molly Belle Wright and Wyatt Solis), and their Golden Retriever—hit the road at the start of Omaha, towards Nebraska. We don’t get to know too much about them at first—just that they have an old car that needs a little push, and they’ve been evicted from their home, forced to collect their most treasured possessions quickly, like they are saving memorabilia during a fire. We don’t even know why they are heading there. Cole Webley’s deeply compassionate gut-punch of a movie, which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic […]

The post “Compassion Should Rule the Day, Not Punishment”: Director Cole Webley on His Sundance-Premiering Drama, Omaha first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

One night in the summer of 2022, I received a text message from a producer to whom I had sent the script for 1 Girl Infinite, hoping she might help me make the film. Her message read: “I love the script. But I won’t be able to do it because it’s dangerous.” I was not surprised by her comment. In China, filmmakers must pass the bureau censorship to release their work. I was acutely aware of the fact that the details of my film had no chance of approval for a domestic theatrical release in China, despite it being a […]

The post Clandestine Sexual Development in China: Making 1 Girl Infinite first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Every Tuesday Tyler Coates publishes his new Filmmaker newsletter, Considerations, devoted to the awards race. To receive it early and in your in-box, subscribe here. It rained in Los Angeles this weekend, and the way the phrase “we needed this” became a meme felt like a collective awkward laugh followed by a sigh of relief. For the past few weeks almost everyone has been on edge, many mourning massive losses from the fires in the Palisades and Altadena. Wind advisories meant our go-backs were still packed, phones facing up in case of Watch Duty notifications. (Oh, and a lot of […]

The post Considerations: Phase 2 Begins first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Among the features premiering this year at the Sundance Film Festival, there are none — on paper — simpler than Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day. Arriving just two years after he premiered his Passages at the festival, Sachs reunites with actor Ben Whishaw for a picture that’s one 76-minute dialogue between two friends in a New York apartment in 1974. What’s more, that dialogue is not some dramatically sculptured theatrical two-hander building to third act epiphanies but, rather, a transcription of an actual conversation between art photographer Hujar and artist Linda Rosenkrantz, who was conducting interviews for a book in […]

The post “In a Way This Film Asks, What is Lost by the Virtual?” Ira Sachs on his Sundance-Premiering Peter Hujar’s Day first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

For Jesus Camp and Detropia directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, a film can be born from the most inconspicuous of things, like something they have overheard, or a phrase that stayed with them. Folktales, their stunning documentary set in a folk school in the snow-clad Northern Norway, was no exception. During the early days of Covid, Ewing was catching the end of a podcast when American dog sledder Blair Braverman was talking about her vocation, as well as what happens to your mind when you’re alone for 12 days with a pack of dogs. As a dog and nature […]

The post “There Are No Good Harnesses, Clips and Clamps That Keep a GoPro on a Dog”: Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady on Their Sundance Doc Premiere, Folktales first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.