The Sundance Institute announced today the eight storytellers who comprise the 2024 Momentum Fellows cohort. Led by the Institute’s Women at Sundance and Artist Accelerator programs, the fellowship “specifically targets mid-career artists hailing from historically marginalized backgrounds, offering them tailored support and resources.” From the press release: The fellowship supports creators working in fiction or nonfiction who have recently achieved a noteworthy accomplishment, such as a highly regarded feature film or series. Momentum provides participants with a full-year program of customized support around current goals they identify for themselves to level up in their craft and career, including an unrestricted […]

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John Magaro has been delivering consistently stellar performances in films like Not Fade Away, The Big Short, Carol, First Cow, and Showing Up, to name a few. This past year he played Arthur, husband of Greta Lee’s character Nora, in Past Lives. On this episode he talks, spoiler-free, about the last scene of that film and why it makes people emotional. He explains how receiving books, music, photos from directors helps in his preparation. He makes the case for experience over academia, takes us back to a big breakthrough that came to him from the legendary acting teacher Howard Guskin, […]

The post “My Endless Struggle is for Utter Honesty on Film”: John Magaro, Back To One, Episode 279 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The International Film Festival Rotterdam has always been something of a grab bag. This year, at the 53rd edition, the Dutch festival showed 424 films across its various programmes — a reduction from past years due to widespread budget cuts. Still, 424 films (including 183 world premieres) is a mammoth undertaking for any one film critic at a major festival lacking an intuitive method of whittling down a schedule. This is especially true for international press less interested in the trickle-down from Cannes or Venice — Agniezka Holland’s audience award-winner Green Border, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, and Alice Rohrwacher’s La […]

The post Rotterdam 2024 Critic’s Notebook: A Spoiling Rain, The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire, Under a Blue Sun and 102 Narra first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

On your way up. Take me up. On your way down. I won’t let you down. — Robert Nesta Marley As a form, the biopic and even more specifically the musical biopic, is an often fraught endeavor, one whose pursuit brings its makers along well-worn paths of pitfalls and dead ends. With his fourth feature, Bob Marley: One Love, Reinaldo Marcus Green meets this challenge head on, capturing a vision of Marley in a time of great upheaval. In the 1970s, Jamaica was embroiled in turmoil — a result of staggering levels of poverty and political rivalries. In ‘76, through gang […]

The post “That Kid Running from the Fire”: Director Reinaldo Marcus Green on Destiny, Devotion and Bob Marley: One Love first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

“You know animals are hairy?,” sang the Talking Heads David Byrne. “They say animals don’t worry…” Well, in David and Nathan Zellner’s Sasquatch Sunset, forthcoming from Bleecker Street Pictures, the latter statement is definitely not correct as the filmmakers — Filmmaker 25 New Faces from back in 2008 — wring wonder and joy but also anxiety and fear of encroaching humankind in their story of a family of Sasquatch living undetected in the wilds of Colorado. Bleecker Street’s redband trailer leans hard into Sasquatch sex while cleverly underlining that there’s name talent (Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough) in this movie. […]

The post (Redband) Trailer Watch: The Zellner Brothers’s Sasquatch Sunset first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The U.S. trailer for Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast has arrived. The latest film from Bonello (Nocturama, Saint Laurent) marks his third collaboration with Léa Seydoux, who gives not one but three great performances across three different timelines. The Beast enters release on April 5, and our next issue will feature an interview with Bonello conducted by Michael Almereyda.

The post Trailer Watch: Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Leah McKendrick wrote, directed, and stars in the hilarious, super smart, and intensely personal new film Scrambled. It’s about a perpetual bridesmaid who, realizing she isn’t quite willing or able to settle down, decides to freeze her eggs. McKendrick doesn’t shy away from depicting her character’s sex life, the frustrations involving family and friends, and the true loneliness that enveloped her when she decided to do the same procedure in real life. It’s that rare film that will have you belly laughing one minute and crying hard the next. On this episode, we find out what elements were at play […]

The post “Once in a While You Go, ‘My Vision is Enough’”: Scrambled‘s Leah McKendrick, Back To One, Episode 278 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Robert M. “Bob” Young, often described in the film era of the 1980s as the godfather of American independent filmmaking, has died. His son Andy, himself an award-winning filmmaker, announced Young’s death on February 7th in a Facebook post:  “He was a rebel in the industry, who made the films he dreamed of and lived the life he wanted, whether it was trekking through the Congo, swimming with sharks, or plumbing the depths of the human experience. He was 99 years old, and while the final years were sometimes tough for a guy who lived to do it all, he […]

The post Robert M. Young, 1924-2024: A True Giant of American Independent Filmmaking first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

You have to look hard to find a trailer  for the recent release of Smoke Sauna Sisterhood, Estonia’s entry for this year’s Best International Feature Film category, on Facebook and Instagram — and forget about clips. Even though the lyrical documentary about women in an Estonian sauna has won numerous top prizes around the world—Best Directing at Sundance 2023; Best Documentary at San Francisco International; Best Documentary at the 2023 European Film Awards; Best Cinematography at IDFA 2024—many of the film’s artful moving images of women’s bodies were banned by Meta’s algorithms, and the U.S. distributor Greenwich Entertainment had to […]

The post Doc (and Art-Film) Blocking: How Algorithmic Content Moderation is Hurting Indie Films first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Harvard’s Shorenstein Center announced today the three film professionals who comprise their Spring 2024 cohort of documentary film fellows. Producer and distributor Karin Chien, producer and former executive Amy Hobby, and former director of the Sundance Film Festival as well as Sundance’s Documentary Film Program Tabitha Jackson will, according to a press release, “join the Center under the auspices of the newly-established Documentary Film in the Public Interest research initiative and will spend the semester conducting research and engaging with the Harvard Kennedy School community about the challenges facing the field and its impact on civic life.” “The Documentary Film […]

The post Karin Chien, Amy Hobby and Tabitha Jackson Are New Documentary Fellows at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.