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I started working with Dp Martina Radwan about a year ago on the feature documentary, Mentor (addressing bullying and teen suicide in Mentor, Ohio) I further had the pleasure of working with her on a recent music video for the band Shearwater. It is a gift, as a director, to find a Dp who you can quickly fall into a shorthand with, creating your own visual language, and trusting in the collaborative process. Radwan and I found this with each other.

Her narrative work includes Flannel Pajamas, by Jeff Lipsky; Singapore Dreaming, one of the first Singaporean feature productions and the winner of several international awards; Rain, the first indigenous film of the Bahamas, produced and directed by Maria Govan; The Killing Floor, a thriller produced by Doug Liman & Avi Arad and the horror film Train, a Millennium Films production, both directed by Gideon Raff.

Her most recently-released documentaries include...

Beautiful Darling, the haunting new documentary about the Andy Warhol superstar and pioneering drag-queen transsexual Candy Darling, includes a detail that may not seem to be that big a deal, but that began to astonish me the more I thought about it. It’s that Candy, by the early 1970s, after she’d already become a famous fixture on the downtown scene, was still impoverished, crashing on people’s couches, eating a can of beans for dinner, and — the movie strongly suggests — turning tricks to survive. Basically, she was living the desperate, scraping-through-each-day existence of just about any anonymous New York drag queen.

Candy Darling, the transexual bombshell featured in several Andy Warhol movies, two Velvet Underground songs and one Tennessee Williams play, inhabited the precise fantasy she created for herself. That's argument put forth by director James Rasin in "Beautiful Darling," a straightforward biographical survey of the Warhol superstar's unique appeal, which only faded with her premature death from lymphoma at the age of 29. With a mixture of talking heads and ...

"Denis Villeneuve's Incendies — an operatic saga of intergenerational woe — is the cinematic equivalent of a Harlem Globetrotters game, with brazen contrivances and a preordained outcome repurposed as dazzling spectacle." David Ehrlich at Reverse Shot: "A strained melodrama that unspools like the bastard child of Homer and Alejandro González Iñárritu, Incendies devotes the brunt of its 130 minutes to earning the audacity of its resolution — it's a work of such unchecked ambition that it almost has to be excused before it can be appreciated at all. But if Villeneuve's film ultimately resolves itself as little more than a gaudy parlor trick, it's an expertly executed bit of chicanery whose punchline hits you square in the gut."

"It's a dual story," explains New York's David Edelstein, "of French-Canadian brother-and-sister twins compelled by the will of their dead mother to locate a father they thought died decades earlier and a brother they never knew existed; and,...

Chicago – The 2010 46th Annual Chicago International Film Festival and Michael Kutza, Founder and Artistic Director, announced the competition award winners at a ceremony at the Pump Room in Chicago on October 16th. The Gold Hugo for Best Film went to “How I Ended the Summer,” from Russia.

Kutza made the announcements, along with Mimi Plauché, Head of Programming, and Associate Programmers Joel Hoglund and Penny Bartlett. The Pump Room is the legendary restaurant inside the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago. The Festival’s highest honor is the Gold Hugo, named for the mythical God of Discovery.

International Feature Film Competition

’How I Ended The Summer’

Photo Credit: Chicago International Film Festival

The Gold Hugo for Best Film: “How I Ended the Summer” (Russia), directed by Aleksei Popogrebsky

The Silver Hugo – Special Jury Award: “A Somewhat Gentle Man” (Norway), directed by Hans Petter Moland

The Silver Hugo – Special Jury Award: “We...

The 46th Chicago International Film Festival is coming, and The Scorecard Review will be there will exclusive interviews, movie reviews and red carpet events beginning October 7, 2010.

Here is the news release on the documentaries at this year’s festival.

Chicago, September 7, 2010 – As documentary films gain ever-increasing recognition in theaters around the world, the 46th Chicago International Film Festival announces the 2010 lineup of its Docufest documentary program and new series for true movie buffs, “Film on Film.” Sponsored by DePaul University, Docufest and the Film on Film program feature four world premieres, one international premiere, two North American premieres and two USA premieres.

Special guests attending this year range from award-winning filmmakers Alex Gibney and Lucy Walker to debuting directors making bold first impressions and even troupes of circus performers, slam poets, and a “minuteman” border guard. Twelve countries are represented across these 17 films. The Docufest competition jury includes the winner...

"Given his four-decade-plus career as a New York City chronicler of both everyday and high fashion, Bill Cunningham is astutely defined by Bill Cunningham New York as not simply a traditional photographer of clothing, but an anthropological historian," writes Nick Schager. Richard Press's documentary, then, is a nearly perfect opening film for this year's New Directors / New Film series, running from tomorrow through April 4 — and indieWIRE asks Press about his first feature.

Andrew Schenker introduces Slant's indispensable guide to Nd/Nf 2010: "Once again scouring Cannes, Berlin, Venice, and Sundance for the choicest work being done by cinematic rookies and near rookies (Judy Berlin director Eric Mendelsohn returns to the lineup after an 11-year absence), the programmers of the 39th edition of the Lincoln Center/Museum of Modern Art showcase offer festgoers their choice among daring provocations (I Killed My Mother, Xavier Dolan's anguished festival closing howl), affectionate docu-portraits (Beautiful Darling,...

The annual New Directors / New Films showcase organized by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center has selected as one of this year’s films Amer, the feature film debut by Montreal transgressive filmmaking duo Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani. The film will screen twice during the program:

April 2

9:15 p.m.

Film Society of Lincoln Center

April 3

2:00 p.m.

Museum of Modern Art

So far, 2010 is looking to be a huge year for Cattet and Forzani. Prior to Nd/Nf in April, Amer will screen in March at both the Boston Underground Film Festival and at SXSW. This is already after having a very successful 2009, where the film played at the Lausanne Underground Film Festival and has won awards at the Lund Fantastisk Film Festival, Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival, Festival Nouveau Cinema de Montreal and more.

Amer is a tribute to the...

Beautiful Darling, James Rasin's documentary on the life of actress and Warhol superstar Candy Darling, premieres at the Berlin Film Festival this week. In it, actress Chloe Sevigny voices Darling. From the film's website: Beautiful Darling, a documentary film, pays tribute to the short but influential life of an extraordinary person -- the actress Candy Darling, born James Slattery in a Long Island suburb in 1944. Drawn to the feminine from childhood, by the mid-Sixties James had become Candy, a gorgeous, blonde actress and well-known downtown New York figure. Candy's career took her through the raucous and revolutionary Off-off-Broadway theater scene and into Andy Warhol's legendary Factory. There she became close to Warhol and starred...

  Berlin -- Brit director Mat Whitecross, who shook up the Berlin film festival with his last two documentaries, "The Shock Doctrine" (2009) and "Road to Guantanamo" (2006) is returning this year with "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll," a biopic of British punk icon Ian Dury starring Andy Serkis.

"Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll" is certain to be one of the highlights of this year's Panorama lineup, which was announced Friday.

Other returning veterans include French filmmakers Jacques Martineau and Olivier Ducastel, whose new drama "Family Tree" will have its world premiere in Berlin; Hong Kong helmer Skud, coming to town with "Amphetamine" and Austrian director Peter Kern, whose "Initiation" looks at the relationship between an octogenarian and a 16-year-old boy.

Art and gay cinema have always had pride of place at the Panorama, and are well represented in the 2010 lineup. Panorama's non-fiction section, the Dokumente, includes "Waste Land," Lucy Walker's portrait of artist...