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British nonfiction filmmaker Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project—a 91-minute meta-documentary that won the Next Innovator Award at Sundance on 27 January 2025—continues to gather momentum five months after its Park City premiere.

Music Box Films has picked up U.S. theatrical rights and is eyeing a late-2025 release, positioning the film for awards-season consideration. According to industry insiders, both Netflix and Amazon have entered separate multi-million-dollar negotiations for worldwide streaming, with one recent list of festival sales noting a provisional $5 million figure on the table.

Shackleton—known for Beyond Clueless and the ten-hour protest piece Paint Drying—originally intended to adapt the late California Highway Patrol officer Lyndon Lafferty’s self-published investigation The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up, but the rights fell through at the last minute.

Rather than abandon the idea, he reconstructed the unmade film scene by scene, using static 16 mm shots of suburban Northern California while narrating everything the audience cannot see,...

A serial killer meta-documentary was on the loose this week during the 59th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Kviff) in the Czech Republic. British filmmaker Charlie Shackleton brought his true crime meta-documentary Zodiac Killer Project, which world premiered at Sundance, to the picturesque spa town and entertained the audience during Q&As following screenings.

”Few hold such fascination for mystery aficionados as the elusive murderer known as the Zodiac. When British director Charlie Shackleton failed to secure the rights to a book written by a former traffic policeman convinced of the killer’s identity, he decided to make a film about a film that never got made,” explains the synopsis on the Kviff website. The fest also highlights a “generous voice-over” and notes that the film “deviates from the true crime genre for the very way in which it rejects self-centered respectability.”

During a Q&a following...

Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, Peter Cattaneo’sThe Penguin Lessons and Dylan Southern’sThe Thing With Feathers are among the 14 titles to receive the latest round of UK Global Screen Fund award (Ukgsf) totalling £448,330 through its international distribution fund.

Administered by the British Film Institute (BFI), 111 awards totalling over £3.1m have now been given out by this strand, financed through the UK government’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (Dcms).

Support for international distribution provides sales agents and producers with funding via two tracks – prints & advertising (P&a) and festival launch.

The Penguin Lessons,starring Steve Coogan, has received the...

Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project offers a refreshing twist on the typical true-crime documentary format. What might initially seem like just another exploration of one of America’s most infamous unsolved murder cases is, in fact, an intellectual and self-aware meditation on the genre itself.

Shackleton, known for his previous works that dissect genre conventions—such as Fear Itself and Beyond Clueless—takes a step back from the Zodiac case to examine the very tropes and mechanics that make these kinds of documentaries so compulsively watchable.

At the heart of Zodiac Killer Project is Shackleton’s failed attempt to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s book, The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge, into a true-crime documentary. However, when Lafferty’s estate revoked the rights to the book, Shackleton transformed his frustration into an exploration of the creative process itself, while cleverly sidestepping the legal issues that blocked him.

This documentary,...

Music Box Films has acquired U.S. distribution rights to “Zodiac Killer Project,” director Charlie Shackleton’s true-crime documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and plays at Visions du Réel on Saturday. The film was awarded Sundance’s Next Innovator Award for its “witty narration and fascinating and deft storytelling.”

The film also screened at SXSW, First Look, True/False and Cph:dox, and has its Los Angeles premiere on Sunday at the Los Angeles Festival of Movies. Music Box will set a theatrical release later this year, with a home entertainment release to follow.

“Zodiac Killer Project” is “a sly, sideways spin on the true crime genre, fashioned by a filmmaker who lovingly critiques the tropes and cliches of the form with a connoisseur’s eye,” according to a statement. Using Bay Area landscapes, stylized b-roll and archival material to tell the story of an abandoned documentary about...

The British Independent Film Awards (Bifa) has selected 14 writers and producers for Springboard: Genre, the 2025 iteration of its Springboard training programme.

Supported by production, finance and sales outfit Anton, the third edition of the Springboard programme will run until December 2025.

Scroll down for the full list of writers and producers

It offers a mixture of technical and professional training, mentoring, networking and access to resources to better equip participants for industry challenges faced whilst developing their action, thriller, horror, sci-fi, fantasy, dystopia, comedy or genre hybrid project.

Selected creatives include Jeremy Warmsley, who produced Elizabeth Sankey’s documentary features Romantic Comedy and Witches,...

True crime has always been big business. Back in the 1800s it was penny dreadfuls that offered lurid details of murder while Truman Capote’s 1965 non-fiction book In Cold Blood marks, for many, the beginning of the modern era’s fascination with crime. In recent years, the surge in podcasting and streaming platforms has fuelled the genre further, with hits including Netflix’s Making A Murderer and Amazon Prime’s The Jinx.

