“Something big is about to change,” is surely one ominous beginning for a debut fiction feature, but director Neo Sora knows how to calibrate the fine balance between anticipation and inevitability. A story set in the near future, Happyend makes Tokyo a vast playground to high-school seniors gathered around childhood pals Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) and Kou (Yukito Hidaka). Life is blooming and the future is ripe for those teenagers, even if the whole city is constantly preparing itself for a catastrophic earthquake. Daily drills and false alarms interrupt an otherwise-smooth rhythm where Yuta and Kou gather their classmates at their Music Research Club, an extracurricular that’s more enjoyable than practical in purpose. With a fully equipped school room at their disposal at all times, the gang can build a secure microcosm for the shared love of electronic avant-garde and a generally good time.
But Happyend is far from a...
But Happyend is far from a...
- 9/9/2024
- by Savina Petkova
- The Film Stage
McKenzie Wark is out in Brooklyn, New York. We’re speaking via video chat in the days leading up to the FIDMarseille premiere of Life Story, her new collaboration with Jessica Dunn Rovinelli. Between questions, and while we wait for Jessica to join us, McKenzie moves around the world just out of frame. She speaks to her daughter, walks into and out of L-Train Vintage, crosses streets, occasionally exchanging greetings with passersby. It is a joy to edit the transcript of this interview later on—sentences are punctuated with “oh hi!”s, “how’ve you been?”s, little subtexts of intimacy smuggled into thoughts about […]
The post “The Contingency of the Image Is Its Truth”: McKenzie Wark and Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on Life Story first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
The post “The Contingency of the Image Is Its Truth”: McKenzie Wark and Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on Life Story first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
- 7/8/2024
- by Frank Falisi
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
McKenzie Wark is out in Brooklyn, New York. We’re speaking via video chat in the days leading up to the FIDMarseille premiere of Life Story, her new collaboration with Jessica Dunn Rovinelli. Between questions, and while we wait for Jessica to join us, McKenzie moves around the world just out of frame. She speaks to her daughter, walks into and out of L-Train Vintage, crosses streets, occasionally exchanging greetings with passersby. It is a joy to edit the transcript of this interview later on—sentences are punctuated with “oh hi!”s, “how’ve you been?”s, little subtexts of intimacy smuggled into thoughts about […]
The post “The Contingency of the Image Is Its Truth”: McKenzie Wark and Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on Life Story first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
The post “The Contingency of the Image Is Its Truth”: McKenzie Wark and Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on Life Story first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.
- 7/8/2024
- by Frank Falisi
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
Austrian directors Lilith Kraxner and Milena Czernovsky’s bluish has won the Grand Prix in international competition at FIDMarseille, which ran from June 25-30.
bluish centres on two somewhat disorientated characters in their twenties who each aimlessly drift through a city’s gloomy winter days. It stars Leonie Bramberger and Natasha Goncharova. World sales are handled by Square Eyes.
bluish previously won the Screen International Award at the C EU Soon work-in-progress programme at Rome’s Mia Market in October 2023. Czernovsky and Kraxner’s previous feature Beatrix premiered at FIDMarseille in 2021.
The second major award in the international competition, the Georges de Beauregard prize,...
bluish centres on two somewhat disorientated characters in their twenties who each aimlessly drift through a city’s gloomy winter days. It stars Leonie Bramberger and Natasha Goncharova. World sales are handled by Square Eyes.
bluish previously won the Screen International Award at the C EU Soon work-in-progress programme at Rome’s Mia Market in October 2023. Czernovsky and Kraxner’s previous feature Beatrix premiered at FIDMarseille in 2021.
The second major award in the international competition, the Georges de Beauregard prize,...
- 7/1/2024
- ScreenDaily
A pair of films we’ve been hoping find a home have now been acquired. We’re pleased to exclusively announce that Cinema Guild has secured North American distribution rights for Jessica Dunn Rovinelli’s So Pretty and Empathy. So Pretty premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019 and won numerous awards internationally. Empathy won the Prix du Cnap when it premiered in FIDMarseille in 2016. Cinema Guild will kick off the partnership with Rovinelli with a special screening of So Pretty with a Q&a at Metrograph in New York on June 8. A digital release will follow for both films.
