Unless you are buried too deep into the Plato’s Cave that UFO researchers and enthusiasts insist we are only now emerging from, it has been hard to miss that UFOs — or, as they are called now, UAPs — are having a moment. Interest in what’s out there has ebbed and flowed over the years, from speculation about Roswell, NM and Area 51, the Erich Von Daniken books of the 1970s, The X Files to, more recently, declassification of Navy videos and UAP government whistleblowers testifying before government committees. UAP sightings are increasing — partly due to Starlink — while […]

The post “A Purely Rationalist Dismissal of UFOs Fails To Capture Something Essential About the Phenomenon”: Daniel Claridge and Pacho Velez on Their Tribeca-Premiering They’re Here first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Biographies of artists have typical rises and falls, eddies into new enthusiasms and returns to consistent themes. But when it comes to musician, artist and cultural provocateur Genesis P-Orridge, such rhythms occur in truly outsized relief. In S/He Is Still Her/e — The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary, director Charles Rodrigues, whose previous Tribeca-premiering feature was Gay Chorus Deep South, proceeds biographically through P-Orridge’s life, from her childhood in Manchester through early assaultive work with the UK performance group COUM Transmission, industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle and finally the more beatific psych-rock outfit Psychic TV. P-Orridge’s ultimate destination was the body-morphing Pandrogyny […]

The post “A True Download of Her Consciousness Into What Has Now Become a Feature Film”: Director David Charles Rodrigues On His Tribeca-Premiering S/He Is Still Her/e — The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

A real-life high stakes thriller from Emmy (and BAFTA and Cinema Eye)-winning filmmaker James Jones (Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes, Wanted: The Escape Of Carlos Ghosn), Antidote follows a few brave men who have chosen to put their lives (and thus those of their families) on the line to bring down the Putin regime: a whistleblowing insider to Russia’s poison program; the twice-poisoned, Russian-British activist-journalist (and current political prisoner) Vladimir Kara-Murza; and Bellingcat’s Christo Grozev, last seen in Daniel Roher’s Oscar-winning Navalny exposing the murderers who unsuccessfully poisoned the late activist before confinement to a Siberian prison finished the job. Which, […]

The post “Our Film Highlights the Bravery of Those Willing to Stand Up to Putin Despite the Personal Cost, But It Should Also Act as a Wakeup Call”: James Jones on his Tribeca-Debuting Antidote first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

From our colleagues at Psyche comes a beautiful short film by Lynne Sachs that is a decades-long collaboration with the late pioneering feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer. From the Psyche writeup: In 1998, the pioneering US feminist artist Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) spent a month at an artist residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Feeling “compelled to do absolutely nothing” while living in a dune shack without running water or electricity, Hammer documented her solitude with a journal, a tape recorder and a 16mm film camera. For decades, these materials remained in her personal archive, until, as Hammer was nearing the end of […]

The post Watch: Lynne Sachs’s Short Barbara Hammer Film, A Month of Single Frames first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

While Max Duncan and Xinyan Yu’s Made in Ethiopia takes place in the titular country, it in many ways echoes last year’s Central African Republic-set Eat Bitter, co-directed by Ningyi Sun and Pascale Appora-Gnekindy, which similarly explored China’s capitalist push throughout the continent; and specifically from the POV of the shared personal toll it’s taking on individuals from very unalike cultures. In this case we’re introduced to an inexhaustibly optimistic woman named Motto, the upbeat Chinese head of a mega industrial park in a rural Ethiopian town. She’s also a true believer that the Chinese dream can be exported to […]

The post “I Don’t Think We Ever Expected To See a Carbon Copy of China’s Industrial Experience [in Ethiopia], and We Certainly Didn’t”: Max Duncan and Xinyan Yu on Their Tribeca-Debuting Made in Ethiopia first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

BendFilm, the Oregon-based independent cinema organization which organizes the Bend Film Festival in addition to its year-round activities, has announced a new immersive retreat. From the press release: BendFilm, the nonprofit independent cinema organization, has announced BendFilm: Basecamp, a three-day immersive retreat for emerging creatives and their industry counterparts to connect, learn and collaborate. BendFilm: Basecamp will take place at Caldera Arts outside Sisters, Oregon, from October 7-10, 2024, and flow directly into the 21st annual Bend Film Festival (which takes place October 10-13, 2024, across venues throughout Bend and beyond). BendFilm: Basecamp’s inaugural year is made possible, in part, […]

The post BendFilm Announces BendFilm: Basecamp, a Three-Day Immersive Retreat first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Abel Ferrara has said, “In movie making, money is no excuse. It doesn’t cost anything to set up a cool looking shot.” In a Violent Nature is the embodiment of that credo. A deconstruction of the slasher genre, the movie tells a familiar story from an unfamiliar point of view as the camera stays with its undead killer Johnny (adorned in a vintage fireman’s mask and armed with a pair of logging hooks) as he traipses through the forest from victim to victim. The film poses the question, as director Chris Nash puts it, “What if Gus Van Sant directed a […]

The post From 2nd Unit to Second Shoot: DP Pierce Derks on In a Violent Nature first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

UFO (Untitled Filmmaker Org) announced today the three filmmakers who have been selected for the latest edition of its Short Film Lab. At the Lab, which begins this month, Emily May Jampel, Arielle Knight, and Samuel Wright Smith will develop new scripted, documentary, and animated nonfiction projects, respectively. As announced in a press release, filmmakers Tahiel Jimenez Medina, Brydie O’Connor, Bren Wyona, and Kevin Xian Ming Yu from the inaugural cohort will continue in the program through December to develop new projects across nonfiction and scripted approaches, as part of the Lab’s staggered enrollment model.  From the press release: The […]

The post UFO (Untitled Filmmaker Org) Announces Spring 2024 Short Film Lab Cohort first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The New York City nightmare of giving up a rent-stabilized apartment inspires (literal) dramatic vengeance in The French Italian, writer-director Rachel Wolther’s feature debut. Long-term couple Doug (Aristotle Athari) and Valerie (Catherine Cohen) live in a gorgeous brownstone on the Upper West Side—that is, until they’ve had it with their raucous downstairs neighbors oscillating between screaming matches and belching off-key karaoke renditions of “La Bamba.” They move out after obsessively peeping and eavesdropping on their newfound enemies; their hatred drives them to Rye, New York, where they take over Doug’s parent’s house while they’re in Boca. Now forced to shuttle […]

The post “I Was a Teenage Theater Nerd”: Rachel Wolther on Her Tribeca-Premiering Feature Debut The French Italian   first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

With Run Lola Run‘s 25th anniversary release this weekend in a new 4K restoration, we are reposting our Spring, 1999 cover interview with director Tom Tykwer. Among the last year’s festival staples, the most exhilarating may have been Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run. The self-taught 34-year-old Berliner’s third feature is a clock-driven, lighter-than-air romantic-action-comedy-thriller floating atop a percolating electronica score. The film plays out three potential narratives of what dangers and distractions the streets of Berlin hold just before noon for Lola (Franka Potente) and Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), two effortlessly cool, suddenly in trouble twentysomething lovers. Manni loses 100,000 marks […]

The post “Most of the Film is Done in 120 Beats Per Minute, But Some of It Is At 140 BPM”: Tom Tykwer on Run Lola Run first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.