The Canadian music documentary RUSH: BEYOND THE LIGHTED STAGE has won the Heineken Audience Award at the 9th Tribeca Film Festival, which concludes today. The award includes a cash prize of $25,000 for the film's co-directors Scot McFadyen and Sam Dunn. The Award was voted on by audiences attending the Festival by completing nomination ballots upon exiting Festival public screenings.
The film, which had its World Premiere at the Festival, is a valentine to the legendary C...
Alex Gibney
Last week, Tribeca Film Festival founder Jane Rosenthal jokingly referred to this year's Festival as "The Alex Gibney Film Festival". Gibney, a respected documentarian who won the Oscar for the film TAXI TO THE DARKSIDE, has three films featured at this year's event.
In MY TRIP TO AL-QAEDA, Gibney adapts an acclaimed one-man theater piece by playwright Lawrence Wright to offer a deft and alarming look at...
Main Square, Old Town, Wroclaw, Poland
The AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL (AFF), the first film event in Eastern Europe solely devoted to the works of contemporary and classic American cinema, was announced this week during the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. The first edition of the AMERICAN FILM FESTIVAL will be held from October 20 to 24, 2010 in the cultural heritage city of Wroclaw, Poland (featured this week in the New York Times as one of the hot travel ...
The 2010 Connecticut Film Festival, which launches on Tuesday in the historic city of Danbury, Connecticut about 50 miles north of New York City, could very well be given the moniker "North By Northeast". This is not a geographic description nor a play on words of a classic Hitchcock thriller. It is, in fact, a nod to the multi-media event known as South By Southwest (SXSW), which takes place in edgy Austin, Texas each February. The Connecticut Fi...
Economic blues got you counting your pennies? Volcanic ash delaying your flight to New York? Can't get motivated to get dressed and come downtown? Afraid to be seen in public? Well, if you are a cinema lover and cannot quite overcome your own neuroses or spewing volcanos to attend this year's Tribeca Film Festival, don't despair.....the Festival is now coming to you.
Tribeca Film, supported by founding partner American Express, has acquired the rights to distribute 12 independent films ...
Despite being faced with serious financial adversity and some torrential downpours, the 15th edition of the Palm Beach International Film Festival ended on Monday in an optimistic spirit of independent film camaraderie as over 70 filmmakers from around the world enjoyed welcoming audiences, shared their experiences and attended fabulous parties. After a week of screenings, the jury votes were tallied to determine the winners for Best Feature Film, Best Documentary and Best Short Fil...
TEN STORIES TALL (David Garrett, USA)
It was perhaps an unconscious choice, but several of the films I caught at this year’s Palm Beach International Film Festival dealt with the sense of fragility and vulnerability that is at the core of human experience. In these films, characters face the realities of mortality and unfulfilled dreams with the kind of courage and grace that made a deep impression on audiences. If films teach life lessons, and I wholeheartedly t...
Soul Kitchen (Fatih Akin, Germany)
This year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which is currently in the middle of its 12 day run in New York City, boasts a strong representation of both veteran and emerging European talents. As a whole, the Festival offers a tantalizing check of the pulse of current trends and styles in European filmmaking. How these films will fare in the US market is far from certain, but for the next week, European cinema rules in downtown New York.
The na...
This year’s Palm Beach International Film Festival is expanding its audience on a global level via a strategic partnership with independent film distributor IndieFlix.com.
With IndieFlix’s Online Festivals Initiative, film lovers around the globe who register are now able to screen eight featured short films from this year’s PBIFF and vote for their favorite.
Registration is easy......just visit the Festival website http://www.pbifilmfest.org/ and click on the Ind...
The Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) (www.tribecafilminstitute.org) today announced the films that will receive financial and creative support from the TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund, provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This year, of 128 applicants, six projects will be awarded a total of $140,000 to help filmmakers both create and distribute their films. In addition, grant recipients will also receive year-round mentorship from science experts and members of the film industry. Th...
With nearly 2000 film festivals around the world, the competition to snag World and International the competition in the world of film festivals for World and International Premieres is fierce. This is especially true fo regional film festivals that cannot claim a strong industry component (they are cultural events, mainly for the local community). This weekend alone, there are 4 film festivals in the United States, stretching from California (San Francisco) to New York (Tribeca) to Florida (Mia...
With nearly 2000 film festivals around the world, the competition to snag World and International The
The competition in the world of film festivals for World and International Premieres is fierce. This is especially true fo regional film festivals that cannot claim a strong industry component (they are cultural events, mainly for the local community). This weekend alone, there are 4 film festivals in the United States, stretching from California (San Francisco...
SONS OF PERDITION
It can be argued that what separates A list film festivals from their colleagues are the number of World Premieres that grace their theaters. No matter what the ultimate reception is for these films, the wanna-see anticipation of films in their first public and industry showings provide a sizzle. At the Tribeca Film Festival, which is entering its first weekend, there are an impressive number of World Premieres that are grabbing attention from the public and in...