Both of those, and a host of similar true crime shows, are up for discussion in the latest documentary from Charlie Shackleton. In essence an essay film, spurred by his failed attempt to make a film about San Francisco’s Zodiac Killer, this is a surprisingly droll deconstruction of crime reconstruction. Shackleton may be having his cake and eating it to a degree but this is a sharply observant critique of the phenomenon that digs beyond how these shows look and feel.

True crime has always been big business. Back in the 1800s it was penny dreadfuls that offered lurid details of murder while Truman Capote’s 1965 non-fiction book In Cold Blood marks, for many, the beginning of the modern era’s fascination with crime. In recent years, the surge in podcasting and streaming platforms has fuelled the genre further, with hits including Netflix’s Making A Murderer and Amazon Prime’s The Jinx.

Both of those, and a host of similar true crime shows, are up for discussion in the latest documentary from Charlie Shackleton. In essence an essay film, spurred by his failed attempt to make a film about San Francisco’s Zodiac Killer, this is a surprisingly droll deconstruction of crime reconstruction. Shackleton may be having his cake and eating it to a degree but this is a sharply observant critique of the phenomenon that digs beyond how these shows look and feel.

Over half a century later, what new information can be gleaned from the nights of August 9 and 10, 1969? Tom O’Neill and Dan Piepenbring’s riveting (if convoluted) book Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties––released in June 2019, between the Cannes premiere and theatrical release of Quentin Tarantino’s cathartic rewrite of that history––argues that while all the evidence of the murders has been gleaned, there’s a complex and knotty web of conspiracies for the motivations, some more plausible than others. To pare down the 528-page book to its most overarching theory, it postulates Manson may have been allowed (and perhaps even directed) by the CIA to concoct a reign of terror in accordance with secret government programs created to squash left-wing movements demanding progress for the country. Culling the most vital elements of the book into an easily digestible 96-minute Netflix documentary,...

For a town that’s all about the movies, Los Angeles strangely isn’t always the destination for a premier film festival. Enter the Los Angeles Festival of Movies (Lafm), heading into its second year, and adding more films to its lineup. IndieWire exclusively announces the latest additions. The festival runs April 3 through 6 across venues on the east side of L.A.

Mubi and Mezzanine co-present the festival, which has just added A24’s fest-favorite comedy “Friendship,” starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd, to its lineup along with restorations of Robina Rose’s “Nightshift” and Jessie Maple’s “Will,” which is regarded as the first indie feature made by an African American woman. The festival, as previously announced, opens with Amalia Ulman’s satire of clueless documentarians adrift in South America, “Magic Farm,” and closes with Neo Sora’s dystopic coming-of-age Venice premiere “Happyend.” “Magic Farm” will be released later...

Fresh from winning the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at Sundance, Seeds will germinate at True/False, the acclaimed documentary festival in Columbia, Mo. Brittany Shyne’s film, exploring the experience of Black farmers who till the soil in the South, bows on the festival’s opening night on Thursday, with additional screenings on Friday and on Sunday, the closing night of True/False.

“Seeds is such a beautiful film. It’s one of my absolute favorites in the lineup,” notes True/False Artistic Director Chloé Trayner. “I know I’m not meant to have favorites, but it’s just pure cinema.”

Long before the documentary’s premiere, it earned support from True/False. “Seeds was a part of our Rough Cut Retreat, which we run in partnership with Catapult Film Fund. And so Brittany brought the project to the retreat along with her editor Malika [Zouhali-Worrall], and we spent five days together,...

Amalia Ulman’s Magic Farm will plant roots as the opening night screening of the second edition of the Los Angeles Festival of Movies. Presented by Mubi and Mezzanine, Lafm is set to take place from April 3-6, and it will feature a program of more than 20 feature films, a curated shorts roster, an inaugural animation program and featured artists talks.

Magic Farm, a Mubi film that had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival last month, will open the fest at Vidiots’ Eagle Theatre on April 3. Written and directed by Ulman, the pic stars Chloë Sevigny, Simon Rex and Alex Wolff in the story of a film crew working for an edgy media company that travels to Argentina to profile a local musician. In her The Hollywood Reporter review, critic Sheri Linden wrote that “Magic Farm features a stupendous cast fully in sync with Ulman’s deadpan absurdity.

The independent-focused Los Angeles Festival of Movies is preparing for its second edition, unveiling its coming line-up for April 3 to 6. The fest, co-presented by Mubi and Mezzanine, will kick-off with an opening night screening of Amalia Ulman’s south-of-the-border satire “Magic Farm,” starring Chloë Sevigny, Simon Rex and Alex Wolff as an inept documentary crew that ends up in the wrong country after embarking to profile an Argentinian musician. The feature premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January; this Lafm selection will mark its West Coast premiere.

