RIP Agnès Varda

by Anne Marie Kelly

Acclaimed godmother of the French New Wave and belated Honrary Oscar award-winner Agnès Varda passed away this Friday of breast cancer at 90 years old. The film community is in mourning for a singular and pioneering visionary, who treated film as art and famously declared that she refused to watch movies before embarking on her own career. In spite, or perhaps because, of this fact, Varda would go on to create incredible works across multiple genres and decades, creating unforgettable films that were personal, political, comedic, deeply poignant expressions of a spirit that never ceased being fascinated by the world around her.

We at Team Experience have long been fans of Varda, including her early work, famous films, late-career documentaries, and her unbelievable offscreen appearances as well. Her brusque presence and iconic style was a fixture at film festivals, where she had time for fans but never for praise. She will be missed.

What are your favorite Varda moments? What are you watching in her honor?

Doc Corner: Orson Welles x2

By Glenn Dunks

It has been suggested that Mark Cousins is a very unique brand of filmmaker. In that regard, he makes a perfect filmmaker for a project about another very unique brand of filmmaker: Orson Welles. I have not seen Cousins’ much-loved The Story of Film: An Odyssey nor any of his other film-centric documentaries so I can’t speak to how his latest fits into his oeuvre, but I do know that I was pleasantly surprised to discover that The Eyes of Orson Welles was not a typical bio-doc about Welles.

Instead, it takes the novel approach of using his work in another medium, his love of drawing and painting, to approach his cinematic output and his character as a man more broadly...

Click to read more ...

Doc Corner: Feminist History of Revolution in ¡Las Sandinistas!

By Glenn Dunks

A feminist tribute to the female soldiers of Nicaragua’s underground rebellion, Jenny Murray’s debut feature ¡Las Sandinistas! is an appropriately-timed documentary about the capacity of women in times of social upheaval and democratic unrest. It is an often-thrilling account of a revolution that represents in part the keen importance of women creatives behind the camera as a way of hunting stories that have gone previously unexplored and unexamined in film and yet hold worth to contemporary audiences.

Murray, who also produced and edited ¡Las Sandinistas! after a pair of short films (she is also an actress), has struck upon really fascinating subjects and it’s both her luck and ours that many are still alive and able to tell their stories...

Click to read more ...

The winning films from SXSW and SLO Festivals

Austin's SXSW extravaganza (it's not just films there but music and comedy festivals simultaneously) and San Luis Obispo's 25th anniversary film festivals are both a wrap. And with festival wraps come jury and audience prizes! While each year's mainstream gold rush culminating in the Oscars sometimes get snarky reactions in terms of all the back-patting of already über successful people, festival prizes are different. They can be career-making or at least significantly augmenting moments for indie filmmakers, who don't have the benefit of millions in P&A budgets or A list careers to bolster public interest. Awards are often the way artists can begin to forge a creative career. So keep an eye out on these titles and people in case they work their way around to you.

SXSW WINNERS

Saint Frances

NARRATIVE, AUDIENCE AWARDS
• Main Slate: Saint Frances (Alex Thompson) This dramedy is about a young woman who takes a job as a nanny shortly after having an abortion.
• "Headliners": Longshot (Jonathan Levine) New comedy starring Charlize Theron and Seth Rogen
• "Spotlight": The Peanut Butter Falcon (Tyler Nilson, Michael Schwartz) <-- Abe reviewed this one for us. Shia Labeouf stars...

Click to read more ...

SLO Film Fest: Wolves, Sharks, and that "Delicate Balance"

Nathaniel R reporting from the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival

After a delightful trip back to 1969 iconography and disturbing peek back at 1933 fascism, the San Luis Obispo's 25th festival threw us directly into the immediate now with three engaging documentaries exploring very real, very urgent problems with our ecosystems, relationships with animal life, and the dehumanizing dangers of globalism and late stage capitalism. That may sound depressing, and it was to an extent, but all three films were suffused with enough passion and optimism to make their bitter pills easier to swallow.

The shortest and "lightest" of these with Collin Monda's hour-long documentary The Trouble With Wolves, which is locked but not quite finished (needing funds to complete its rights clearances and such). It's a surprisingly nuanced look at the success and aftershocks of a 1995 federal program to reintroduce gray wolves to the US via Yellowstone National Park.

Click to read more ...