The 27th edition of the SCAD Savannah Film Festival boasted a number of unexpected bonuses this year. First there was the eclectic,“Hollywood meets indie” mashup guest list to accompany the stellar program (much of which had recently premiered at the top tier fests). Actors in town to pick up awards at the sold out screenings included Amy Adams, Pamela Anderson, Kieran Culkin, Colman Domingo, Natasha Lyonne, Demi Moore, Lupita Nyong’o and Sebastian Stan among others; while the producers and directors attending to nab honoraries ran the gamut from Jerry Bruckheimer, Kevin Costner and Jason Reitman, to Richard Linklater, RaMell Ross, […]

The post “The Streamers Have Eaten All the Bananas”: Behind Her Lens: Producers at the 27th SCAD Savannah Film Festival first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

When Josh Margolin first heard that his grandmother had nearly become the victim of a phone scam — in which someone pretending to be Margolin attempted to score thousands of dollars from the elder — he immediately felt ill at ease and violated on her behalf. But it didn’t take long for the writer-director to recognize a great story: What if his grandmother had given away her money and, upon realizing the scam, set out to get revenge? The result is Margolin’s feature debut Thelma, starring June Squibb in the eponymous role as a 93-year-old Los Angeles resident who doesn’t […]

The post “There’s an Inherent Absurdity to the Lengths She Goes”: Josh Margolin on Thelma first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Angela Jolie will receive the Performer Tribute for her performance in Pablo Larrain’s Maria at the upcoming 2024 Gotham Awards, the Gotham Film Festival & Media Institute announced today. Jolie plays iconic opera singer Maria Callas in the Paris-set film that finds Callas, in her final days, processing her life and career on stage. It follows films by Larrain about other 20th century women icons, including Jackie Onassis (Jackie) and Spencer (Princess Diana). “Like the legendary figure she portrays, Angelina Jolie transcends mere performance to craft something extraordinary,” said The Gotham executive director Jeffrey Sharp in a press release. “Her […]

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Uttering the words “artificial intelligence” in Hollywood right now elicits something of a Chicken Little response. From major studio IP franchises to small independent documentaries, there is no corner of the entertainment industry that artificial intelligence does not (or will not) touch and, with so much uncertainty surrounding the legality of AI, many industry stakeholders have taken to wringing their hands and proclaiming that the sky is falling. Despite artificial intelligence’s novelty, however, many of the issues surrounding its legality can be addressed by pre-existing copyright and First Amendment principles. Copyright Guidelines Governing “Human Authorship” For example, let’s examine the […]

The post What Filmmakers Should Know about AI Copyright Restrictions first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

It’s been nearly a decade since Athina Rachel Tsangari, the idiosyncratic Greek filmmaker who’s never one to repeat herself, has graced us with a new film. Tsangari is always looking for a new challenge: from the improvisational, genre-bending desolateness of The Slow Business of Going (2000), to her Greek Weird-Wave breakout Attenberg (2010) and game of hypermasculinity, Chevalier (2015), each new project takes on a whole different formal imagination. What links them together? Beyond their ostensible differences is Tsangari’s affinity for betweenness—that feeling of not belonging. This feeling is reflected in the films as much as in Tsangari’s life, bouncing […]

The post “A Nihilist Western”: Athena Rachel Tsangari on Harvest first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Anora, Nickel Boys, Challengers and I Saw the TV Glow were among the multiple 2024 Gotham Award nominees announced today by The Gotham Film & Media Institute, Filmmaker‘s publisher. Anora, winner of this year’s Cannes Palme d’Or, received the most nominations — four, including Best Picture, Best Director, Outstanding Lead Performance and Outstanding Supporting Performance. Among other films making their mark with multiple nominations are Good One, A Different Man, The Brutalist and The Fire Inside. On the documentary side, this year’s Berlin Festival Documentary Award, No Other Land, joins other international titles (Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, Intercepted and […]

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Daisy Ridley shot to global fame for her portrayal of Rey in the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Since then, she has been choosing diverse roles that showcase her talents in films with wide ranging budgets that prove her north star is the quality of the work and nothing else. She has three films that have come out in this year alone—Sometimes I think About Dying, Young Woman and The Sea, and her latest, Magpie. On this episode, she explains how coming up with the idea for Magpie and building her character from the ground up was an interesting exercise in […]

The post “I’m Good at Being Told What To Do, and I Genuinely Think That is a Skill”: Daisy Ridley, Back To One, Episode 315 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

In a newly released featurette, writer/director/actor Jesse Eisenberg, actor Kieran Culkin, producer Emma Stone and others discuss Eisenberg’s Sundance-premiering feature, A Real Pain, out Friday from Fox Searchlight. It’s a comedy/drama about two cousins navigating long suppressed tensions while on a Holocaust remembrance tour to Poland, and one obvious question to ask is in what order those two elements occurred within the development process? Was Eisenberg attracted to the Holocaust tour concept first, or wanting to explore the family rivalry? That question is answered, along with more, in the above clip.

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Curated by occasional Filmmaker Magazine contributor James Hansen, the experimental film festival Light Matter has announced the lineup for its fourth edition, being held this November, including the opening of a new gallery exhibition by Jodie Mack. From the press release: Recognized as “a major East coast showcase for experimental film and video” (Michael Sicinski, In Review Online), the Light Matter Film Festival returns with its fourth annual showcase dedicated to emerging and established international artists in experimental film, video, and media art. The 2024 edition also celebrates the expansion of Light Matter into an international co-production across two continents. From […]

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In 2020’s The Painter and the Thief, Norwegian director Benjamin Ree told the story of the unlikely friendship between artist Barbora Kysilkova and heroin addict Karl-Bertil Nordland through overlapping, sometimes contradictory points of view. He has used this approach again for The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a telling—and repeated retelling—of the short life of Mats Steen, a young, disabled Norwegian gamer who died in 2014 from the rare degenerative disease Duchenne muscular dystrophy. While his loving family was devoted to giving Steen the best life he could have, in the immediate aftermath of his death they grieved the fact that […]

The post “This Film is Done by YouTubers”: Benjamin Ree on The Remarkable Life of Ibelin first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.