The fest also features a screening of “Friendship,” the A24 comedy starring Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd. Neo Sora’s Gen-z apocalypse ensemble drama “Happyend” will play as the closing night selection.

Other feature inclusions are the world premiere of Dennis Cooper and Zac Farley’s “Room Temperature,” about an annual family-operated haunted house that dramatically ups the stakes; the U.S.

The festival’s 14th edition opens with Durga Chew-Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse and closes with Giovanni Tortorici’s Diciannove, framing a lineup of 38 premieres, including 20 features, representing 21 countries

Museum of the Moving Image is pleased to announce the complete lineup for the 14th edition of First Look, the Museum’s festival of new and innovative international cinema, which will take place in person March 12–16, 2025. Each year, First Look offers a diverse slate of major New York premieres, work-in-progress screenings and sessions, and fresh perspectives on the art and process of filmmaking.

The 2025 lineup will present 38 films, of which 20 are features, including 4 world premieres and 23 U.S. or North American premieres, from 21 countries. Each day will be anchored by a Showcase screening. The festival will open and close with the U.S. premieres of two scintillating debut features from the 2024 Toronto and Venice Film Festivals, Durga Chew-Bose’s lush, heart-wrenching Bonjour Tristesse...

A yearly highlight of New York programming (and North American options at large), the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look returns on March 12 with an opening-night, US-premiere screening of Durga Chew Bose’s Bonjour Tristesse, closes March 16 with the stateside debut of Giovanni Tortorici’s Diciannove, and in intervening days combines programming of recent cutting-edge highlights with in-person talks and seminars.

First Look’s fixture “Working on It” will run between March 12 and 14, offering “a laboratory for works in progress and dialogues about process, bringing together festival guests, filmmakers, students, writers, and the general public.” Meanwhile, writers and editors from Reverse Shot “will welcome a new cohort for its Emerging Critics Workshop, with writers attending throughout the festival”; submissions may be made here through February 14.

So says Eric Hynes, MoMI’s Senior Curator of Film and First Look’s Artistic Director:

“In so many ways, First Look serves...

The annual First Look festival at the Museum of the Moving Image has unveiled its 2025 program. IndieWire can announce that the 14th edition of the beloved festival will take place March 12-16, and open with Durga Chew-Bose’s “Bonjour Tristesse.” The feature previously debuted at TIFF’s Discovery Program.

The film, which is an adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s novel, centers on 18-year-old Cécile (Lily McInerny) who is enjoying the French seaside with her father, Raymond (Claes Bang) and his lover Elsa (Naïlia Harzoune). Yet the arrival of her late mother’s friend Anne (Chloë Sevigny) changes everything. Per the official synopsis, “amid the sun-drenched splendour of their surroundings, Cécile’s world is threatened and, desperate to regain control, she sets in motion a plan to drive Anne away with tragic consequences.”

The 2025 lineup will present 38 films, of which 20 are features, including 4 world premieres and 23 U.S. or North American premieres,...

Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project is a real odd duck in the true crime documentary sphere. The film outlines the rough sketches of a highway patrolman’s one-man-mission to catch The Zodiac Killer, but also simultaneously tears apart the true crime documentary format as we know it today. Part video essay, part investigative journalism, the heavy-meta doc peels back the curtain on the tricks of the trade and the reliably predictable tropes that have completely overtaken true-crime documentaries writ large.

In its earliest stages, Zodiac Killer Project was supposed to be a by-the-books true crime documentary like any other. Filmmaker Charlie Shackleton found his subject in Lyndon E. Lafferty who published a detailed account of his investigation in the book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: Aka The Silenced Badge. After a chance encounter with a man that shared a striking resemblance to the notorious police sketch of The Zodiac Killer,...

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"Zodiac Killer Project," a new movie from director Charlie Shackleton that debuted at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, is one of the most unconventional true crime documentaries ever made. It begins with a slow pan across a rest stop parking lot, with a narrator's voice telling the audience what we would be seeing if the filmmaker had been able to make the movie he wanted to make. Most of the film plays out this way — we witness establishing shots of banal locations, with narration explaining why they would have been important in a version of this story that we'll never actually see, and the occasional flash of an insert shot showcasing the action that would have taken place. It may sound boring, but against all odds, it's mesmerizing.

Shackleton wanted to adapt former police officer Lyndon Lafferty's 2012 book "The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge,...

February 2 Update: Ryan White’sCome See Me in the Good Light won theFestival Favorite Award on Sunday, marking the final piece of business for the festival, which endedon February 2.