In So Pretty, four young queers in New York City struggle to maintain their proto-utopian community against the outside world as their lives curiously merge with the 1980s German novel so schön by Ronald M. Schernikau. An investigation of leftist politics and femme identity in the context of an increasingly right-wing world,...
In So Pretty, four young queers in New York City struggle to maintain their proto-utopian community against the outside world as their lives curiously merge with the 1980s German novel so schön by Ronald M. Schernikau. An investigation of leftist politics and femme identity in the context of an increasingly right-wing world,...
- 5/14/2024
- by Jordan Raup
- The Film Stage
Just in time for Succession‘s end, let’s look at method acting. The Criterion Channel are highlighting the controversial practice in a 27-film series centered on Brando, Newman, Nicholson, and many other’s embodiment of “an intensely personal, internalized, and naturalistic approach to performance.” That series makes mention of Marilyn Monroe, who gets her own, 11-title highlight––the iconic commingling with deeper cuts.
Pride Month offers “Masc,” a consideration of “trans men, butch lesbians, and gender-nonconforming heroes” onscreen; the Michael Koresky-curated Queersighted returning with a study of the gay best friend; and the 20-film “LGBTQ+ Favorites.” Louis Garrel’s delightful The Innocent (about which I talked to him here), the director’s cut of Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation, and Stanley Kwan’s hugely underseen Lan Yu make streaming premieres, while Araki’s Totally F***ed Up and Mysterious Skin also get a run. Criterion Editions include Five Easy Pieces,...
Pride Month offers “Masc,” a consideration of “trans men, butch lesbians, and gender-nonconforming heroes” onscreen; the Michael Koresky-curated Queersighted returning with a study of the gay best friend; and the 20-film “LGBTQ+ Favorites.” Louis Garrel’s delightful The Innocent (about which I talked to him here), the director’s cut of Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation, and Stanley Kwan’s hugely underseen Lan Yu make streaming premieres, while Araki’s Totally F***ed Up and Mysterious Skin also get a run. Criterion Editions include Five Easy Pieces,...
- 5/22/2023
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Monte Hellman and his dog Kona. Monte Hellman, cult director of The Shooting (1966), Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) and Road to Nowhere (2010) has died. Hellman spoke with Notebook on several occasions about his films, decrying the committee-designed quality of new films while staying true to his own long-held principles: "I am aware of continually breaking rules." Léos Carax's first English-language film, the musical Annette, will be opening the 74th Cannes Film Festival on July 6th. The film will simultaneously be released in French cinemas. Two other Cannes titles have also been announced, having been selected for last year's postponed edition of the festival: Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch and Paul Verhoeven's Benedetta. Steven Soderbergh is undertaking the overwhelming creative task of staging this year's Oscars ceremony. As Soderbergh says, the project is "the walking...
- 4/21/2021
- MUBI
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: The Hour of the Furnace by Fernando Solanas.Argentinian filmmaker Fernando Solanas, best known for his 1968 documentary The Hour of the Furnace and his manifesto "Toward a Third Cinema", has died. Celine Sciamma has started filming her follow-up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire. The film, entitled Petite Maman, will be filmed by regular collaborator Claire Mathon and will focus on the childhood of two eight-year old kids. Although her adaptation of Denis Johnson's Stars at Noon has been delayed, Claire Denis will be reteaming with Juliette Binoche and Bastards star Vincent Lindon for a still-untitled film. Sean Baker has also confirmed that his "secret movie" called Red Rocket, starring Simon Rex (of the Scary Movie franchise), will complete shooting this month. Recommended VIEWINGStarting on November 16, Jr and Alice Rohrwacher's...
- 11/11/2020
- MUBI
Film Independent has selected the 10 projects and 19 participants for its inaugural Docuseries Intensive. CNN Original Series is backing the 2020 Film Independent Docuseries Intensive — which is only appropriate considering its the home of award-winning series such as Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown, United Shades of America with W. Kamau Bell and This is Life with Lisa Ling.
The Docuseries Intensive is a three-day remote workshop that will give filmmakers the tools and access needed to develop and present their nonfiction series to potential collaborators working in the series space. Through executive and peer mentorship, workshopping and fostering industry connections, Fellows will get a deeper understanding of how the business works, as well as having tangible next steps to move their projects forward.
