The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao, Director Karim Aïnouz

Set in a brilliantly recreated 1950s Rio de Janeiro, The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao revolves around two inseparable sisters, 18 and 20 years old, living restricted lives with their conservative parents. However, each nourishes a passionate dream: Eurídice of becoming a renowned pianist; Guida of finding true love. In a shocking turn of events, they are separated and forced to live apart. Karim Aïnouz’s first film, MADAME SATÃ, a Jean Genet-inspired story of 1930’s Rio’s drag demi-monde, premiered at Film Forum in 2003. INVISIBLE LIFE shares with it this director’s commitment to immersing himself in the emotional lives of his characters, visualized through rich, inventive, and lush imagery. Based on Martha Batalha’s popular novel The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão, the film won the Un Certain Regard prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival. INVISIBLE LIFE is nominated for Best International Film at the 2020 Film Independent Spirit Awards and is Brazil’s official submission to the 2020 Academy Awards® for Best International Film. Director and co-screenwriter joins us to talk about his razor-sharp, wrenching story of patriarchy, fierce determination and love in a time and place where gender mattered more than family.

 

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About the filmmaker: Karim Aïnouz was born in Fortaleza, Brazil in 1966. He studied architecture in Brasilia and film at New York University. He was assistant director to Todd Haynes, worked on over 20 films as an editor and has been directing his own films since 1992. In 2014 his film Praia do Futuro screened in the Berlinale Competition, and he was one of the directors of Cathedrals of Culture (also 2014). Selected filmography: Madame Satã (2002), Love for Sale (2006), The Silver Cliff (2011), Futuro Beach (2014), Central Airport THF (2017), The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão (2019).

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**OFFICIAL BRAZILIAN OSCAR® ENTRY FOR BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE**
**WINNER – UN CERTAIN REGARD – CANNES FILM FESTIVAL 2019**

“RAVISHING. A waking dream, saturated in sound, music and color to match its depth of feeling. Aïnouz has made both a testament to the resilience of women in a society stacked against them…as well as a stirring celebration of the families we create when the ones we’re born into fall away.” – Guy Lodge, Variety

“GORGEOUS. A haunting drama that quietly celebrates the resilience of women… by turns seductive and sorrowful, tender and raw.” – David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

“This is an absolutely gorgeous film that starts off as a sort of Rio fairytale and then turns into something a little more realistic with its feet on the ground.” – Amy Nicholson, FilmWeek

“It’s a drama of resilient women, thoughtless men and crushingly unrealized dreams, told with supple grace, deep feeling and an empathy that extends in every direction.” – Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

Dawson City: Frozen Time, Director Bill Morrison

A hallucinatory cinematic fever dream, Dawson City: Frozen Time tells the bizarre true story of some 533 silent film reels, dating from the 1910s and 20s, that accumulated at the end of a film distribution line in northwestern Canada and which were miraculously discovered some 50 years later, in 1978, buried in a sub-arctic swimming pool, deep in the Yukon permafrost. Filmmaker Bill Morrison (Decasia, The Miners’ Hymns, The Great Flood) deftly combines excerpts from this remarkable collection with historical footage, photographs, and original interviews, to explore the complicated history of Dawson City, a Canadian Gold Rush town founded across the river from a First Nation hunting camp, and then traces how the development of that town both reflected and influenced the evolution of modern Cinema. Combined with a powerful, evocative score by Alex Somers ( Captain Fantastic; Hale County This Morning, This Evening; Honey Boy), orchestrated and arranged by Ricardo Romaneiro, Dawson City: Frozen Time is a triumphant work of art that spins the life cycle of a singular film collection into a breath-taking history of the 20th century. Director, writer and editor Bill Morrison joins us to talk about his amazing re-creation of a time and place that existed in the parallel universes of a nascent film industry and crushing avarice of a gold rush that still resonates today.

About the filmmaker: Bill Morrison has premiered films at the New York, Rotterdam, Sundance, and Venice film festivals, and multi-media work at major performance venues around the globe such as BAM, the Barbican, Carnegie, and Walt Disney Concert Hall. Morrison’s films typically source rare archival footage in which long-forgotten, and sometimes deteriorated, imagery is reframed as part of a collective mythology. His work has been recognized with the Alpert Award, Creative Capital, the Foundation for Contemporary Art, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a mid-career retrospective at MoMA. His found footage opus Decasia (2002) was the first film of the 21st century to be selected to the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry. The Great Flood (2013) was awarded the Smithsonian Ingenuity Award of 2014 for historical scholarship. Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) won a Critics’ Choice Award for the most innovative documentary of the year, and was named the best documentary of 2017 by the Boston Society of Film Critics.