The US film charts two poets’ “journey through love, life and mortality”.

Original January 31 Report:Sundance Film Festival announced its awards winners on Friday, with grand jury prizes going to Atropia, Seeds, Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears), and Cutting Through Rocks.

In the audience awards, Twinless, André Is An Idiot, DJ Ahmet, and Prime Minister prevailed.The Next Innovator Award went to Zodiac Killer Project and Next Audience Award was presented to East Of Wall.

True crime, as a genre, has always thrived on contradictions. It is investigative yet exploitative, educational yet voyeuristic, illuminating yet sensationalized. Over the past decade, the genre has exploded into a cultural phenomenon, moving beyond late-night Dateline specials into prestige television, cinematic documentaries, and viral podcasts. But what happens when we reach a saturation point? When the tropes become so well-worn that they begin to fold in on themselves? Zodiac Killer Project, the latest film from British director Charlie Shackleton, is less a documentary about a serial killer and more a deconstruction of true crime itself — a self-reflective, formally playful interrogation of why we tell these stories, how we tell them, and whether any of it brings us closer to closure.

A Documentary That Never Was

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A still from Atropia by Hailey Gates, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival (Photo Courtesy of Sundance Institute)

Atropia starring Alia Shawkat and Callum Turner earned the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: U.S. Dramatic Competition award at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, and Seeds was named the U.S. Documentary Competition winner. The 2025 winners were announced today during a ceremony held at The Ray Theatre in Park City.

Additional Grand Jury Prize winners include Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears) and Cutting Through Rocks. Audience Awards went to Twinless (U.S. Dramatic Competition), André is an Idiot (U.S. Documentary Competition), DJ Ahmet (World Cinema Dramatic Competition), Prime Minister (World Cinema Documentary Competition), and East of Wall (Next).

“We congratulate all of our filmmakers and award winners on a successful 2025 Sundance Film Festival and thank them for the stories they shared with our audiences,” stated Amanda Kelso, Acting CEO, Sundance Institute.

Top L–R: Zodiac Killer Project. Mad Bills to Pay, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, Coexistence, My Ass!, 2000 Meters to Andriivka, Cutting Through Rocks; Second Row L-r: DJ Ahmet, Two Women, The Things You Kill, Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears), Plainclothes, Twinless; Third Row L-r: Sorry, Baby, Ricky, Atropia, Selena y Los Dinos, Life After, André is an Idiot; Bottom L–R: The Perfect Neighbor, Seeds, East of Wall, Prime Minister Photo: Sundance Institute

The Sundance Film Festival has announced its winners from this year's festival, with the US Grand Jury prizes going to Atropia and Seeds.

In the World section, the Grand Jury prizes went to Cactus Pears (sabar Bonda) and Cutting Through Rocks. The Next award went to UK director Charlie Shackleton for Zodiac Killer Project.

Atropia, written and directed by Hailey Gates stars Alia Shawkat as an aspiring actress in a military role-playing facility, who falls in love...

The 2025 Sundance Film Festival awards were announced today at The Ray Theatre in Park City, Utah.

See the list of 2025 winners below, and congrats to all the winners.

U.S. Dramatic Competition

Grand Jury Prize

Atropia (USA) – Hailey Gates

Directing Award

Ricky (USA) – Rashad Frett

The Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award

Sorry, Baby (USA) – Eva Victor

Special Jury Award for Acting

Twinless (USA) – Dylan O’Brien

Dylan O’Brien and James Sweeney appear in Twinless by James Sweeney, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Greg Cotten.

Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble

Plainclothes – Carmen Emmi

Audience Award

Twinless – James Sweeney

U.S. Documentary Competition

Grand Jury Prize

Seeds (USA) – Brittany Shyne

Directing Award

The Perfect Neighbor (USA) – Geeta Gandbhir

Special Jury Award

Life After (USA) – Reid Davenport

Special Jury Award for Archival Storytelling

Selena y Los Dinos (USA) – Isabel Castro

Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award...

As the Sundance Film Festival heads into its final weekend, the Park City event handed out trophies this morning to this year’s best. See the full list below.

Hailey Gates’ war satire Atropia took the marquee U.S. Grand Jury Prize for dramatic features. Alia Shawkat stars as an aspiring actress in a military role-playing facility who falls in love with a soldier (Callum Turner) cast as an insurgent, but their unsimulated emotions threaten to derail the performance.

The Audience Award: U.S. Dramatic went to Twinless, James Sweeney’s film about two young men (Dylan O’Brien and Sweeney) who meet in a twin bereavement support group and form an unlikely bromance.

