The winner of the 44th Portland International Film Festival’s Future/future competition is Identifying Features, directed by Fernanda Valadez. The film, an intriguing and confident first feature following a mother’s journey to find out what happened to her son along the Mexican border, was awarded the honor as well as a $1,000 prize.
New York Women in Film & Television culminates its month-long recognition of Women’s History with a weekend of screenings celebrating female creators in film, television, and media. NYWIFT will screen IFC Films’ critically acclaimed Farewell Amor March 26-27 as part of its annual Support Women Artists Now Day celebration in partnership with SAG-AFTRA, FF2 Media, Women in the Arts & Media Coalition, HerFlix, In Creative Company, The Gotham, African American Women in Cinema, and Women Make Movies, followed by a talkback with filmmaker Ekwa Msangi on Saturday, March 27 at 12 p.m. EDT. Then the 41st Annual NYWIFT Muse Awards celebrating women of vision and achievement will have its educational broadcast on CUNY TV on Sunday, March 28 at 8 p.m. EdT.
Goldcrest Post recently performed a feat of post-production magic for one of the most unusual film releases of the year. Grizzly II: The Revenge, a thriller about a giant bear that attacks fans at a rock concert, was shot in 1983 by the late Hungarian director André Szöts. Starring Steve Inwood, and including appearances by George Clooney, Laura Dern, Louise Fletcher and Charlie Sheen, the film was intended to be a sequel to Grizzly, a modestly budgeted independent film that became the top grossing independent film of all time upon its release in 1976, but it was left unfinished. That changed late last year when executive producer Suzanne C. Nagy retrieved the nearly 40-year-old original elements from storage and sought Goldcrest’s help in getting the film ready for its long-delayed release.
As the industry continues to transition towards IP-based solutions, many integrators have found themselves limited by budget-related restrictions. Diversified, a global technology solutions provider, recently ran into this challenge when it came to a project at BerkleeNYC, a campus-based recording studio formerly known as Avatar Studios. In the process of building a cost-effective IP network for the school’s renowned Power Station recording studio, Diversified turned to TSL Products to provide an IP routing interface that marries TSL’s virtual control processor, the GTP-V1, and its renowned Virtual Panels into a solution that TSL has coined, IP-Cross Connect.
The Motion Picture Sound Editors’ 68th Golden Reel Awards, scheduled for Friday, April 16th as a fully virtual event, will invite sound professionals from around the world to gather and celebrate their craft in a way unlike anything in the organization’s long history.
Arriving in movie theatres in the summer of 1988, Coming to America starred Eddie Murphy as Prince Akeem Joffer from the fictional African nation of Zamunda. Upon learning that his parents, King Jaffe (James Earl Jones) and Queen Aoleon (Madge Sinclair), had arranged for him to be married, Akeem and his aide Semmi (Arsenio Hall) embarked on a journey to find the prince a bride with whom he could connect both emotionally and intellectually. Naturally, Akeem’s quest for the future queen of his nation took him to Queens, New York, and it was there that he met and fell in love with Lisa McDowell (Shari Headley). Directed by Craig Brewer, the sequel Coming 2 America finds Akeem and Lisa 30 years later and still happily married, now with three daughters of their own.
Image Nation Abu Dhabi has launched a series of webinars in partnership with the Israel Film Fund to foster the exchange of cultural content and support filmmakers in the two countries. The webinar series, titled Film Exchange: Abu Dhabi - Israel, will focus on critical areas within production, talent development and filming in both Abu Dhabi and Israel as a way to encourage collaboration and co-productions between Image Nation and the IFF.
Specialist audiovisual translation firm IT Pros Subtitles has invested in the Next-TT localization platform to manage and organize its expanding remote workflow infrastructure. Next-TT enables IT Pros to manage teams of freelance translators, and offers remote access to SubtitleNext’s proprietary tools, technologies, and delivery capabilities.
Continuing to bolster its talent and technical resources, One Union Recording Studios, the San Francisco Bay Area’s largest, independent recording facility, has hired senior engineer Joel Hopper. Hopper brings 18 years of experience in the advertising and recording industries and most recently served as re-recording mixer, sound designer and picture editor at Barrell House, the in-house production unit at Bay Area ad agency Pereira O'Dell.
Extreme Reach Payroll Solutions has named Kathleen Thompson head of production incentives. With more than 20 years in the entertainment and media industry, Thompson brings both her expertise and deep relationships to this new role in which she’ll build a team focused on consulting and tax credit administration.
