PANGEA DAY '08 UPDATE | Today's Inaugural Worldwide Event Brings Film and Dialog to the Globe

Last week, the Tribeca Film Festival turned a spotlight on the pending launch of Pangea Day, which can probably be best described as the first "worldwide film festival." For four hours on May 10, 2008, twenty-four films "made by the world for the world" will be broadcast live around the globe via the Internet and at organized events around the globe. In a discussion ahead of today's event, the movers and shakers behind Pangea Day discussed the beginning of a global film experiment.
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In a Time of Change, Pondering the Tension Between New Film Journalism and Old

If the primary accomplishment of the Moving Image Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing--a five day workshop for film critics that completed its second year at the Museum of Moving Image on Tuesday--was New York Times film critic A.O. Scott's diminished hesitance to comment on blogs, its contributions to the larger issues of the discipline would be moot.
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DISPATCH FROM AWARDS SEASON | Docs in the Spotlight: Oscar Nominee Michael Moore Calls for Distribution Reform

Oscar nominee Michael Moore stirred members of the doc community on Wednesday night in Los Angeles, laying out a plan to create a new theatrical distribution outlet for non-fiction film. On stage at the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences' Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, Moore rallied attendees at the annual International Documentary Association (IDA) celebration for feature and short film doc Oscar nominees. "We have to correct this situation with documentary films," Moore said of the challenges that have recently faced theatrically distributed documentaries. "This cannot go on any longer."
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SHORTS COLUMN | Scouting at UCLA's Industry Showcase of Student Films

On June 12, 2007, Hollywood Industryites packed the Directors Guild of America Theater, eager to view the seven winners of UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television's Directors Spotlight competition. With a roster of past student winners including Alexander Payne ("Sideways"), Todd Holland ("Malcolm in the Middle"), Shane Acker ("9"), and Gil Kenan ("Monster House"), the annual screening has a reputation for being a do-not-miss event for those interested in identifying student filmmakers with big league potential. While there wasn't a clear standout among this year's crop of Spotlight winners, all seven of '07 directors showed enough potential to make tracking them worthwhile.
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SHORTS COLUMN | A Photo a Day and Then Some: An Appreciation of the Self-Portrait Short

Who would have thought an experimental short film could have a fan base of 5,926,124 and counting? Nearly six million clicks have propelled Noah Kalina's "Everyday" a.k.a. "Noah Takes a Photo of Himself Every Day for 6 Years" to become a genuine YouTube phenomenon. Countless self-obsessed photographers and irreverent parodists have surfaced in the wake of Kalina's six-minute short and Ahree Lee's equally well-known "Me," which consists of three years of self-snaps flying by in less than three minutes. But with film festival favorites such as David Birdsell's "Hairlady" pushing the envelope of what a self-portrait short can achieve, the question remains whether the format is merely a time-lapse novelty or a genre with unlimited artistic potential.
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CANNES '07 | Festival Hot List: 10 Foreign-Language Films to Watch For in Cannes

With the 60th edition of the Cannes Film Festival just days away, cinephiles and industryites the world over are preparing for a new round of the best movies from around the globe. But there's a curious trend at this year's special anniversary event: a preponderance of Hollywood and American indie cinema. Never particularly lacking in press coverage, a raft of U.S. auteurs -- Quentin Tarantino, the Coen Brothers, Gus Van Sant, Steven Soderbergh, Michael Moore, David Fincher, et. al. -- will likely once again grab the headlines in Cannes. But this being "le Festival international du film" (as it was once known) what about all those other countries' movies?
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IN DEPTH | The Premieres Race; Rival Fests (Tribeca, SXSW, LAFF) Put Pinch on Filmmakers and Regional Showcases

When the Tribeca Film Festival begins this week, the event will unveil 75 world premieres, five international premieres, and 30 North American premieres. That's no easy feat during the spring and early summer months, which see a dozen high-profile regional festivals around North America, from SXSW to Los Angeles, all competing for new films. But "this ridiculous concern for premiere status," as one festival programmer calls it, puts excessive pressure on filmmakers, limits their ability to generate momentum on the festival circuit, and arguably runs counter to the broader mission of film festivals in the first place: to showcase good films and cultivate cinephilia.
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SHORTS COLUMN | "Tanghi Argentini" Dances Away With Four Prizes at Aspen Shortsfest

Winning a festival's audience award is getting to be old hat for Guido Thys' "Tanghi Argentini," which followed up its amazing success at this year's Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival with a similar triumph at the 16th Aspen Shortsfest, which took place April 3 - 8 in Aspen, Colorado. Another highly buzzed about Clermont-Ferrand short, Michael Dreher's "Fair Trade," also won big at Aspen, generating predictions from industry insiders that "Fair Trade" and "Tanghi Argentini" should be considered front-runners for next year's Academy Awards.
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