Georgi M. Unkovski’s DJ Ahmet won the Audience Award: World Cinema Dramatic and also nabbed the Special Jury Award for Creative Vision. It follows Ahmet (Arif Jakup), a 15-year-old boy from a remote Yuruk village in...

Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project is a phoenix of sorts, born of twin failures. Chp Officer Lyndon E. Lafferty was convinced that he had discerned the identity of the Zodiac Killer, which of course he never proved. In 2012, Lafferty’s The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silent Badge was published, and later Shackleton was in the process of turning the book into a true-crime documentary, until the author’s family decided not to grant the filmmaker the rights to the material. Lafferty, who died in 2016, had no say in the matter. Lafferty and Shackleton are united, then, along with many others, in having been eluded in various fashions by the Zodiac Killer, who’s become a latter-day Jack the Ripper in the American imagination.

It’s not difficult to see why the Zodiac Killer haunts us. With his flamboyant taunting and cryptology, he’s a Hollywood boogeyman made real. He’s come to exist,...

The true crime documentary has become so ubiquitous in the age of streaming, it’s likely to pop up on your algorithm even if you’ve never watched a single one. Turning the gruesome details of sequestrations, deadly cults, unsolved child murders and killer clowns into trashy serialized programming, these dime-a-dozen content fillers are, not unlike certain types of synthetic opioids, cheap to make and highly addictive.

In his clever nonfiction exposé, Zodiac Killer Project, British critic-turned-filmmaker Charlie Shackleton gets at the heart of what makes these docs so successful on both a psychological and schematic level. He deconstructs the genre but also manages to deepen it, creating his own suspenseful true crime feature while demonstrating how such features are created.

It’s a tough balancing act that the director, whose previous works dissected teen movies (Beyond Clueless) and horror flicks (Fear Itself), pulls off with a mix of earnestness and cheekiness.

“Zodiac Killer Project,” the fascinating feature documentary from director Charlie Shackleton, is nothing like what it sounds. For one thing, it’s not really about the infamous Zodiac Killer — though neither really was the David Fincher film either. Instead, both are about something much better and wholly unexpected. Following Shackleton’s failed attempt to make a movie about a man who suspected he knew who the actual Zodiac Killer was, this doc is just as good as Fincher’s film in how it cuts to the core of something deeper while remaining a vision all its own.

The failure that set the film in motion was due to a rights issue, but Shackleton had already planned out how he would have made his movie. So, not to let that go to waste, he decides to show us, taking us meticulously through, almost beat by beat, what this would have looked like.

The two opposing poles of the Sundance Film Festival are always the overly familiar and the cloyingly offbeat. Too many films fall at the extremes of either side, yet those in the middle are easily written off as “Sundance films” that cram buzzwords together into their own uniquely twee packaging.

Towards the end of Jafar Panahi’s 2011 masterpiece “This Is Not a Film,” a roiling but playfully self-reflexive iPhone documentary the Iranian director shot within the confines of his own apartment while under house arrest for his supposed crimes against the regime, there’s a moment where Panahi appears to forget himself as he describes the narrative feature he intended to make before his arrest. He can picture it so clearly in his mind’s eye that it’s as if he’s already seen the final cut — as if he’s describing a memory to us, as opposed to an unrealized dream. And then, abruptly snapping back to reality with such a brutal dramatic punch that it almost feels scripted in advance, Panahi all but swallows his own tongue. “If we could tell a film,” he says with poisoned disdain, “then why make a film?”

It’s a rhetorical question,...

What would a feature-length director commentary look like when the film was never made? This is the slippery, fascinating conceit of Charlie Shackleton’s rather brilliant Zodiac Killer Project, which finds the director walking through his failed attempt to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge into the first major documentary on the unsolved case. What emerges, one could argue, is even more intellectually stimulating than the original intentions: a sui generis, often humorous stream-of-consciousness journey highlighting the ever-mounting mass of repeated cliches of various true-crime documentaries and series. Instead of a simple hit piece, however, Shackleton investigates why such familiarity often works on the viewer while ensuring you’ll never watch such a program the same way again.

In the nearly four decades since Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, true-crime media has become an industry unto itself, in large part thanks to...

It’s worth mourning the films we’ll never get to see: the unfunded epics, the unmarketable art films, perhaps even the unengaging streaming product. Filmmaker Charlie Shackleton faced that grief when his thoroughly researched project, a documentary on the Zodiac killer case, got the plug pulled after years in development. But the director’s vision was simply too comprehensive for the project to go unrealized. In the comically plainly titled “Zodiac Killer Project,” Shackleton explains how his film would’ve unfolded, speaking in a consolation-prize confessional.