 

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“an instantaneously recognizable masterpiece” – Glenn Kenny, New York Times

“Bill Morrison, whose extraordinary documentary Decasia turned decomposing film stock into the stuff of avante-garde reverie, returns with another staggering journey into the past.” – J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader

“The thrilling documentary “Dawson City: Frozen Time” is indescribable not because it’s ambiguous (it’s totally straightforward) but because it does so many things so beautifully it is hard to know where to begin.” – Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times

“The rise and fall of Dawson City, intimately tied to the vagaries of climate and man’s greed, is heartbreakingly rendered.” – Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor

Subject to Review, Director Theo Anthony

In tennis, measurement – specifically, judging whether a ball is in or out – is particularly crucial. The new ESPN Films 30 for 30 Short, SUBJECT TO REVIEW takes a close look at not just the technology that’s been developed to determine the right calls with better accuracy, but the meaning and significance of that pursuit. The film, directed by Theo Anthony (“RAT FILM”) will air Sunday, Dec. 22, at 3 p.m. ET on ESPN. Tracing the history of photographic review back more than a hundred years, and chronicling controversial moments before and after the age of review in tennis, SUBJECT TO REVIEW explores the mechanisms of the cameras and computerized simulations that now serve as the final word on close calls – but also the limits of the veracity of those calls. Ultimately, it’s a story about technology in sports – but also a study of what we want from our machines, and our minds, well beyond any court of play. “’Subject to Review’ is about how some images are made and why they’re made that way,” said director Anthony. “It’s a film about the inescapable rift between the world and how we image that world. I hope that audiences can take this small exercise in critical curiosity beyond the world of tennis, giving audiences a little space to look differently at the world.” Theo Anthony joins us to talk about the complex relationship between flawed human judgement and the “certainty” of technology.

 

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 “Subject to Review” has screened at New York Film Festival, Hamptons Film Festival, Vancouver Film Festival and Mar Del Plata Film Festival.

 About the Filmmaker – Theo Anthony is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker whose films have received premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival, Locarno International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and SXSW. His first feature, “RAT FILM,” was released by Cinema Guild in 2017 to critical acclaim. “Subject to Review” is produced by Sebastian Pardo and Riel Roch-Decter of MEMORY, an independent artist-driven studio specializing in producing and curating innovative, thought-provoking works that push the formal boundaries of their medium. Together, the duo has produced and distributed multiple award-winning fiction and non-fiction films.

SUBJECT TO REVIEW will air on ESPN beginning Sunday, December 22, at 3 p.m. (Eastern)

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First Love, Director Michael Masarof

Michael Masarof’s drama FIRST LOVE focuses on Rebecca (Annie Heise) is a notorious Hollywood actress, holed up in a seaside hotel, in the midst of a nervous breakdown. Her twin brother Matthew (Aaron Costa Ganis) is a lapsed lawyer and failed family man, whose new career as a writer is on the verge of a major breakthrough. They haven’t seen each other in fifteen years. Matthew travels to the City of Angels, with his tell-all memoir in hand, and a plan to make it big. All he needs is his reclusive twin’s blessing. He was the only one she ever trusted, but has their mysterious twin bond stood the test of time? As Rebecca slinks further into an abyss, and Matthew wanders the city looking for a connection, they both find distractions. A naïve Jordanian hotel worker (Amin El Gamal) and a young Swedish woman (Malin Barr) seem like the perfect fix, but these newfound romances only bring Matthew and Rebecca closer to one another. As the Pacific breaks in front of them and the California sun gets ever hazier, can Rebecca and Matthew grow a new bond if the old one is severed? Director and writer Michael Masarof joins us to talk about his intimate drama about identity, family and connection.

About the Filmmaker: Michael Masarof is a writer and director born in New York and residing in Los Angeles. Michael received his MFA in Film Directing from New York University’s Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film & Television’s Graduate film program at the Tisch School of The Arts, where he was the recipient of the Jane Rosenthal Scholarship and the Warner Bros. Production Grant. Michael’s short film You Should Have The Body won the first place prize at the International Munich Festival of Film Schools. It also screened as a special presentation at the Berlinale, as well as on Channel 3SAT in Germany. First Love is Michael’s debut feature.

