Films on the Green Festival Brings French Classics to NYC Parks

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Monday, 06 June 2016 18:13

Written by Renzo Adler

Ah, summer. When the grass grows, the AC’s go on full blast, and the parks come alive with the sound of the French New Wave. At Central Park, Washington Square Park, Transmitter Park (Brooklyn), Riverside Park, Tompkins Square Park and Columbia University, the Films on the Green Film Festival will be showing free(!) French cinema on Fridays from June to September.

The festival is courtesy of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the FACE Foundation and features films from the likes of Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Luc Besson, François Truffaut, and Céline Sciamma, blending classic French New Wave with contemporary cinema.

Films featured as part of the festival include:

• Breathless
  By Jean-Luc Godard, 1960, 1h30
  Preceded by The Red Balloon by Albert Lamorisse, 1956, 36min
  Tuesday, June 7, 8:30 pm, Central Park, Cedar Hill

• The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe
  By Yves Robert, 1972, PG, 1h30
  Friday, June 10, 8:30 pm, Washington Square Park

• Air of Paris
  By Marcel Carné, 1954, 1h50
  Friday, June 17, 8:30 pm, Washington Square Park

• Subway
  By Luc Besson, 1985, R, 1h44
  Friday, June 24, 8:30 pm, Transmitter Park

• The 400 Blows
  By François Truffaut, 1959, 1h39
  Friday, July 1, 8:30 pm, Transmitter Park

• April and the Extraordinary World
  By Christian Desmares & Franck Ekinci, 2015, 1h43
  Friday, July 8, 8:30 pm, Riverside Park, Pier I

• Un Flic
  By Jean-Pierre Melville, 1972, PG, 1h38
  Friday, July 15, 8:30 pm, Riverside Park, Pier I
  
  
• Cleo From 5 To 7
  By Agnès Varda, 1962, 1h30
  Friday, July 22, 8:30 pm, Tompkins Square Park
  
  
• Boyfriends and Girlfriends
  By Eric Rohmer, 1987, PG, 1h42
  Friday, July 29, 8:30 pm, Tompkins Square Park
  
  
• Girlhood
  By Céline Sciamma, 2014,1h52
  Thursday, Sept. 8, 7:30 pm, Columbia University

To learn more, go to: http://frenchculture.org/film-tv-and-new-media/festivals/films-green-2016

Films on the Green 2016
June 17 - September 8, 2016

Various Locations
New York, NY

The 2016 Los Angeles Film Festival Heralds Diversity

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Sunday, 29 May 2016 16:50

Written by Casey Hernandez

Taking place from June 1 to 9, 2016, The Los Angeles Film Festival, produced by Film Independent — the non-profit arts organization that also produces the Film Independent Spirit Awards —  celebrates the power of the storyteller starting with the opening night film Lowriders, directed by Ricardo de Montreuil. It stars Eva Longoria and details a culturally vibrant film that explores familial relationships within a second-generation Mexican family in East LA. 

Closing the festival will be the intense suspense thriller Desierto. Starring Gael Garcia Bernal, it is directed by son Jonás Cuarón, and produced by father Alfonso Caurón. 

Being held at ArcLight Cinemas (9500 Culver Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232) and The Culver Studios (9336 Washington Blvd., Culver City, CA 90232), the Festival showcases diversity, innovation and uniqueness of vision in independent American and international cinema. This year’s fest features Ryan Coogler, Ava DuVernay, Nate Parker and the new crop of African and African-American storytellers.

Highlighting the contributions of such diverse storytellers, Creed director Coogler is the 2016 Guest Director; he will attend the 15th annual Filmmaker Retreat, a signature program that brings together the feature directors in this year’s Festival along with seasoned filmmakers and Film Independent board members who attend as honored artists.

Selma director DuVernay and her distribution company, Array Releasing, will receive the Festival’s annual Spirit of Independence Award on June 4th, which honors those who advance the cause of independent film and champion creative freedom.

Auteur actor-turned-director Parker shares on June 2nd what it took to bring The Birth of a Nation, the story of Nat Turner, the African-American preacher turned insurgent to the big screen in “Nate Parker's Labor of Love: The Birth of a Nation Conversation.” Parker will be joined by cast members Aja Naomi King (How to Get Away with Murder) and Gabrielle Union (Being Mary Jane).

