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.

Dream Team, the third feature by Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn, is another in the writer-director duo’s run of genre pastiches that double as sociopolitical parables. Here, the influence of ’90s basic cable TV thrillers is channeled into an episodic story about a pair of Interpol agents (Esther Garrel and Alex Zhang Hungtai) who travel to Mexico to investigate the mysterious death of a corral smuggler. Shot by Horn in characteristically textured 16mm, the film unfolds between a variety of West Coast locales stretching from Baja California to Vancouver. As the body count rises and rumors of a physic coral […]

The post Revisiting Silk Stalkings: Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn on IFFR 2024 Premiere Dream Team first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The SXSW Film Festival announced today 50 new films, XR projects and television programs that complete the 2024 SXSW Film & TV Festival lineup. Among the world premieres are the latest from The Voyeurs director Michael Mohan, who reunites with star Sydney Sweeney in Immaculate; Dev Patel’s action thriller Monkey Man; Alice Lowe’s followup to her Prevenge, Timestalker; and a new film from The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby director Ned Benson, The Greatest Hits. Festival favorites traveling from Park City to Austin include Didi, Black Box Diaries, Love Machina, Ghostlight and I Saw the TV Glow. Of particular interest to […]

The post SXSW Announces 50 New Projects for Its 2024 Program, Including Films from Michael Mohan, Nicole Riegel and Alice Lowe first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Mia McKenna-Bruce is an English actress. Her performance in the film How To Have Sex is, rightfully, being spoken about with many superlatives. Subtle, controlled, thoroughly alive, deeply impacting, it is a star-making turn. There’s a scene where her character, Tara, is simply walking down the street, and it’s something of a revelation. It won her the BIFA for Best Lead Performance. On this episode, she breaks down the ingredients that helped her deliver this work—an extensive audition process to find her co-stars that allowed her time to play; complete trust in the director, Molly Manning Walker, and everyone on […]

The post “This World That Molly and the Team Created For Us, is the Dream as an Actor”: How To Have Sex Star Mia McKenna-Bruce, Back To One, Episode 277 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Little known in the Anglophone film world (although a recent book in Cambridge University Press’s ReFocus series might suggest an impending course correction), Antoinetta Angelidi is one of the most creative and distinct directors of the last half-century. Raised in and around Athens, Angelidi found solace in art in her adolescence after a traumatic childhood rape left her speechless. Though she initially took to painting, she was an avid moviegoer and, later, after a dream in which a Magritte-styled work exhibited a tiny movement, she turned to cinema. A student activist, she fled Greece for Paris with just the clothes […]

The post “A Cinema of Deconstructed Painting”: Antoinetta Angelidi and Rea Walldén on the Rotterdam-Premiering Obsessive Hours at the Topos of Reality first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

The diversity of cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister’s output makes it difficult to typecast him. The German DP won an Emmy for his work on a BBC version of Great Expectations and followed with the Rowan Atkinson spy spoof Johnny English Strikes Again. Then, in succession, he lensed the Scott Cooper horror flick Antlers, the Apple prestige drama Pachinko and Todd Field’s Tár, picking up an Oscar nomination for the latter. But with True Detective: Night Country, Hoffmeister returns to a previous specialty–unsettling subzero horror. Hoffmeister’s work on AMC’s The Terror followed an ill-fated 19th century artic expedition. He’s back to frigid […]

The post 112 Days in Iceland: DP Florian Hoffmeister on True Detective: Night Country first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Tackling a timely but under-discussed contemporary issue in both the United States and Canada, journalists Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie (A Girl Named C) investigate a string of abuses and missing persons cases at an indigenous residential school in Sugarcane. Below, Kassie, who in addition to directing the film with NoiseCat produced it alongside Kellen Quinn. Below, she recounts her debut experience as a producer and how she made a transition from the world of visual journalism. Filmmaker: Tell us about the professional path that led you to produce this film, your first? What jobs within and outside of […]

The post “I Come From the One-Woman-Band Show of Visual Journalism…”: Emily Kassie on Producing Sugarcane first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Fading though they are, I still have fond memories of the UA Crossbay I movie theater in Ozone Park. Founded in 1924, the Queens theater went out of business in 2005 and was converted into a Modell’s Sporting Goods, then a Raymour & Flanigan furniture outlet (“sadly fitting,” writes one user in the comments section of the theater’s Cinema Treasures page, “since most people watch movies sitting or lying in their beds nowadays”). The marquee still remains, sporting a branded logo of its current tenant rather than a rundown of the week’s releases. I also remember having seen many movies […]

The post “The Bizarre Thing about 35mm is that It’s Almost Ageless”: Kleber Mendonça Filho on Pictures of Ghosts first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.