For its distinguished honorees this year, the 15th edition of the Palm Beach International Film Festival pays tribute to a local legend and a star on the rise. This evening at the recently-opened swanky The Omphoy Ocean Resort (www.omphoy.com), the Festival will present its Lifetime Achievement Award to local Florida legend, actor/director/producer Burt Reynolds. The Festival's Horizon Award will be given to actor Quinton Aaron, who recently starred opposite Oscar winner Sandra ...
The Tribeca Film Festival, which opens tomorrow evening, is just in its 9th year (a baby by the standards of such veterans as Cannes, Venice, San Francisco and other 50 plus film events). In under a decade, the Festival has made a strong impression, being one of the few that is looking to create a brand name that is instantly recognizable and represents a particular kind of film culture (think Cannes, think Sundance). The Sundance connection is especially relevant, with this year...
The Palm Beach International Film Festival, which begins this evening, is going Hawaiian with its Opening Night attraction of PRINCESS KA'IULANI, a historical drama about a real life heroine in the legacy of the Hawaiian Islands.
The biopic stars Q'orianka Kilcher (the star of the Terrence Malick historical epic THE NEW WORLD) as a turn-of-the-century princess caught up in the last days of the Hawaiian monarchy. Set in 1888, the Kingdom of Hawaii is divided by a civil war. Prin...
Do you remember when you were a little kid and you heard that the circus was coming to town? For me, it is a warm and still excitable feeling. Well, as a jaded adult, such simple pleasures are not supposed to create a sense of excitement (been there, done that) but the arrival (sound the trumpets!!!) of the Tribeca Film Festival this week is a cause for circus-like jubilation.
OK, let's get the jaded criticism out of the way.....the Tribeca Film Festival, formed 9 years ago as a ...
Do not pity (nor envy) this pale New Yorker as I leave the cool and rainy climes of my native Manhattan for the sunny paradise of Palm Beach, Florida. Late April brings with it the beginnings of steamy Florida weather, with its peekaboo of sun and clouds, where a torrential rainshower can happen one minute and the sun shining the next is not out of the ordinary.
In this dramatic clime, the Palm Beach International Film Festival beckons with its film premieres, snazzy special eve...
Maybe it is the altitude or its location high in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, but Sundance Film Festival jurors seem to gravitate towards films that can be both chilly (and chilling) in tone and execution. Two years ago, it was FROZEN RIVER, a film about border smuggling in the frozen tundra of upstate New York that put one in the mood for an overcoat and a teeming cup of Ovaltine. Last year’s winner PRECIOUS, which just secured an impressive five Oscar nominations this morni...
In a somewhat strange convergence, European documentaries were the overall winners in all categories at the Sundance Film Festival, which announced its awards Saturday evening. While this is certainly a boon for European non-fiction makers, the European dramatic films in the World Cinema competition were uniformly snubbed. .
However, there was much love for European docs, which is certainly something to celebrate. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize in the World Cinema Documentary section...
The Sundance Film Festival is an event full of unusual stories....but Hasidic drug dealers? That has to be a first. The film, appropriately called HOLY ROLLERS, was produced and stars Danny A. Abeckaser, who is best known as a rock impressario and club promoter.
The film, set in New York in the 1990s, is about a pair of Hasidic Jews who become part of an ecstasy smuggling ring. The film is the feature directorial debut of Kevin Asch with a screenplay by actor/scenarist Antonio Masc...
As the Sundance Film Festival shifts into its final weekend, with awards being announced on Saturday evening, several distribution deals have been announced. While the horde of film executives left the Festival in the past 48 hours, a rash of deals have been announced, with more expected in the days and weeks ahead.
The heyday of when films were bought in the opening hours of the Festival are long gone, due to the difficult distribution landscape and the smaller number o...
Joan Rivers, the queen of comedy who has been perfecting her craft in a career that spans over five decades, is as unlikely a personality as one would expect to find in the uber-indie surroundings of Park City. However, the comedienne, who is as well known for her addiction to plastic surgery as she is for her classic comedy ("can we talk?" being her signature catchphrase) is here at the Sundance Film Festival for the world premiere of the documentary JOAN RIVERS: A PIECE OF...
After winning the top prize at the IDFA International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, the world’s most prestigious showcase for non-fiction film, the Canadian/UK co-production LAST TRAIN HOME is making a splash at its International Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Now the clear favorite for awards recognition in the World Cinema Documentary competition here, the film seems poised for a distribution deal.
LAST TRAIN HOME by director Lixin Fan is a beautif...
Actor Mark Ruffalo, a genial leading man who has been one of the most consistent (and unheralded) actors in significant films over the past decade, has made his directorial debut here at the Sundance Film Festival. His sturdy direction offers a quirky spin to SYMPATHY FOR DELICIOUS, a comedy drama bout a diabled disk jockey who wakes up one day with the power to heal. The DJ, who is paralyzed and confined to a wheel chair, is winning played by Christopher Thornton, who also wro...
