Directors Amy Bench and Annie Silverstein (one of Filmmaker‘s 2014 25 New Faces) have collaborated on the short doc Breaking Silence, which premieres today at DOC NYC before release on the PBS app beginning November 15. Winner of both a Jury and Audience Award at SXSW 2023, as well as Best Documentary Short awards at the Atlanta and Oak Cliff Film Festivals, the film is, in the words of the filmmakers, “a verité portrait of Walker and Leslie Estes, a deaf father and CODA daughter from Baton Rouge, LA, who work together upon Leslie’s release from prison—driven by their shared experiences ..read more

Karishma Dube’s Bittu begins with sound before image, a vague squabble over black before it drops you into the middle of a world in motion. The opening shot is not held long before cutting to the next. It is one among many, does not announce itself as the beginning, and is not so contrived and defined that you can remember exactly when the film began. Suddenly, the viewer’s immersed in a story that started well before they became a witness to it. The opening shot introduces the film’s namesake little girl, Bittu, as played by the phenomenal first time performer […] The post "Letting Go...Trus ..read more

A spectral and hypnotic entry in this year’s Slamdance Film Festival is Chris Peters’s “film experiment,” 24,483 Dreams of Death, which uses a Mario Bava film (Mask of the Demon) as the sole source material for an A.I.’s imagination of our visual world. Over six days, Peters — a filmmaker, painter as well as software engineer — fed the frames of the film into the computer, producing images that represent, he writes, “… the machine’s neural network forming in real time, not footage in the traditional sense of photographed scenes, but footage of the internal experience of a new intelligence ..read more

The transportation of an object from point A to point B — it’s one of the most basic of human endeavors, and one that provides both story and a bit of mystery to Adinah Dancyger’s rich and elegant short, Moving. Starring Hannah Gross (Mindhunter, I Used To Be Darker) and winner of the Grand Jury Award for Narrative Short at the Slamdance 2020 festival, Moving, with much physical action and minimal dialogue, focuses on a young woman moving a mattress across town and up a flight of stairs to an empty apartment. Moving in New York City is a nightmare […] The post "...I Asked If She Was Up for Ha ..read more

Yaara Sumeruk’s short film If We Say That We Are Friends was scheduled to have its New York premiere tonight at the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look series. Of course, it’s been cancelled, along with the majority of the city’s cultural activity in the wake of the Coronavirus. But in what’s perhaps a forerunner of the way filmmakers may be responding to the screening cessations in the weeks ahead, Sumerek is going ahead with the event, but online, in a “social distant screening.” At 7:00 PM, viewers can click on this Vimeo link and use the password “Dine” […] The post Watch: First Look ..read more

I’ve always liked female bodies.  This is the first line of voice-over spoken in French across the opening seconds of black that launch While I’m Still Breathing (Tandis que je respire encore), a 12-minute short film playing in Sundance New Frontier by a creative collective that includes writer and actress Laure Giappiconi; sound and performance artist Elisa Monteil; and photographer and filmmaker La Fille Renne.  The voice, a woman’s, speaks over a whirl of black and white grain in a medium shot showing a woman standing against a horizon of black tree trunks and blurred branches. T ..read more

Oscar-nominated documentary director Marshall Curry — and a 2005 Filmmaker 25 New Face — makes his dramatic fiction debut at Tribeca with the short film, The Neighbor’s Window. Starring Maria Dizzia, Juliana Canfield and Greg Keller it employs the urban Rear Window concept in order to tell a delicate tale in which envy bleeds into empathy. Dizzia and Keller are a married couple suffering through the relationship doldrums of early parenthood when a young, sexually adventurous couple move in directly across the way. Drawing the blinds isn’t something the younger couple even deigns to do, and th ..read more

The Oscar short lists were announced earlier this week and one of the ten titles to make the cut in the Live-Action Short category was Caroline. Written and directed by Celine Held and Logan George — two of 2017’s 25 New Faces — the film follows a frenetic afternoon in the life of single mother who leaves her three children behind to go on a job interview. Watch it above. The post Short Film: Caroline, Directed by Celine Held and Logan George first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine ..read more

Now that Roma is available for all on Netflix, it’s as good a time as any to revisit the earliest work of Alfonso Cuarón. Made in 1983, when he was a 22 year-old film student in Mexico City, Quartet for the End of Time bares a strong semblance to the to the classics of the French New Wave. Named after the featured chamber music by Olivier Messiaen, the film explores the solitary life of a young man in and around his apartment. It was Cuarón’s last credited short before his 1991 feature length debut, Solo Con Tu Pareja. The post Watch: Alfonso Cuarón's Quartet for the End of Tim ..read more

In The Morning After an interracial lesbian couple wake up the day after the 2016 general election to find their world changed. They drag their tired bodies out of bed to have brunch with one of the women’s fathers, who presents a charming, welcoming veneer despite his soon-to-be revealed political leanings. Written and directed by Lauren Minnerath, and starring Taylor Hess (a Filmmaker contributing editor) and Adenike Thomas, the short film methodically dissects an already tense instance of “meet the parents,” made all the more trying by the present circumstance. Check it out above. The post ..read more