 

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For news, screenings and updates go to: firstlovefeature.com

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The Disappearance of My Mother, Director Beniamino Barrese

The Disappearance of My Mother chronicles Benedetta Barzini desire to leave this world behind. An iconic fashion model in the 1960s, she became a muse to Warhol, Dali, Penn and Avedon. As a radical feminist in the 1970s, she fought for the rights and emancipation of women. But at the age of 75, she is fed up with all the roles that life has imposed upon her and decides to leave everything and everybody behind, to disappear to a place as far as possible from the world she knows. Hiding behind the camera, her son Beniamino witnesses her journey. Having filmed her since he was a child in spite of all her resistance, he now wants to make a film about her, to keep her close for as long as possible – or, at least, as long as his camera keeps running. The making of the film turns into a battle between mother son, a stubborn fight to capture the ultimate image of Benedetta – the image of her liberation. Director Beniamino Barrese joins us to talk about this remarkably intimate, raw film and his complex relationship with his muse and mother who reluctantly helping him with his “project” as she prepares for her final exit.

 

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For news and updates go to: kinolorber.com/film/the-disappearance-of-my-mother

More about the film go to: thedisappearanceofmymother.com

Opening in Los Angeles on December 13 at Laemmle Monica Film Center

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“One of the most moving and complex films at Sundance. I’ll add to my list of heroines Benedetta Barzini, an Italian 1960s supermodel who became a leftist feminist and mother.” – Amy Taubin, Film Comment

“A film that both beguiles and unsettles as it salutes a remarkable woman… who has spent a lifetime challenging the influence of the fashion industry and staring down the unflinching gaze of the camera.” – Allan Hunter, Screen International

“One solitary word cannot fully encapsulate how utterly personal the documentary comes across. Barrese guides the audience through his mother’s mindscape, and as a thoughtful, remarkably insightful woman, the documentary reflects this sentiment through its visual language and fluid editing… ‘The Disappearance of My Mother’ is a noble effort, and as the subject of the film, Barzini herself is an intriguing personality; her perspective on the world is genuinely moving to hear at times, and her insights often work their way into your mind, inspiring you to openly consider your own life. Similarly, Barrese’s talents as a filmmaker cannot be disregarded.” – THE PLAYLIST, Jonathan Christian

“Deeply personal and shot through with fascinating contradictions, ‘The Disappearance of My Mother’ is a portrait of a woman in rebellion… Barzini is a severe, unsparing critic of the commodification and exploitation of the female body by men, which greatly complicates her son’s insistent, at times intrusive gaze. It also deepens the movie, making the personal ferociously political.” – NEW YORK TIMES, Manohla Dargis

Midnight Family, Director Luke Lorentzen

** Update – MIDNIGHT FAMILY is a shortlisted nominee for the 2020 ACADEMY AWARD FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY

MIDNIGHT FAMILY has won more than 25 national and international awards, played in 135 film festivals around the world. MIDNIGHT FAMILY is set in Mexico City, where the government operates fewer than 45 emergency ambulances for a population of 9 million. This has spawned an underground industry of for-profit ambulances often run by people with little or no training or certification. An exception in this ethically fraught, cutthroat industry, the Ochoa family struggles to keep their financial needs from jeopardizing the people in their care. When a crackdown by corrupt police pushes the family into greater hardship, they face increasing moral dilemmas even as they continue providing essential emergency medical services. MIDNIGHT FAMILY is an enthralling. harrowing, and intimate look at a family business of dedicated professionals who often fo more than simple transport the helping the people who end up in their ambulance. Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Editor Luke Lorentzen joins us to talk about his mesmerizing film and the challenges of capturing all the different facets of the Ochoa family.

About the filmmaker: Director, Producer, Cinematographer, Editor Luke Lorentzen is a graduate of Stanford University’s department of Art and Art History. His first film, Santa Cruz del Islote (2014) – a short documentary about a small and densely populated fishing community in Colombia – won awards at over ten international film festivals including the San Francisco International, Full Frame Documentary, Camden International, and Chicago International. Midnight Family (2019) – Luke’s first feature documentary out of school – tells the story of a family-run ambulance business in Mexico City. Midnight Family has played at over 130 film festivals around the world and has won over 25 awards including a Special Jury Award for Cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival and the Grand Jury Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest. Midnight Family will be released theatrically around the world in December of 2019. Luke is also a director and producer on the Netflix documentary series, Last Chance U. His work explores elements of everyday life, often through rigorous formal means, questioning and experimenting with the ways in which non-fiction stories are told. Originally from Connecticut, Luke currently lives in San Francisco.

