Sometimes the story of how a film was made is almost as compelling as the story the film itself tells. That was certainly the case with There is No Evil, this year’s Golden Bear winner at the 70th annual Berlinale, the 2020 Berlin Film Festival. The film, from Iranian director Mohammed Rasoulof, faced serious and unique challenges getting onto the big screen at a film festival. First, there was the fact that Rasoulof is unable to leave Iran.
The Göteborg Film Festival’s video-on-demand platform Draken Film has launched a selection of newly released films in collaboration with leading Swedish distributors and is donating half of the revenues from new subscribers to independent Swedish art-house cinemas.
The 12th edition of DTLA Film Festival, a leading annual showcase for indie films in Los Angeles, has announced that it will postpone its 12th edition until further notice. Citing the worsening Covid-19 coronavirus epidemic and recommendations by the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies for all citizens to avoid public events, festival organizers said the time had come to pull the plug on this year’s festival.
Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President, the new feature documentary from Grammy Award-winning director Mary Wharton, producer Chris Farrell and writer Bill Flanagan, will make its world premiere April 15 as it opens the 19th Tribeca Film Festival in New York. The rockumentary-flavored film, which went through post-production finishing at Sim Post New York, centers on the 39th president’s life-long passion for music and rock’s contribution to his unlikely journey from a peanut farm in Georgia to the White House.
Two Dum Micks, an offbeat comedic short film, written, directed, and produced by D.B. Sweeney and edited by Keith Kristinat at The Colonie in Chicago, has won more than two-dozen first-place film festival awards to date. It tells the story of Mikey and Mick, played by Sean Astin and Sweeney, as two down-and-out guys who come up with an implausible jailhouse scheme to get the money they need to solve their legal problems.
The Norwegian Film Institute has selected Nagra’s media asset management platform DVnor Organizer for secure storage and one-click distribution of its films to more than 170 film festivals worldwide. The system will enable the NFI to receive, store and distribute new cinema titles in high-quality from all the major Norwegian film producers and production companies, as well as store more than 300 catalogue titles. It will also provide subtitling packages in different languages.
This year at Sundance, more films than ever have been created with Adobe Premiere Pro, making Adobe the most used editing software at the festival for the second year in a row, based on an official Sundance survey. The majority of films (56 percent) chose Premiere Pro for editorial software.
Continuing its long association with the world’s best independent films, Alchemy Post Sound provided Foley sound services for nine films screening at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. They include three films participating in the festival’s prestigious U.S. Dramatic Competition and two included in its Premieres track.
A long-time supporter of independent film, Sim provided post-production finishing services for four films premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Sponsored by Regal Cinemas, Festival of Cinema NYC has opened its call for submissions. The festival, which says it is New York City’s fastest growing film festival, is looking for the best in independent film of all lengths and genres. That includes drama, comedy, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, documentary, experimental, LGBTQ, and animation.