The program will elaborate on a range of topics, from funding and development to marketing and distribution. Networking and pitch events will offer Fellows the opportunity to introduce themselves and...
The Docuseries Intensive is a three-day remote workshop that will give filmmakers the tools and access needed to develop and present their nonfiction series to potential collaborators working in the series space. Through executive and peer mentorship, workshopping and fostering industry connections, Fellows will get a deeper understanding of how the business works, as well as having tangible next steps to move their projects forward.
The program will elaborate on a range of topics, from funding and development to marketing and distribution. Networking and pitch events will offer Fellows the opportunity to introduce themselves and...
- 10/8/2020
- by Dino-Ray Ramos
- Deadline Film + TV
Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSMartin Scorsese and Paul Schrader in 1973.Martin Scorsese will be executive producing Paul Schrader's upcoming The Card Counter, a casino-set thriller starring Tiffany Haddish, Oscar Isaac, and Willem Dafoe, marking the pair's fifth collaboration. Though we're a little late, we're thrilled by news that the Safdie Brothers have teamed up with comedian Nathan Fielder to pen a half-hour pilot for Showtime. The story reportedly stars Fielder and Benny Safdie in the tale of a curse that threatens the marriage of a couple on a Hgtv show. Recommended VIEWINGMetrograph's official trailer for the 4K restoration of Fruit Chan's Made in Hong Kong, a portrait of nihilistic youth in the city. Abel Ferrara's surreal Siberia stars Willem Dafoe as an isolated man who ventures into "dreams, memory and imagination in an attempt to find his true nature.
- 2/26/2020
- MUBI
Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli's So Pretty is showing February 24 - March 24, 2020 on Mubi as part of the series Direct from the Berlinale.So Pretty was a labor of love. I’m speaking not only about the intense care shown to me and the film by the many artists and artisans that worked on our production, but also the means by which the film was constructed. It was an attempt to take love seriously as a means of production, as a method of constructing a world, and as a way to move the camera through a space and through bodies.I want new ways of relating eyes, skin, camera, lust, and pretty surfaces. If the film is successful, at least in my eyes, it is because I tried to teach myself to take love seriously both as an aesthetic and as structural element of the world. It used to be...
- 2/18/2020
- MUBI
Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli's So Pretty is showing February 24 - March 24, 2020 on Mubi as part of the series Direct from the Berlinale.The question of the trans image on film has often been centered around seeing the film image as opposed to the making of the film image. There has been yearning to see the images of affirmative visibility after decades of negative, harmful, or fraudulent trans images on-screen. Ultimately, these conversations and contentions about the trans image on-screen have slowly given way to art being created as a reaction against or commenting on images such as the well-worn negative media tropes or the class and racially tiered “visibility for some, but not all” that still fails to account for the most vulnerable in the community. And there is also the fact that aesthetics must become synonymous in any discussion about portraying trans people on-screen, that humanizing or giving...
- 2/12/2020
- MUBI
AdamAdam has the right to exist—but I do not think it is a good or successful film. Adam has the right to exist—but I would have preferred a few other, better trans-related works of literature chosen to be adapted by major independent film producer James Schamus. Adam has the right to exist—but it is not a film I would implore people to see. In fact, I might even encourage people to skip it. Not out of protest or the symbolism that is ascribed to power in purchasing a movie ticket in support of Lgbtq-related films, but because I do not think this film is worth rallying around or against. As a film, it should and ought to be treated equally like the idealized notion of purchasing a movie ticket: seeing something worth seeing. Adam is not worthless or easily disposable as a whole enterprise, although I...
- 9/11/2019
- MUBI
This week the team at BAMcinemaFest has given a platform to an incredible collection of innovative films from around the world. But what do these short, documentary and scripted narrative directors do when they aren’t showcasing their films at a festival? How do they make a living when they aren’t busy making personal films? IndieWire asked the 2019 BAMcinemaFest directors that exact question.
Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli (“So Pretty”): Editor and colorist for commercial and independent film and video. I moonlight as a German live-subtitler for unsubtitled 35mm prints at art houses around the city.