 

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For news, screenings and updates go to: midnightfamilyfilm.com

Midnight Family opening at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles on Friday Decemebr 13 with a Q&A with director Luke Lorentzen at the 7:50 PM screening on Friday night

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AWARDS:
Special Jury Award for Cinematography, U.S. Documentary, Sundance Film Festival
IDA Documentary Awards, Winner, Best Editing
IDA Documentary Awards, Nominee, Best Feature
IDA Documentary Awards, Nominee, Best Cinematography
Cinema Eye Honors, Best Film Nominee
Cinema Eye Honors, Best Cinematography Nominee
Cinema Eye Honors, Best Production Nominee
Cinema Eye Honors, Unforgettables Award, Juan Ochoa, Nominee
Golden Frog for Best Documentary, EnergaCAMERIMAGE
Best Documentary, Films from the South, Oslo
Maysles Brothers Award, Special Jury Mention, Denver Film Festival
Best Film, WatchDocs IFF, Warsaw
FIPRESCI Rellumes Award for Best Director, Gijón Film Festival

 

100% on Rotten Tomatoes

“10 Best Movies of Sundance 2019″

“Fantastically shot by the director Luke Lorentzen, the documentary develops an urgency that suits the life-or-death stakes onscreen. By turns terrifying and exhilarating, “Midnight Family” unfolds with such velocity that it may take a while for your ethical doubts to catch up to what’s happening. When they do, they leave you gasping.” – Manohla Dargis, New York Times

“Arguably the most exhilarating documentary to come out of Sundance this year, Midnight Family follows the Ochoa family—the gruff but compassionate Fer and his two underage sons, Juan and Josué—at intensely close range on these Sisyphean missions of mercy.” – Museum of Modern Art and Film Society of Lincoln Center

“A deft mix of big-picture doc-making and intimate moments… not to mention a wild — and remarkably eye-opening — ride.” – David Fear, Rolling Stone

“An intimate verite documentary… the Ochoas emerge as fascinating embodiments of a country working overtime to correct its shortcomings and keep the lights on. This bracing U.S. competition documentary is poised to provide a personal window into the fast-paced mayhem of Mexico after dark.” – Eric Kohn, Indiewire

What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, Director Rob Garver

The highly entertaining new documentary What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael is an unvarnished portrait of a pioneer who was both admired and resented for what she said about art in an era of great moviemaking. New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael battled to make her mark — fueled by brilliance, unshakable self-confidence, a complicated past, and a deep love of the arts. In a field that has historically embraced few women film critics, Kael was charismatic, controversial, witty, and discerning. Her decades-long berth at The New Yorker energized her fans (“Paulettes”) and infuriated her detractors on a weekly basis. Her turbo-charged prose famously championed the New Hollywood Cinema of the late 1960s and ‘70s (BONNIE AND CLYDE, NASHVILLE, CARRIE, TAXI DRIVER) and the work of major European directors (François Truffaut, Bernardo Bertolucci), while mercilessly panning some of the biggest studio hits (THE SOUND OF MUSIC, MIDNIGHT COWBOY, DIRTY HARRY). Her creepy battle with Andrew Sarris and his auteur theory was legendary, and her stint in Hollywood, trying her hand at producing, was a disaster. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael includes over 35 new interviews and never-before seen archival material. Sarah Jessica Parker reads from Kael’s reviews; filmmakers Quentin Tarantino, Paul Schrader, and Francis Ford Coppola and critics Camille Paglia, Molly Haskell, Greil Marcus, and David Edelstein speak to her enormous gifts and influence. Director, editor and producer Rob Garver joins us for a conversation on the life and impact of an iconoclastic, gifted, generous, vindictive writer and fierce champion of film and filmmakers.

