America’s Largest Documentary Festival – Nov. 8-26
Anselm Kiefer, Liv Ullmann, Little Richard, Jack and Sam Top DOC NYC How does one approach a film festival too…
Articles
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New York Film Festival September 29–October 13
Film at Lincoln Center knows its audiences. Christian Petzold’s Afire (2023), a German drama of wildfires setting an entire forest…
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‘Drunken Noodles’ Review: Lucio Castro’s Quaint Second Feature Threads the Needle Between Drama and Fantasia
In his sophomore feature ‘Drunken Noodles,’ filmmaker Lucio Castro captures a plethora of these quiet moments, contrasting them with euphoric tableaus of various gay dalliances. The film spiritually evokes a space between two worlds: the hushed atmosphere of a cruising site and the unburdened revelry of one of Sal Salandra’s canvases (the real-life artist who inspires a crucial character in the film). Inside of this delicately drawn world, protagonist Adnan — a graduate student house sitting for his uncle in New York City while working at a small art gallery — seeks to fulfill his desires.
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Interviews | TV
Inside ‘Closet Space,’ the Sapphic Dating Show Fighting Against Shallow and Heteronormative Dating Culture with Community and Authenticity
As queer dating culture bleeds into mainstream culture at a heightened rate — with the current crazes surrounding “Heated Rivalry”…
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Magical Girl Transformation: Alice Maio Mackay’s ‘The Serpent’s Skin’
For all that feels familiar about “The Serpent’s Skin” — a horror film featuring demonic possession, witchcraft and characters connecting…
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Liz Sargent Talks Emotional Authenticity and Systemic Fragility for People with Disabilities and Their Caregivers in her Feature Debut, ‘Take Me Home’
Following the film’s festival run, “The Independent” spoke with Sargent about the deeply personal origins of the project such as the risks of building a film around her own sister’s lived experience and the larger questions around disability, autonomy and care that emerged throughout her filmmaking process.
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New Directors/New Films April 8-19
In a world where most film directors start by making shorts, just one New York fest shows them all to…
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Caught Between Tragedy and Utopia: A Review of Liz Sargent’s ‘Take Me Home’
Within minutes of the feature, L. Sargent’s intention to shift away from her proof-of-concept 2023 short becomes obvious. Though captured by different cinematographers, both films share similar documentary-style camera work and capture a tone of devastating and tender social realism. A striking difference, however, is the father’s, Bob’s (Victor Slezak), absence in the short and significant presence in the feature, in which he almost completely replaces Anna’s fellow adoptee sister, Emily (Ali Ahn). This drastically shifts the film from a depiction of sisterhood to one of parenthood complimented by sisterhood.
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I Can’t Feel My Dad’s Love, and I Won’t. But I Know It’s There: An Essay on ‘Sentimental Value’
“Everyone’s mad at dad, huh?” There’s a lot trapped within the Borg house. (Literal) writing on the wall, domestic disputes…
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Beyond the Frame: When Video Art Rewrites the Language of Cinema
From video art’s emergence in the late 1960s, it has sparred in a productive tension with cinema, simultaneously appropriating and dismantling film’s conventions. Early pioneers such as Nam June Paik, who transformed television into sculptural architecture, Bruce Nauman, whose closed-circuit videos foregrounded surveillance, and Joan Jonas, who fused performance with myth, all redefined the screen as a physical and experiential space rather than a transparent narrative window. This expanded cinematic grammar saw further development by artists such as Douglas Gordon, whose temporal manipulations of Hollywood films fractured narrative time; Sam Taylor-Wood, who merged painterly stillness with cinematic duration; and Stan Douglas, whose meticulously constructed filmic installations interrogated history, memory, and the mechanics of storytelling.