The candid narrator, who is also a published film critic, emerges with more than just his regrets. The doc is also a playful evaluation of the true-crime content bubble and the genre’s full capitulation to copycatting itself.

Though Shackleton’s feature can’t legally cite its source material as the 2012 book “The Zodiac Killer Cover-up: The Silent Badge,” it is all but an official adaptation.

Charlie Shackleton’s would-be film about the serial killer salvages success with this funny and insightful work

If Laurence Sterne made a true-crime documentary it might resemble this exasperating, sometimes negligible but also often amusing and rather insightful personal work from British film-maker Charlie Shackleton. It is a deconstruction of genre and a meta story of failure from which the director salvages a teaspoonful of success. Shackleton recounts his abortive attempt to make a film about the Zodiac serial killer, who murdered at least five people in the San Francisco Bay Area without being caught, and whose case is still open. It was also the subject of a movie by David Fincher.

Shackleton intended to adapt a book entitled The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge by Lyndon E Lafferty, a former California highway patrol cop who died in 2016. Lafferty believed he knew the identity of Zodiac. He once witnessed...

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why? The most significant day in the making of Zodiac Killer Project was the day another film fell apart. It was August 2022, and I was sitting in Maggie’s Diner in Vallejo, California, having spent the morning scouting locations for a true crime documentary about the Zodiac Killer. As I ordered my lunch, I received […]

The post “The Day Another Film Fell Apart” | Charlie Shackleton, Zodiac Killer Project first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Films are made over many days, but some days are more memorable, and important, than others. Imagine yourself in ten years looking back on this production. What day from your film’s development, production or post do you think you’ll view as the most significant and why? The most significant day in the making of Zodiac Killer Project was the day another film fell apart. It was August 2022, and I was sitting in Maggie’s Diner in Vallejo, California, having spent the morning scouting locations for a true crime documentary about the Zodiac Killer. As I ordered my lunch, I received […]

The post “The Day Another Film Fell Apart” | Charlie Shackleton, Zodiac Killer Project first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Synopsis The true crime genre’s ubiquity is driven by people’s endless fascination, disgust, and — bizarrely — search for comfort in genre conventions that still have the ability to generate complex emotions despite their predictability and familiarity. Having tried and failed to make a documentary about the infamous Zodiac Killer, filmmaker Charlie Shackleton walks the …

The post Sundance ’25 — Zodiac Killer Project | Directed by Charlie Shackleton appeared first on Horror News | Hnn.

UK filmmakers and talent have a strong showing at Sundance 2025, taking place from January 23 to February 2, 2025 in Park City.

Brides, the feature debut of theatre director and incoming Young Vic artistic director Nadia Fall,premieres in the World Cinema Dramatic competition.The film, which is written by Suhayla El-Bushra,follows two troubled teenage girls who decide to run away to Syria, is produced by Neon’s Nicky Bentham and Marica Stocchi from Italian outfit Rosamont.

It was supported by the BFI and Ffilm Cymru Wales, Welsh Government via Creative Wales, Great Point Media, the Italian Ministry of Culture Minority Co-production Fund,...

Updated with details on documentaries from Elegance Bratton, Amy Berg, Jesse Moss, and Amanda McBaine, and Sally key art. Some of the biggest talents in documentary film will be unveiling new work at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, including Oscar winners Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, Davis Guggenheim, and Mstyslav Chernov.

The marquee names in the nonfiction slate extend to the subjects of films – musical great Sly Stone examined in Questlove’s Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius); the late Selena Quintanilla’s story told in a film by Isabel Castro; Actress Marlee Matlin’s trailblazing career explored in Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, from director Shoshannah Stern; astronaut Sally Ride’s gravity-defying journey and personal life revealed in Sally, directed by Cristina Costantini.

No Sundance premiere documentary may attract more attention than Pee-wee as Himself, “A chronicle of the life of artist and performer Paul Reubens and his alter ego Pee-wee Herman.

Museum of the Moving Image is pleased to announce the complete lineup for the 13th edition of First Look, the Museum's festival of new and innovative international cinema, which will take place in person March 13–17, 2024. Each year, First Look offers a diverse slate of major New York premieres, work-in-progress screenings and sessions, gallery installations, and fresh perspectives on the art and process of filmmaking. This year's festival introduces New York audiences to more than three dozen works from around the world. The guiding ethos of First Look is openness, curiosity, and discovery, aiming to expose audiences to new art, artists to new audiences, and everyone to different methods, perspectives, interrogations, and encounters. For five consecutive days the festival takes over MoMI's two theaters, as well as other rooms and galleries throughout the Museum—with in-person appearances and dialogue integral to the experience. Each night concludes with one of five...

The annual Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look Festival has given IndieWire an exclusive “first look” at the lineup.