“The most powerful, loved, and hated film critic of her time.” – Roger Ebert on Pauline Kael

For news, sreenings and updates go to: whatshesaidmovie.com

For more on the film go to: paulinekaelmovie.com

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“Garver’s film blossoms into something more comprehensive than complimentary, a film that doesn’t balk at the trickier aspects of Kael’s career, even as it never fully engages with the tensions that informed her.” – Kate Erbland, indieWire

“Garver’s film also works as a great overview of the sweeping changes in both filmmaking and film culture over the course of her career from the perspective of someone in and yet not of the industry.” – Glenn Dunks, The Film Experience

“An exquisitely crafted documentary about the woman who was arguably the greatest movie critic who ever lived…” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“Garver’s film is above all a celebration of the pleasure of intellectual and emotional response to art… and a picture of a style of thinking that might be seen as distinctively but non-stereotypically female.” – Jonathan Romney, Screen International

Knives and Skin, Director Jennifer Reeder

What happened to Carolyn Harper? Part suburban nightmare, part neon-soaked teenage fever dream, this tantalizing mystery traces the wave of fear and distrust that spreads across a small Midwestern town in the wake of a high school girl’s mysterious disappearance. As the loneliness and darkness lurking beneath the veneer of everyday life gradually comes to light, a collective awakening seems to overcome the town’s teenage girls—gathering in force until it can no longer be contained. Unfolding in a hallucinatory haze of lushly surreal images, Knives and Skin is a one-of-a-kind coming-of-age noir that haunts like a half-remembered dream. Director / writer Jennifer Reeder joins us for a lively conversation on her heady melange of a film that bends multiple genres to its razor sharp will.

Director’s Statement: I tell stories about unruly women and the landscapes they transform. This is a story by a woman that proposes girlhood as a place of transcendence and transgression. I am committed to this voice and to producing unexpected narratives. I write scripts from actual experience and observation and my films are specific in mood and perspective. I am influenced by Ohio, where I grew up—all that sky and flatness. And even more so by the Midwestern people and their kind of everyday destructiveness and determination to cope. This awkward emotionality is evident in my films as scenes unfold like sticky flypaper and characters make one small mistake after another. – Jennifer Reeder

 

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For news and updates go to: chicagofilmproject.com/knives-and-skin

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“It may be the most anarchic and refreshing take on the American teen’s existential malaise since Heathers.” – Demetrios Matheou, Screen International

“An effervescent suburban noir rich with tragedy, rough around the edges, but sharp like the dagger when it counts.” – Matt Donato, Dread Central

“The film’s approach to narrative structure is both messy and strangely confident and alluring, poising Knives and Skin as a bold and complicated cross-genre anomaly, much like the women Reeder lovingly depicts.” – Chloe Leeson, Screen Queens

“At times fraught with anxiety, haunting in quiet horror, blackly comedic, and aching with with sorrow and love, Knives and Skin is many things and also defies easy categorization, as it puts forth a perspective that is multiple and complicated.” – Shelagh Rowan-Legg, ScreenAnarchy

The Animal People, Co-director Casy Suchan (Denis Henry Hennelly)

Fifteen years in the making, The Animal People, Co-directed by Casey Suchan and Denis Henry Hennelly – Executive Produced by Joaquin Phoenix – follows the journey of six young Americans who find themselves targeted as terrorists by the US government for their involvement in a controversial protest campaign. Seeing the future of social movement organizing, the activists used the then fledgling internet to dramatically magnify their impact as they systematically knocked out the pillars of financial support that kept the company in business. But when letter writing and protests began to mushroom into dead-of-night vandalism and worse by unknown activists, this corporation and the government formed an alliance to destroy the group. The FBI began an unprecedented campaign of surveillance in preparation for prosecution, creating a model that would later be used against Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Congress, under corporate influence, rewrote laws and bent the definition of incitement in order to accomplish the prosecution of these six, potentially weakening free speech rights for all Americans. Featuring expansive interviews with the activists spanning over a decade, rare archival footage – including never-before-seen FBI undercover surveillance tapes, wiretaps and government documents, The Animal People is a chilling portrait of what happens when activism rattles the institutions of power. Co-director Casey Suchan (Denis Henry Hennelly) joins us to talk about their bellwether film that puts the anti-accountability campaign engineered by large corporate interests and the supine partnership with complicit government agencies on full display.

https://www.finngatepictures.com/theanimalpeople

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“INCREDIBLE”Richard Whittaker, The Austin Chronicle

“POWERFUL… COMPELLING… highlights a pivotal case.”Sightlines Magazine

 “EYE-OPENING… will stick with you long after you’ve watched.”Shuffle