The Indie Spirits Flip the Oscar Script
In a big studio-backed awards season, it’s rare to see much overlap between the Film Independent Spirit Awards and the Oscars. A west coast cousin of sorts to the Gotham Awards, the Indie Spirits often celebrate the movies that the Academy skipped over with its nominations. The ceremony itself is also more fun (there’s some day-drinking involved) than the more staid guild awards that dot the homestretch ahead of the similarly serious Academy Awards. Having said that, the Indie Spirits still matter quite a bit to campaign strategists and the people who employ them. They take place in the heart […]
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Samantha Smart is the lead actress, writer and producer of Charliebird, the feature debut of director Libby Ewing, which won the top prize at the 2025 Tribeca Festival, calling it “a deeply affecting portrait featuring grounded and complex performances.” On this episode, Smart describes the process of writing it, getting to a crisis point of wondering if she could still play the character she was creating for herself, and miraculously finding young Gabriela Ochoa Perez who skillfully plays Charlie. She details the fine-tuning that needed to happen with the central scene, how the camera operator’s energy affects actors, talks about her […]
Matt Johnson is the center of attention wherever he goes. He’s especially popular in his hometown of Toronto, where his advocacy for young Canadian filmmakers and warm, self-referential humor have made him one of the city’s most favored sons. Mayor Olivia Chow was in attendance when Johnson and his co-star/co-writer Jay McCarrol brought their film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie back to Toronto for a TIFF Midnight Madness screening that Jonson calls “one of the foundational moments of my adult life.” After years of attending the festival, he “wanted so badly to share that same kind of joy […]
It’s been nearly a decade since Gore Verbinski’s last feature film A Cure for Wellness hit theaters, but the director best known for creating the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise hasn’t been slacking. “I’ve worked every day of those years,” the Oscar-winner behind Rango tells Filmmaker over Zoom. “We developed an animated musical. We recorded the entire soundtrack for an animated musical. We’ve developed multiple screenplays. I just find that sometimes the stories I’m most passionate about perhaps don’t satisfy the green-light committees’ process, and that’s fair. But I got to do what I do, and they do what they […]
“What is MAGIC TOWN?” For me, the clues that prompted this response took my whole life to uncover. Film, trivia, and magic have always been triple passions of mine. At 12 years old, my first paying job was as a magician, putting together an act with my best friend and playing at birthday parties. The money wasn’t great, but we were passionate. In 1997, we attended our first Abbott’s Magic “Get Together” in Colon, Michigan (indeed, pronounced exactly how you think). In a tradition dating back to the 1930s, magicians had been gathering in this tiny village every summer to […]
Brat summer is decidedly over. The mechanics of its disintegration are lampooned in The Moment, a mockumentary cum critical commentary of the hype that propelled Charli XCX’s 2024 album into a full-blown cultural phenomenon. Charli plays an exaggerated version of herself, plagued by funhouse mirror distortions of the anxieties that besieged her during the extended press and stadium tour that ostensibly signaled the peak of her pop stardom. It’s appropriate that Aidan Zamiri, one of Brat’s key visual collaborators, stepped up to direct The Moment, which marks his feature film debut. Though he previously helmed music videos for Charli (notably […]
Sarah Coffey starred as Eva Shapiro in the feature film 31 Candles, and instantly made her an iconic romanic comedy character. She can also be seen in Queens Of The Dead, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. And her viral success as a comedian led to a role in Stapleview, the first-ever fully produced live sketch show on TikTok. On this episode, she talks about the blessings and drawbacks of finding a spotlight through her own online content. She takes us back to her early days, discovering an early love of singing, and talks about how that […]
As we reported last week, the NYC-based, cinema worker-centric zine Cashiers Du Cinéma has curated a 10-film program at Brooklyn’s BAM Cinema that spotlights the oft-unappreciated labor of front of house theater staff. Today, filmmaker David Cardoza shares an exclusive promo for our readers that stars Bill Heidbreder, a NY writer/critic and subject of the 2002 documentary Cinemania. The promo features Heidbreder donning a movie usher’s red vest, black sunglasses and a microphone headset as he implores commuters in the 6th Ave subway tunnel to check out the BAM series, which is entitled Cinéma Du Cashiers and runs from February […]
Several Futures announces today that it has acquired North American distribution for Revelations of Divine Love, New York-based filmmaker Caroline Golum’s sophomore film. Following her 2017 debut A Feast of Man, Golum’s 14th century-set feature had its world premiere at FIDMarseille last summer. Several Futures, which specializes in “auteurist and anti-imperialist work,” picks up Revelations of Divine Love a few weeks after its North American premiere at the Montreal Critics’ Week film festival. “Caroline Golum’s film is totally unique in the current landscape of American independent film—not only in its ambition, but in its sincerity and artistry,” said Several Futures […]
In 1990, a federal law was passed requiring the return of Indigenous human remains and sacred items to their rightful communities. More than three decades later, most of those ancestors are still waiting—boxed, catalogued, and stored in museum basements and university archives. In Aanikoobijigan, filmmakers Adam and Zack Khalil turn their attention to that unfinished work, following the long, often painful effort to bring ancestors home for proper burial. The film centers on a group of tribal specialists in Michigan who carry out this work day to day, navigating institutions built to hold on to what was never theirs. For […]