Ben Berman (“The Amazing Johnathan Documentary”): What I do when I’m not making films is mainly question what I do for a living. So at least we’re on the same page about that. I’ve directed and edited some comedy tv shows: “Tim and Eric,” “Lady Dynamite,” “Man Seeking Woman,...
Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli (“So Pretty”): Editor and colorist for commercial and independent film and video. I moonlight as a German live-subtitler for unsubtitled 35mm prints at art houses around the city.
Ben Berman (“The Amazing Johnathan Documentary”): What I do when I’m not making films is mainly question what I do for a living. So at least we’re on the same page about that. I’ve directed and edited some comedy tv shows: “Tim and Eric,” “Lady Dynamite,” “Man Seeking Woman,...
- 6/22/2019
- by Chris O'Falt
- Indiewire
Following its very good opening night film — Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (also Filmmaker’s forthcoming Summer issue cover) — BAMcinemafest the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s essential early summer fest, is underway. This year’s edition is typical of the fest: a well-curated and relatively compact mix of recent festival standouts, a world premiere or two, and assorted other programs, including tomorrow’s day-long (and free) program of industry panels presented in collaboration with Ifp. The festival runs until June 22, and for those in or headed to Brooklyn, here are some recommendations from us at Filmmaker. So Pretty. Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli’s […]...
- 6/14/2019
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
Following its very good opening night film — Lulu Wang’s The Farewell (also Filmmaker’s forthcoming Summer issue cover) — BAMcinemafest the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s essential early summer fest, is underway. This year’s edition is typical of the fest: a well-curated and relatively compact mix of recent festival standouts, a world premiere or two, and assorted other programs, including tomorrow’s day-long (and free) program of industry panels presented in collaboration with Ifp. The festival runs until June 22, and for those in or headed to Brooklyn, here are some recommendations from us at Filmmaker. So Pretty. Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli’s […]...
- 6/14/2019
- by Scott Macaulay
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Before Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli began the bulk of production on her second feature So Pretty, she wrote an essay for this site outlining some of the goals and background behind the production: The film is an adaptation of a 1980s German gay novel [Ronald M. Schernikau’s So Schön] that I am transposing and translating to a cast of feminine people of many genders in 2018, New York City. […] Given the explicit gender-trouble and queer elements of So Pretty, as well as the fact that it takes seriously the novella’s paraphrased subtitle “a utopian film,” my film must create an image […]...
- 6/12/2019
- by Vadim Rizov
- Filmmaker Magazine-Director Interviews
Before Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli began the bulk of production on her second feature So Pretty, she wrote an essay for this site outlining some of the goals and background behind the production: The film is an adaptation of a 1980s German gay novel [Ronald M. Schernikau’s So Schön] that I am transposing and translating to a cast of feminine people of many genders in 2018, New York City. […] Given the explicit gender-trouble and queer elements of So Pretty, as well as the fact that it takes seriously the novella’s paraphrased subtitle “a utopian film,” my film must create an image […]...
- 6/12/2019
- by Vadim Rizov
- Filmmaker Magazine - Blog
Selection includes 39 titles and 31 world premieres.
This year’s Forum programme at the Berlin Film Festival (Feb 7-17) will feature 39 films, including 31 world premieres.
The Forum brings together challenging and thought-provoking filmmaking that brings together film with visual art, theatre and literature.
Highlights include a Super 8 silent vision of Elfriede Jelinek’s ghost novel ’Die Kinder der Toten’ in a film of the same name by Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska, Ghassan Salhab’s “essayistic collage” An Open Rose for which the filmmaker has used the letters from prison by Polish Marxist Rosa Luxembourg, and the documentary Landless, the...
This year’s Forum programme at the Berlin Film Festival (Feb 7-17) will feature 39 films, including 31 world premieres.
The Forum brings together challenging and thought-provoking filmmaking that brings together film with visual art, theatre and literature.
Highlights include a Super 8 silent vision of Elfriede Jelinek’s ghost novel ’Die Kinder der Toten’ in a film of the same name by Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska, Ghassan Salhab’s “essayistic collage” An Open Rose for which the filmmaker has used the letters from prison by Polish Marxist Rosa Luxembourg, and the documentary Landless, the...
- 1/18/2019
- by Louise Tutt
- ScreenDaily
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