Goings On: Tribeca, SFFILM, and More
The two big film festivals of April, one for each coast, have made major lineup announcements. The Tribeca Film Festival has rolled out all of its feature titles for its seventeenth edition, running from April 18 through 29. Last month, the festival announced that it’d be opening with the world premiere of Lisa D’Apolito’s Love, Gilda, a portrait of Gilda Radner. This year’s edition will close with Liz Garbus’s The Fourth Estate, “which follows the New York Times’ coverage of the Trump administration’s first year. Our centerpiece gala is the world premiere of Drake Doremus’s sci-fi romance Zoe [image above], starring Ewan McGregor, Léa Seydoux, Rashida Jones, and Theo James.”
Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay: “Work by former 25 New Faces like Eva Vives, John Maringouin, Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck, new movies by Miguel Arteta and Mads Brugger, the first feature by interactive superstar Meredith Danluck, Nancy Schwartzman’s campus rape doc Roll Red Roll, and, from Sundance, Jeremy Yaches’s extraordinary coming-of-age tole We the Animals as well as Desiree Akhaven’s Grand Prize winner The Miseducation of Cameron Post are all titles that immediately caught my eye. Also, significantly, of the ninety-six feature films, forty-six percent are directed by women—an all-time high for the festival.”
The San Francisco International Film Festival, whose 2018 edition runs from April 4 through 17, has announced that twenty films, ten fiction and ten nonfiction, will compete for the Golden Gate Awards. Macaulay spots “two world premieres: a US/Ghana production by Bay Area directors Zachary Fink and Alyssa Fedele, The Rescue List, about a safe house for kids escaping the country’s child labor system; and Tre Maison Dasan, U.S. director Denali Tiller’s doc about children whose parents are incarcerated.”
More Goings On
New York. “David Lynch’s Festival of Disruption is expanding to New York City in 2018,” reports Lake Schatz for Consequence of Sound. “The two-day event goes down at Brooklyn Steel on May 19 and 20.” Daniel Kreps for Rolling Stone: “The director himself, who will curate and host the two-day festival, will also present a series of talks, including a Blue Velvet screening with actress Isabella Rossellini. An art exhibit showcasing works by Lynch, William Eggleston and Sandro Miller’s Psychogenic Fugue featuring John Malkovich photographed as iconic David Lynch characters is also planned.”
“The Shed, the architecturally ambitious new art space in New York City, has revealed its first group of commissions for the inaugural 2019 season,” reports Jake Nevins for the Guardian. “They include a live production celebrating the influence of African American music conceived by filmmaker Steve McQueen and developed by Quincy Jones, as well as a performance piece based on Euripides’ Greek tragedy Helen by the acclaimed poet Anne Carson, starring Ben Whishaw and Renee Fleming.”
Austin Pendleton will be at Film Forum tomorrow for a Q&A following a screening of Skidoo (1968), “the film in which Otto Preminger’s camera guides a sweaty, prison-striped Jackie Gleason through his first acid trip, Groucho Marx plays a gangster named ‘God,’ and Frankie Avalon’s remote-controlled apartment is on the fritz,” as Patrick Dahl notes at Screen Slate. “It’s a psychedelic farce with teeth, a loony masterpiece. And Harry Nilsson’s on the soundtrack. And there’s naked football. And multiple musical numbers. This list is not exhaustive.”
Chicago. “One of the weighty pleasures of the annual survey of European films at the Siskel Film Center,” the Chicago European Union Film Festival, “is how the contributions from the twenty-eight European Union member nations—with sixty-one Chicago-debuting features this year—allows a subjective overview of just what ‘European’ means at this point in the early twenty-first century,” writes Ray Pride for Newcity. “Leaving aside the collective cultural suicide behind the lemming-leap to Brexit from soon-to-cleave Great Britain, a sampling of movies made by any diligent moviegoer could reveal hope and passion, fear and dispassion, tragedy and compassion.”
“One of the traditions of the festival has been that the Opening Night slot is given to a film from the nation currently holding down the presidency of the real-life EU, which is Bulgaria this year,” notes Peter Sobczynski at the top of an extensive preview at RogerEbert.com of this year’s edition, running from Friday through April 5. Stephan Komandarev’s Directions “is a episodic drama laced with moments of dark comedy involving the activities of a group of five taxi drivers and their fares over the course of a long night during which the news is dominated by the story of a rich banker who has been murdered by the cabbie he was extorting and who himself now lies in a coma.”
Toronto. From Friday through March 15, TIFF Cinematheque presents Filmmaker in 5: Sidney Lumet. “Whatever their excesses, the best of his films have a grinding inexorableness that is hard to forget,” writes Andrew Tracy. “It’s this tenacity that vindicates Lumet from his occasional affinity for the glib—a drive towards thoroughness that finds its greatest exemplar in the police-corruption drama Prince of the City, whose peculiar exhilaration is intrinsically linked to its exhaustion, if not its exhaustiveness.”
London.Walerian Borowczyk: Obscure Pleasures opens on Friday at Close-Up and runs through March 23. The series focuses on “early features alongside two shorts programs, one of which is dedicated to his rarely screened art documentaries. These screenings are accompanied by an exhibition of Borowczyk’s graphic art, and a talk by Daniel Bird, co-producer of Arrow Academy’s Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection, co-founder of Friends of Walerian Borowczyk and author of Boro: Walerian Borowczyk.”
And on Saturday, Close-Up presents Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (1933) and L’Atalante (1934).
UK. The sixteenth Kinoteka Polish Film Festival is on at various venues from today through March 29. “Alongside programmed strands are one-off events such as a Q&A with the legendary Krzysztof Zanussi after a screening of his debut film, The Structure of Crystal (1969), and a supper club including a showing of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique (1991),” writes Ben Nicholson, previewing several highlights for the BFI.
Paris. As part of its festival of restorations, Toute la mémoire du monde, the Cinémathèque française will present work by Peter Nestler from Friday through Sunday.
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