Seven filmmaker support organizations, including the International Documentary Association, Women Make Movies and Third World Newsreel, have signed a letter protesting Trump administration cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities that will affect both independent documentary filmmakers and non-profit organizations. In addition to funds for future grants, the administration is rescinding grants awarded during the Biden administration — monies that filmmakers and organizations had already planned to spend. The New York Times reported today: Starting late Wednesday night, state humanities councils and other grant recipients began receiving emails telling them their funding was ended immediately. Instead, they were told, […]

The post Seven Documentary Organizations Sign Letter Decrying DOGE National Endowment for the Humanities Cuts first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

By mere chance, The Friend has been a part of my life for quite some time now. I was first introduced to the book when Hal Hartley recommended it for my book club sometime around 2021, when I was just a girl with two cats. Fast forward and it’s 2024, now I love dogs and had just adopted a puppy named Variety Magazine. It was during that spring, on one of those early days of puppyhood, that he got street cast for a b-roll sequence in an upcoming film… that was to be an adaptation of Sigrid Nuñez’s The Friend. […]

The post Amalia Meets Bing: Walking with the Canine Star of The Friend and Talking to Owner Bev Klingensmith and Trainer Bill Berloni first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“We called it Field of Dreams in reverse: if you wreck it, they will leave,” writer and actor Nate Fisher told me of the selling pitch for Eephus, the melancholic baseball comedy he co-wrote with Michael Basta and director Carson Lund, which made its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival last Fall after debuting at Cannes, 2024. (The film is currently in theatrical release from Music Box.) The unusual baseball film captures the last recreation-league baseball game played at a soon-to-be-demolished field in a deliberately ambiguous New England location, carried out by two teams—the Riverdogs and Adler’s […]

The post “Field of Dreams in Reverse”: Baseball Movies, Eephus and One Last Game in East River Park first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The archival documentary WTO/99 functions both as historical document and prophecy of the future, chronicling the four days in 1999 when anti-globalization activists from multiple movements—labor unions, student groups, teamsters, anarchists, nonprofit organizations like Global Exchange and the Rainforest Action Network—took to downtown Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference. While the King County Sheriff’s Office and Seattle Police Department initially took a hands-off approach to supervising the peaceful protests, they quickly adopted a more aggressive tack after protestors successfully blocked WTO delegates from reaching the convention center on the first day of the conference. Tear gas, pepper […]

The post Trade Wars: Ian Bell on WTO/99 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In 1919, poet, playwright, aristocrat and nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio led an expedition of disgruntled legionnaires from the Italian army to occupy the city of Fiume, now a part of Rijeka in modern-day Croatia. D’Annunzio’s irredentist conquest initially sought to reclaim the former Roman province of Dalmatia for the new state of Italy. D’Annunzio treated his occupation of Fiume with the same romanticism as his writing, even going so far as to obsessively have him and his men filmed and photographed to project a propagandistic ideal. These images, along with D’Annunzio’s continued popularity in Italy, have muddled history, with the event […]

The post “The Cause of Fascism was the Capitalists”: Igor Bezinović on Fiume o morte! first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The 54th edition of New Directors/New Films, co-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center, runs from April 2 to April 13. This year’s program includes 24 features and 9 shorts. As always, the slate is admirably international in scope, spotlighting work from 22 different countries, with many films making their U.S. premieres after screening at festivals such as Berlin, Cannes, Karlovy Vary, Rotterdam, and Venice. Although I’ve attended ND/NF for more than two decades, and reported on it for this website and others for almost half that time, I still get excited when the slate […]

The post Five Favorites from the 2025 New Directors/New Films Festival first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“Kids and sweet love are the most important thing. And not all this stuff – trenches and war. But if we’re not here there won’t be any kids or sweet love,” a grizzled Ukrainian special forces commander tells one of his charges, a fellow soldier fighting alongside him on the frontline of a seemingly never-ending war. It’s a heartfelt scene made all the more poignant by the identity of the comrade with a camera he’s addressing, a mother named Alisa Kovalenko whose young son Théo has been evacuated to France (along with the filmmaker’s mother and French partner). My Dear […]

The post “Most of Us Went to the Front for the Sake of our Children’s Future”: Alisa Kovalenko on her CPH:DOX-debuting My Dear Théo first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The incredible Lebanese actor Hadi Tabbal just finished the monumental Broadway run of Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play English. He originated the role of Omid, and performed in various iterations of this powerful and transformative play over the last few years. On this episode, he talks about the fascinatingly unique aspect of English that is unlike any other play he’s performed, and what he means when he says it is “alive” every night and “very delicate,” and he has to “take care” not to “derail” it. He explains the difference between “discovery” and “deciding,” talks about the “saddest” part of […]

The post “I Don’t Want To Be On Stage If I’m Not Vibrating Inside with Life”: Hadi Tabbal, Back To One, Episode 336 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In a panel on Pacific Islander filmmaking organized by the Hawai’i International Film Festival last year, a Native Hawaiian producer noted that fellow creatives in the region were “not divided by land, but connected by water”—a thought at the heart of the new Cinema At Sea Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival in Naha. The southernmost and westernmost region of Japan, made up of multiple islands geographically closer to Taipei than Tokyo, Okinawa may be best known historically as the site of several bloody battles during WWII, or colloquially as the “Hawaii of Japan,” a sun-kissed vacation dreamland of azure waves […]

The post The Tides that Bind: Cinema At Sea Okinawa Pan-Pacific International Film Festival 2025 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Death of a Unicorn, the feature debut by producer Alex Scharfman, could also be titled Death by Unicorn, as the film offers numerous stabbings via horn by the title creatures. The A24 production co-stars Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega as a father and daughter who, on their way to visit an uber-rich pharmaceutical bigwig (Richard E. Grant) at his secluded compound in the woods, hit a unicorn with their car. The father and daughter load it up and plan to dispose of it later, but the mythical creature’s family comes looking for revenge, going on a murderous parental outrage. “When […]

The post “I Didn’t Want to Have Complex Animatronics”: Alex Scharfman on Death of a Unicorn first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.