In hindsight, it shouldn’t be surprising that the cinema of 2023 was so preoccupied with the unknown, as the first proper year after the start of the pandemic was always going to find the movie industry plunging into a brave new world.
Some of the most pressing questions we had at the start of January were answered with resounding force. Would the studios — some of which had fatally diluted their brands with streaming options in a desperate bid to appease the stock market — find that once-reliable franchises had lust their luster? Yes. Would audiences — so eager for a different breed of “event film” that they had already started to redefine the term themselves — actually follow through on the “Barbenheimer” meme that first spread across social media in late 2022? Yes. Would titans like Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and Wes Anderson make good on the breathless chatter that surrounded their latest projects...
Some of the most pressing questions we had at the start of January were answered with resounding force. Would the studios — some of which had fatally diluted their brands with streaming options in a desperate bid to appease the stock market — find that once-reliable franchises had lust their luster? Yes. Would audiences — so eager for a different breed of “event film” that they had already started to redefine the term themselves — actually follow through on the “Barbenheimer” meme that first spread across social media in late 2022? Yes. Would titans like Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan, and Wes Anderson make good on the breathless chatter that surrounded their latest projects...
- 11/28/2023
- by David Ehrlich and Kate Erbland
- Indiewire
When asked how she felt about this year’s opening film at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) having been supported by the IDFA Bertha Fund (Ibf), the fund’s executive director and IDFA deputy director Isabel Arrate Fernandez beamed with pride, stating it is “amazing, most of all because it’s a beautiful film.”
The film in question is Olga Chernyk’s “A Picture to Remember,” which has its world premiere at IDFA, running between Nov. 8-19. “The film team was involved with IDFA in several ways, not only through financing via the fund but also because Olga and Kasia [Boniecka], the film’s editor, attended the IDFA Project Space earlier this year. From the fund’s perspective, you never know where the films will end up, and when they start their career this way it’s incredible.”
Speaking to Variety, Fernandez recalls how “A Picture to Remember” was...
The film in question is Olga Chernyk’s “A Picture to Remember,” which has its world premiere at IDFA, running between Nov. 8-19. “The film team was involved with IDFA in several ways, not only through financing via the fund but also because Olga and Kasia [Boniecka], the film’s editor, attended the IDFA Project Space earlier this year. From the fund’s perspective, you never know where the films will end up, and when they start their career this way it’s incredible.”
Speaking to Variety, Fernandez recalls how “A Picture to Remember” was...
- 11/9/2023
- by Rafa Sales Ross
- Variety Film + TV
2023 has been yet another excellent and eye-opening year for documentary filmmaking, but you probably wouldn’t know it from the rather muted role that non-fiction cinema has played in the discourse over the last 11 months. Sundance was typically replete with major work like “Milisuthando,” “Kokomo City” and “The Disappearance of Shere Hite,” but many of these unconventional highlights struggled for distribution, while the usual array of music biodocs (e.g. “Little Richard: I Am Everything”) and environmental panic attacks (“Deep Rising”) failed to make the same impression that similar festival premieres have made in the past.
The rest of the calendar has largely continued that trend, with critical favorites like Claire Simon’s “Our Body” and “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” relegated to the margins while “After Death” — a faith-based, fact-free work of pseudoscience from the distributor behind “Sound of Freedom” — became the highest-grossing documentary of the year.
The good news,...
The rest of the calendar has largely continued that trend, with critical favorites like Claire Simon’s “Our Body” and “De Humani Corporis Fabrica” relegated to the margins while “After Death” — a faith-based, fact-free work of pseudoscience from the distributor behind “Sound of Freedom” — became the highest-grossing documentary of the year.
The good news,...
- 11/7/2023
- by David Ehrlich and Kate Erbland
- Indiewire
“I have to be careful about how I remember my memories.”
The director Milisuthando Bongela opens her discerning documentary Milisuthando with this shrewd declaration. It is an invitation, a notice and a guiding principle for her poetic meditation on a childhood affected by the violence of apartheid South Africa. Under Bongela’s direction, memories are pliant forces. They stretch into the past, haunt the present and creep into the future.
Bongela sifts through her memories and collects them along with those of her ancestors and other members of the Model C generation (a term used to describe the cohort of kids who integrated formerly whites-only schools in South Africa). She observes them with a keen sense of responsibility, interrogates them tenderly and then shapes them into a gentle and intimate narrative. Milisuthando is a longform journey that begins and ends in Transkei, a project of apartheid created to accommodate the...
The director Milisuthando Bongela opens her discerning documentary Milisuthando with this shrewd declaration. It is an invitation, a notice and a guiding principle for her poetic meditation on a childhood affected by the violence of apartheid South Africa. Under Bongela’s direction, memories are pliant forces. They stretch into the past, haunt the present and creep into the future.
Bongela sifts through her memories and collects them along with those of her ancestors and other members of the Model C generation (a term used to describe the cohort of kids who integrated formerly whites-only schools in South Africa). She observes them with a keen sense of responsibility, interrogates them tenderly and then shapes them into a gentle and intimate narrative. Milisuthando is a longform journey that begins and ends in Transkei, a project of apartheid created to accommodate the...
- 2/2/2023
- by Lovia Gyarkye
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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