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.

At this stage in the season, when it is entirely too early to make any meaningful predictions about what the Oscar nominees (much less the winners) will be, I like to look back at the Academy’s recent history to identify trends that can give us an idea of what voters are into, generally speaking. It’s not an exact science, of course — the contenders are drastically different every season — but there is one trend that I’ve noticed shaking out over the last decade or so: The Oscars for best original screenplay and best adapted screenplay are more likely to go […]

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The latest venture from MEMORY — the 25 New Face-selected production company of producers Sebastian Pardo and Riel Roch-Decter — has kicked up a bit of mainstream attention this week, with TMZ, People Magazine and Daily Telegraph, among others, covering coded comments by The 1975’s Matty Healy on a certain ex. But the project – the Doomscroll political talk show series/podcast hosted by artist and writer Joshua Citarella and featuring Healy as the latest guest — is not another celebrity chat fest but rather a series of long-form discussions on contemporary politics, culture and theory — “‘Lex Fridman for the […]

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Shiori Ito’s Black Box Diaries is a film the Japanese journalist should never have had to make. Based on her international bestseller, the Sundance-premiering doc is a dogged investigation into a rape perpetrated by another Japanese journalist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, a longtime friend of the late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose biography the offender penned as well. It’s also a somewhat surreal journey, given that the brave survivor in the purposely stalled case is Ito herself. Through an engaging mix of secret recordings, vérité shooting and confessional video, we’re invited along on an increasingly maddening odyssey through the shockingly antiquated Japanese […]

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Titus Kaphar’s artwork can be found across the nation at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Yale University and the Mississippi Museum of Art; his painting Yet Another Fight for Remembrance might be his most recognizable, as it was commissioned by TIME Magazine as a response to the Ferguson unrest following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer. The MacArthur Fellowship recipient continues to examine contemporary Black life in his feature film debut, Exhibiting Forgiveness.   Actor André Holland stars as Terrell, an acclaimed painter living with his singer-songwriter wife Aisha (Andra Day) and young son […]

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Alfred Hitchcock, the director as well as self-analyzing critical observer, is evoked in the latest documentary from Mark Cousins, titled, appropriately, My Name is Alfred Hitchcock. During the pandemic lockdown, Cousins was invited by producer John Archer to make a film about the great director timed to the 100th anniversary of his debut film. Cousins set about watching all of Hitchcock’s films in chronological order, reading various critical book as well as works by his daughter and The Birds actress Tippi Hedren, all the while filling up notebooks of thoughts, reflections and details. That research and viewing produced a script, […]

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The International Documentary Association (IDA) announced today the 20 feature-length and 20 short documentaries shortlisted for the 40th IDA Documentary Awards, to be held December 5, 2024, at The Orpheum Theater in Downtown Los Angeles. Dominic Asmall Willsdon, IDA’s Executive Director, said in a press release, “The 40th IDA Documentary Awards continues the tradition of celebrating the best of international nonfiction media of the year. We are grateful to all filmmakers who shared their work for consideration this year, representing a record amount of countries in the award’s history. The impressive shortlist for Best Features and Best Shorts reflects on […]

The post Seeking Mavis Beacon, Dahoney Among IDA Shortlist Nominees first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

There’s an honesty to Rap World, the feature debut of co-directors Conner O’Malley and Danny Scharar, beyond its vérité stylings. With Scharar playing the director, Ben, Rap World is a mockumentary following three friends—Matt (O’Malley), Casey (Jack Bensinger) and Jason (Eric Rahill)—from Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, as they trudge through one long night in a quixotic attempt to make a rap album. It is January 11th, 2009: a month earlier The Dark Knight was released on home video, in nine days George W. Bush will leave office, the Great Recession looms and America feels like it is on the cusp of some […]

The post “Nostalgia for When Things were Terrible”: Conner O’Malley, Danny Scharar and Jack Bensinger on Rap World first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.