"A couple of years ago, Jonas Mekas, the godhead of New York's underground film scene and a cofounder of Anthology Film Archives, moved to Greenpoint," writes the L's Mark Asch. "[I]t was the signal event of the East Village's irreversible gentrification, until earlier this year, when the Mars Bar, the legendary dive down the block from Anthology, served its last lukewarm bottled beer to a rent-stabilized daytime drunk. So it's incredibly fitting that the first Greenpoint Film Festival, which kicks off [tonight], will open with the world premiere of Mekas's new feature film, the as ever affectingly home-movie-ish My Mars Bar Movie." And This Side of Paradise, an exhibition of photo prints taken from original 16mm film from Mekas's This Side of Paradise: Fragments of an Unfinished Biography (1999), is at agnès b. through Sunday.
"Scottish experimental filmmaker Luke Fowler will be present for a program of recent work on Thursday night at the Gene Siskel Film Center, part of Conversations at the Edge," notes Peter Margasak at the Chicago Reader. The program includes two of the three films in Fowler's A Grammar for Listening series, this particular pair built around field recordings made by Lee Patterson and Eric La Casa. "A second Fowler screening happens on Friday evening at the Film Studies Center on the University of Chicago campus, and will include his work in progress about Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing, All Divided Selves." Margasak also points us to Christoph Cox's interview with Fowler and posts a video Fowler's made for Scottish folk singer Alasdair Roberts.
Last night, 33 nominees were announced as contenders for the 2012 Cinema Eye Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking.
Ambrose Heron has the award-winners at this year's London Film Festival and quotes from the jury on their reasoning. Best Film: Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk about Kevin, which has just received a pretty fine poster for its US release from Oscilloscope Laboratories.
SXSW Film announces its first round of panels: "Highlights include a Conversation with Cliff Martinez, the composer of Drive's hypnotic score and the return of the festival favorite, Jeffrey Tambor's Acting Workshop." Earlier: Daniel Kasman's conversation with Cliff Martinez.
In the works. "Shane Meadows is set to direct a film documenting the return of the Stone Roses," reports Henry Barnes in the Guardian. From the Playlist comes word of Oliver Stone's adaptation of Robert Caro's 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winner The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York for HBO, the Farrelly Brothers' sequel to Dumb and Dumber and Martin Scorsese's flirtation with the idea of directing an adaptation of Norwegian crime writer Jo Nesbø's The Snowman.
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