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NEWS
A Different Man (Aaron Schimberg, 2024).
- IATSE, Teamsters, and the Hollywood Basic Crafts unions began bargaining jointly with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers after a thousands-strong rally in Los Angeles. In Variety, IATSE president Matthew Loeb discusses the union’s priorities and the threat of another strike after the current contract expires on July 31.
- In an open letter, Carlo Chatrian, the outgoing artistic director of the Berlinale, and Mark Peranson, the festival’s head of programming, respond to the backlash that followed the closing ceremony, at which a number of award recipients called for a ceasefire in Gaza: “This year’s festival was a place for dialogue and exchange for ten days; yet once the films stopped rolling, another form of communication has been taken over by politicians and the media, one which weaponizes and instrumentalizes anti-Semitism for political means.”
- The lineup for this year’s New Directors/New Films has been announced, including the New York premiere of Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man as the Opening Night selection. The festival will take place April 3 to 14.
REMEMBERING
Diary of a Young Comic (Gary Weis, 1979).
- Richard Lewis has died at 76. In a 2008 conversation with Kate Simon for Interview, the comedian and actor spoke about his love for the films of Buster Keaton, John Cassavetes, Jean Eustache, and others. “He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest,” writes Larry David, a longtime friend and collaborator. “But today he made me sob and for that I’ll never forgive him.”
- Paolo Taviani has died at 92. With his brother, Vittorio, he wrote and directed such celebrated and politically engaged films as Padre Padrone (1977), The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982), and Caesar Must Die (2012). “The story of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani is also that of Italian cinema after the end of the Second World War,” writes Giona A. Nazzaro, artistic director of the Locarno Film Festival.
- David Bordwell, the film theorist, has died at 76. In addition to his definitive studies of such filmmakers as Carl Theodor Dreyer, Yasujiro Ozu, and Sergei Eisenstein, Bordwell was deeply engaged with commercial Hollywood cinema, including the role of the spectator. “His legacy will clearly be vast and lasting,” writes his wife and collaborator, Kristin Thompson, “which to me provides the best consolation for his loss.”
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Janus Films has released a trailer for its much-anticipated restoration of Med Hondo’s slave-ship musical, West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty (1979), a landmark of anti-colonial African cinema.
- Altered Innocence has released a trailer for Vera Drew’s The People’s Joker (2022), a trans coming-of-age story whose freewheeling use of intellectual property resulted in it being dropped from TIFF 2022, where our own Chloe Lizotte commended its “infectious visual anarchy.”
RECOMMENDED READING
- “Sometimes I’m sleeping and they call me: ‘The bulldozers are coming.’” In Filmmaker, Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham, two of the four co-directors of No Other Land (2024), speak to Nicolas Rapold about making a documentary in the occupied West Bank.
- “Within living memory it was possible to believe in the proximity of a new world.” In e-flux, Phil Coldiron reviews “Here the Earth Grows Gold,” Suneil Sanzgiri’s current exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.
- “As an action flick, Tenet is a true original, a sci-fi thriller built around a conceit so elaborate that it occasionally achieves Zen-koan levels of paradoxical placidity.” For Vulture, Bilge Ebiri revisits Christopher Nolan’s Tenet (2020) in light of Oppenheimer (2023).
- “The crack in the promise of the Academy Awards is that American pictures don’t cut it any more.” David Thomson’s mordant Oscars preview in the London Review of Books rounds up the presumptive winners. The audiences, he suggests, are the losers.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Black Mama, White Mama (Eddie Romero, 1973).
- New York, through March 31: Spectacle presents a four-film retrospective of Pam Grier’s and Margaret Markov’s performances in exploitation films of the 1970s, including two in which they co-star: Black Mama, White Mama (1973) and The Arena (1974).
- New York, March 19: Light Industry presents an illustrated lecture by Christine Smallwood to accompany the release of La Captive, her new monograph on Chantal Akerman’s 2000 film, from Fireflies Press.
- Brussels, March 14 through July 21: Bozar presents “Chantal Akerman: Traveling,” an exhibition of images and documents from the filmmaker’s archive accompanied by a complete retrospective of her movies.
- Temenos, June 26 through 30: This year’s screening of Gregory Markopoulos’s Eniaios will feature Cycles XV – XVIII. The project, with installments scheduled every four years since 2004, represents a monumental reconfiguration of Markopoulos’s life’s work, projected in the open air of the Greek countryside.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Priscilla (Sofia Coppola, 2023).
- Sofia Coppola speaks with Phuong Le about “the loneliness of sequestered adolescence” and “moments of filmmaking déjà vu” in Priscilla (2023).
- Julio Torres, cult comedy writer and now director of Problemista (2023), tells Kamikaze Jones his dream collaborators from among the “grande dames of international art cinema.”
- George Iskander considers the imperiled mission of Rarefilmm, a website whose community of volunteers preserve and make accessible orphan films from underappreciated national cinemas.
WISH LIST
God's Comedy (João César Monteiro, 1995).
- Illuminated Hours: The Early Cinema of Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler (Asociación Lumière) collects interviews, writings, and production documents by the American poet laureates of 16mm film.
- The restored filmography of João César Monteiro, among the most revered and challenging Portuguese directors of his generation, will be the subject of a Spectrum Films box set this year in the distributor’s Section Parallèle collection.
EXTRAS
- Recently rediscovered: In the 2003–2004 premiere of the original Star Wars trilogy on Chile’s Channel 13, Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and even Emperor Palpatine can be seen choosing the crisp, refreshing taste of Cerveza Cristal.
- Can heartbreak feel any better in a place like this? AMC Theatres has begun to roll out three new pre-roll spots starring Nicole Kidman, a strategic maneuver they’re calling “Phase Two.”