https://independent-magazine.org/2020/02/08/sean-price-williams-on-dreams-film-heroes-and-tokyo-telepath-2020/
Obsessed with Independent Film Since 1976
Obsessed with Independent Film Since 1976
Courtney Sheehan is a film programmer, writer, and business strategist. Most recently, she served as executive director for Northwest Film Forum, the independent film nonprofit in Seattle. She is a frequent contributor to The Independent.
The 49th edition of the Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFRR), which ran January 22-February 1, 2020, marked festival director Bero Beyer’s final year. Beyer has helmed IFFR for over a decade, and will be leaving the festival for an exciting new role as CEO of the Netherlands Film Fund. Beyer will be succeeded by Vanja… Read more »
CES, the largest consumer tech conference in the world, drew 170,000 attendees to Las Vegas from January 7-10, 2020. Spanning nearly 3 million square feet of expo space, over 4,500 companies from 160 countries exhibited their products, ranging from artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, health, sports, robotics, and more. A conference track dedicated to… Read more »
Produced by the Independent Film & Television Alliance, the American Film Market (AFM) is an annual convening of 7,000+ film industry professionals from 80 countries. Over a week in Santa Monica, acquisition and development executives, agents, attorneys, directors, distributors, festival directors, financiers, film commissioners, producers, and writers converge for deal-making, screenings, conferences, networking, and parties…. Read more »
The continued rise of streaming platforms—both large and small—has had reverberating effects in online film communities. Every company in this space, regardless of size and scope, must find, maintain, and build online audiences. For the diehard film fans, keeping up with all the options out there is a task by itself. From the never-ending supply… Read more »
Digital media pioneer Katerina Cizek is a “hometown girl” in Toronto, so the Toronto International Film Festival is always on her calendar. But this year, she’s attending the TIFF Docs Conference with a new project. “I’m leading a co-creation studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab,” she says over breakfast not far from the downtown… Read more »
A standout in TIFF Docs, Serbian Director Mila Turajlic’s The Other Side of Everything (Druga strana svega) mines the depths of family history to offer an untold story of Yugoslavia’s past. Turajlic’s first film, Cinema Komunisto, detailed a richly textured history of the Yugoslav film industry. In her follow up, Turajlic turns toward her family’s… Read more »
The film industries of the countries of former Yugoslavia continue to evolve and adapt to changing environments, both on the industry level in the broader European landscape, and in the political and economic contexts of their respective countries. At this year’s Berlinale, the region’s continued ability to punch above its weight was proven by Bosnian… Read more »
Kivalina is an Alaskan island 80 miles north of the Arctic circle. A community of Inupiaq Eskimos have called the island home for centuries, but today climate change threatens Kivalina’s future. Kivalina, Gina Abatemarco’s documentary feature debut, tells stories about the island, its people and their way of life. It premiered in the 66th Berlinale… Read more »
European documentarian Nikolaus Geyrhalter (Our Daily Bread, Abendland, Over the Years) returned to the Berlinale Forum this year with Homo Sapiens, a photographic contemplation of what human impact on the planet might look like after we are gone and nature has reclaimed the debris. Courtney Sheehan: You’ve talked about how the vision for this film is… Read more »
This is the second installment of a two part story looking at the making of The Land of the Enlightened by Pieter-Jan De Pue which had its European premiere at the 2016 edition of the International Film Festival Rotterdam (following a world premiere at Sundance). Read more about the origins of the film and the story… Read more »