The 13th annual event, which takes place March 13 through 17 in Astoria, Queens, opens with the New York premiere of Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez’s “Sujo,” which recently took home the Grand Jury Prize, World Cinema Dramatic Competition, at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

The First Look Festival focuses on emerging talents and international voices, with the fest premiering 46 works, including 20 features that represent 21 countries. Highlights include Farhad Delaram’s “Achilles,” Graham Swon’s “An Evening Song (for three voices), and the U.S. premiere of Lois Patiño’s “Samsara.” Zhang Mengqi’s “Self-Portrait: 47 Km 2020,” which won the Award of Excellence winner at the 2023 Yamagata Documentary Festival, will also screen along with Shoghakat Vardanyan’s 2023 IDFA grand prize winner “1489,” the debut for the filmmaker. Returning First Look directors like Michaël Andrianaly...

Protests can take many forms, and the reason for the outcry is often more important than the organization of the protest. Paint Drying is a 10-hour film created by Charlie Shackleton as a protest against the British Board of Film Classification's practices. Paint Drying highlights the issues surrounding censorship and the cost that independent creators must endure to have their films reviewed and released in the UK.

Protests come in all shapes and forms and could encompass any argument. The reason for the outcry, either way, is typically more important than how the disapproval is organized. Then again, sometimes, the way an objection is presented is too riveting to cast aside. This is the case when discussing an obscure film meant to get under the skin of those in charge of Britain's rating system, especially since there's a possible form of ingrained censorship that goes into how the country screens and releases its films.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For regular updates, sign up for our weekly email newsletter and follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSCapital.The Palestinian Film Institute and several prominent filmmakers—including Sky Hopinka, Miko Revereza, Maryam Tafakory, Charlie Shackleton, and Basma al-Sharif—have withdrawn from the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam in response to the festival’s messaging about the war in Gaza. On the festival’s opening night, a group of activists took to the stage holding a banner that read “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”; on November 10, IDFA published a statement apologizing to patrons who may have been offended by this “hurtful slogan.” On November 11, the Pfi and the advocacy group Workers for Palestine Netherlands announced their withdrawal from IDFA: “As the world’s largest documentary film festival, IDFA holds the responsibility to respond to the plight of journalists and documentarians on the ground in Gaza,...

Having recently shifted away from their one-film-a-day approach, Mubi has now unveiled their October lineup, which is headlined by Ira Sachs’ stellar drama Passages following its theatrical run this summer. The slate also features handpicked selections by Sachs, with work by Maurice Pialat, Luchino Visconti, Jack Hazan, Shirley Clarke, and Tsai Ming-liang.

Also arriving in October is “Watch If You Dare: Horror Halloween,” a series featuring a trio of giallo classics, with The Fifth Cord, The Possessed, and Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, alongside Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and more. The service will also spotlight the work of underseen Japanese director Yasuzô Masumura, including his aching melodrama Red Angel, his biting workplace satire Giants and Toys, his thrilling noir Black Test Car, and more.

Check out the lineup below and get 30 days free here.

October 1

The Infiltrators, directed by Alex Rivera, Cristina Ibarra | National Hispanic Heritage Month

The Vanished Elephant,...

Not all pranks are created equal. Like all truly great jokes, this one had a clear purpose. Whether it had a deserving victim is a tougher question to answer.

It all started back in 2015 when British filmmaker Charlie Shackleton launched a Kickstarter page to promote his project, Paint Drying. Not long after, it was sent to the censors for the mandatory age-restriction labeling, and the real fun began. Paint Drying premiered in 2016, with a run time of just over 10 hours, consisting of nothing but white paint drying on a wall. And you thought Titanic overstayed its welcome. Savor the trailer here.

This particular art film is clever and important, not for the final product, but for shining a light on the process behind filmmaking, an aspect that we take for granted, a facet that every movie-maker is painfully aware of. The difference between an R and a PG-13 rating is tens of millions of dollars.

Prismatic Ground is becoming a must-attend filmmaker-centered showcase on the rise for underground documentaries, avant-garde, and experimental cinema in the heart of New York City. Founded by Maysles Documentary Center co-programming director Inney Prakash, the initial virtual festival counter-responded to the approaches of many institutions that have inadequately handled virtual exhibitions and poorly supported artists. Prismatic Ground pays filmmakers screening fees, doesn’t divide features and shorts via “waves,” and merges early career and established voices in its accessible presentation of politically engaged, personal, and speculative imagery.

As this hybrid festival adapts the in-person components each subsequent year, the 3rd Prismatic Ground will present works at the Museum of the Moving Image, Maysles Documentary Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Dctv’s Firehouse Cinema, Light Industry, and Anthology Film Archives with limited selections available online.

