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Exclusive: This year’s Manchester Film Festival is set to run from March 14 – 23 and will open with a screening of The Penguin Lessons, directed by British filmmaker Peter Cattaneo and starring Steve Coogan.

Based on the best-selling memoir, the film tells the story of an Englishman’s personal and political awakening during a cataclysmic period in Argentine history, brought about by his unlikely adoption of a penguin.

Manchester will screen 37 features, including 15 UK premieres and 4 world premieres. All films will be screening in Manchester for the first time. This includes the Manchester premiere of the UK’s Oscar selection Santosh from Sandhya Suri, Sundance, and Cannes hit Good One directed by India Donaldson, and South by Southwest Audience Award Winner My Dead Friend Zoe from Kyle Hausmann-Stokes.

Other highlights include the UK premieres of Y2K, A24’s latest horror comedy starring Fred Durst and directed by Kyle Mooney, the...

As the Sundance Film Festival weighs the possibility of leaving Utah, its rebellious younger sibling has already packed its bags.

Slamdance, the unaffiliated festival that has run parallel to Sundance and celebrated outsider cinema in Park City since 1995, has officially relocated to Los Angeles. The organization announced its presence in town with the inaugural Indie Awards ceremony in December, and will break from its Sundance-adjacent schedule for its 30th edition, which will runs from February 20-26.

In addition to its lineup — which features 146 films, with all competition titles hailing from first-time directors at budgets of $1 million or less — Slamdance has announced more details about its plans to run a Los Angeles festival. Screenings will take place at the Director’s Guild of America and Quixote West Hollywood, with a special opening night event at the Egyptian Theater on February 20. Films will also be available to stream on the Slamdance Channel...

Indiewire having encouraged us to reminisce about the 2000s through its recent Best of the Decade list, there’s the reminder of one key thread defining that era: the prominence of digital video and the prescient idea that it would alter filmmaking on all budget levels going forward. Still, films shot on standard-definition Dv, often with the tape format MiniDV, had one of the more inimitable aesthetics of this period; analogous to the revival of 4-track home recording in independent music, these works––from Dogme 95’s first wave to Jackass: The Movie––were tactile, immediate, and bathed in visual glitches, its grain artfully tarnishing the images rather than providing the implacable soul or character of the photochemical kind.

Across the pond, British independent filmmaking was never so wilfully art-damaged: the Y2K era was a commercially lucrative time, defined in the memory by fluffy period dramas and comedies, post-Trainspotting crime flicks,...

Richard Hunter’s feature “Foul Evil Deeds” is one of the more European of British first features, taking its inspiration from continental art house names rather than the more usual luminaries of U.K. social realism such as Ken Loach and Mike Leigh.

It consists of interwoven stories of everyday wickedness, from the careless to the horrific: “The influences are people like Ulrich Seidel and Michael Haneke being a huge one, Roy Andersson being a big one, and peripherally looking at all of those,” Hunter told Variety.

“The early Ruben Östlund as well. The Britishness, inherently, obviously comes out through me.”

Hunter arrived at filmmaking from advertising. “I did documentary at university, and that led into music videos, and from there into commercials. And there I found my wet place in that world. I looked to the people that had done that transition like Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham and Spike Jonze,...