Also part of the fest is The Global Media Makers Presents: Storytelling From The Inside Out is a U.S. Department of State and Film Independent international mentoring initiative which connects visual storytellers from around the world with leading U.S. entertainment professionals through specially tailored mentorships, workshops and master classes.

Shining the light on the need for inclusion, the Diversity Speaks panels bring together content creators of underrepresented communities who embody innovation to discuss how they manage to combine their passions for storytelling, entrepreneurship and their cultural identities into success stories. One of the many highlights include a disucssion with Issa Rae (Awkward Black Girl) who will join Film Independent curator Elvis Mitchell in conversation for an intimate off-the-record talk. 

For a full schedule, tickets and general festival info go to: http://www.filmindependent.org/la-film-festival/

The Los Angeles Film Festival
June 1 - 9 2016

ArcLight Cinemas 
9500 Culver Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232

The Culver Studios
9336 Washington Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232

& Various Locations

Québec Direct Cinema Movement At Anthology Film Archives in May 2016

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Previews

Published on Tuesday, 03 May 2016 09:42

Written by Brad Balfour

Concurrent with the cinema vérité movement in France and the appearance of filmmakers like Robert Drew, the Maysles, and Ricky Leacock in the United States, the Québec Direct Cinema movement emerged in Canada in the 1950s and 60s, matches these other cinemtaic developments.

A host of filmmakers – including Michel Brault, Pierre Perrault, Gilles Groulx, Marcel Carrière, Claude Fournier, Bernard Gosselin, and others – developed and utilized new camera and sound technologies to make documentaries whose spontaneity, vitality, and formal innovations are still remarkable.

Abandoning the carefully composed, often scripted approach of earlier documentary films – in which reality was kept at a safe distance -- filtered via narration and controlled through rehearsal or even staging -- these filmmakers used the new technologies to throw themselves into the worlds they documented, and to respond in the moment to the rhythms and textures of lived experience.

Relative to their U.S. and French counterparts, and despite their proximity, these Québecois filmmakers are relatively under-recognized here in the United States.

In order to redress this, Anthology Film Archives (32 2nd Ave, New York, NY), in partnership with the Québec Government Office in New York and the National Film Board of Canada, presents 17 programs devoted to the Québec Direct Cinema from May 5 - 17, 2016.

Founded in 1970, Anthology's mission has been to preserve, exhibit, and promote public and scholarly understanding of independent, classic, and avant-garde cinema. Anthology screens more than 1,000 film and video programs per year, publishes books and catalogs annually, and has preserved more than 900 films to date.

Anthology now presents this extensive series to survey this enormously influential documentary filmmaking movement.

Featuring more than 30 films – many of them very rarely screened in the U.S. – and graced by appearances from filmmaker Marcel Carrière and scholar and curator Carol Faucher, this series represents an opportunity to explore one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of documentary cinema, and to gain great insight into the people, politics, and society of Québec from the 1950s to the early 1980s.

It all began at the National Film Board of Canada. Despite the NFB’s celebrated reputation since its foundation in 1939, its documentary production had become more conventional in the late 40s/early 50s, with its heavy equipment, scripted scenarios, and strict in-house guidelines.

The arrival of television in 1952-53, with its constant demand for films, pushed the NFB’s producers and filmmakers towards greater creativity, experimentation, and innovation.

Inspired by photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his artistic philosophy (“The Decisive Moment”), small crews of filmmakers set out with portable cameras and their often long-focus lenses, more sensitive film stocks, and lighter sound equipment, “to record life as it happens, unscripted, unrehearsed, to capture it in sync sound without asking [subjects] to pose or repeat [their] lines; …and to edit it into moving films that would make the audience laugh and cry…and change the world by making people realize that life is real, beautiful, and meaningful” (Wolf Koenig, 1967). 

Carrière and Faucher will be here in person for opening weekend, Friday, May 6 to Sunday, May 8.

Tickets: $11 general; $9 for students, seniors, & children (12 & under); $7 Anthology members.

For more info go to: www.anthologyfilmarchives.org

Québec Direct Cinema
May 5-17

Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Avenue
New York, NY 10003