Taking place May 3-7, check out our picks to see below and learn more here.

Hello Dankness (Soda Jerk)

The 2016 U.

No year in review would be complete without a thank-you to our writers. Time and again, they reminded us that cinema is not only alive and well, but it is also always transforming; the filmmakers and festivals covered here push the boundaries of what we took for granted about the medium.Here’s a quick overview of what we published in 2022—and, for many more excellent pieces, we encourage you to browse our archive using the “explore” tab on the homepage.ESSAYSContemporary Cinema:When Propaganda Fails: Adam McKay's Don't Look Up by Ryan MeehanThe Horse in Motion: Jordan Peele's Nope by Blair McClendonThe Many Faces of Michelle Yeoh by Sean GilmanHall of Mirrors: James Gray's Armageddon Time and Steven Spielberg's The Fabelmans by Kelli WestonNameless Energies: Don DeLillo at the Movies by Leonardo GoiThe Voice of a Generation: The Trope of the "Complex Female Character" by Rafaela BassiliHong...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI, and sign up for our email newsletter by clicking here.NEWSThis week, we’re remembering the iconoclastic, anti-capitalist filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub, who has died at the age of 89. In the course of revisiting Christopher Small’s Straub-Huillet Companion column, we were moved by this quotation from Straub, from a 1974 edition of Jump Cut:The revolution is like God’s grace, it has to be made anew each day, it becomes new every day, a revolution is not made once and for all. And it’s exactly like that in daily life. There is no division between politics and life, art and politics. I think one has no other choice, if one is making films that can stand on their own feet, they must become documentary, or in any case they must have documentary roots. Everything must be correct,...

As Mine Exactly.Deep in the bowels of London’s BFI Southbank, Charlie Shackleton is recounting a story about his mother. We’re sitting opposite one another in someone else’s office, separated by a desk; I am wearing a virtual-reality headset and cannot see him. For the next 30 minutes, he will read a script and control the wraparound screen I see in the headset. My role is to simply watch, and listen.As Mine Exactly, which won the Immersive Art and Xr Award at the 2022 London Film Festival, is part one-to-one performance, part desktop documentary, using the contemporary technology of VR to build the kind of intimacy that such technology seems to deny. I am his second performance of the day. “Don’t feel you have to perform your reaction,” he tells me. In doing so, Shackleton embraces the inherent awkwardness and artificiality of VR. The effect is startlingly intimate.

The 66th annual British Film Institute (BFI) London Film Festival announced winners Saturday evening for a competition group representing a diverse selection of stories ranging from period pieces to eerie thrillers. Writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s “Corsage,” was recognized with the festival’s highest honor — the best film award — continuing the historical drama’s festival praise after lead actress Vicky Krieps was awarded the Un Certain Regard best performance prize at Cannes.

Set during Christmas in 1877, “Corsage” follows Empress Elizabeth as she attempts to find liberation from the stifling conformity of her stuffy, image-focused lifestyle as a Vienna royal. Though the film is in part based on the historical figure, who reigned for 44 years, artistic deviations are made in the former ruler’s story.

“The best film award goes to Marie Kreutzer’s masterfully realised film ‘Corsage’ for its mesmerising and original interpretation of the life of the Austrian Empress Elisabeth,...

Click here to read the full article.

Corsage, Marie Kreutzer’s period drama starring Vicky Krieps, has won the top honor at the 2022 BFI London Film Festival.

The film, which first bowed in Cannes’s Un Certain Regard sidebar (where Krieps won for best performance) and is now Austria’s entry to the Academy Awards, claim the best film award from the official competition, announced on Oct. 16 ahead of the festival’s closing night drama.

The jury said that the “masterfully realized” film won for its “for its mesmerizing and original interpretation of the life of the Austrian Empress Elisabeth,” adding that it had been “completely seduced by Vicky Krieps’ sublime performance of a woman out of time trapped in her own iconography and her rebellious yearning for liberation.”

In response, Kreutzer said the award was for “everyone on my team,” claiming that “the most beautiful thing about my job...

Manuela Martelli’s ‘1976’ wins Sutherland Award.

Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage led the winners at the 2022 BFI London Film Festival (October 5-16), taking the best film prize in the Official Competition.

The Official Competition jury, led by Tanya Seghatchian, praised the ”masterfully realised film for its mesmerising and original interpretation of the life of the Austrian Empress Elisabeth”, and said it was ”completed seduced by Vicky Krieps’ sublime performance of a woman out of time trapped in her own iconography and her rebellious yearning for liberation.”

Scroll down for the full list of winners

Corsage debuted in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in May,...