Ever since his Silver Bear win earlier this year at Berlin Jayro Bustamante's IXCANUL (pronounced eesh-kanool) has garnered about fifteen different awards and distinctions. This good year gave Bustamante, a filmmaker from Guatemala, some much-needed exposure and, hopefully, even-better means to make another film soon. In IXCANUL Maria, 17, lives on the slopes of an active volcano. An arranged marriage is

KILLING THEM SAFELY, a new documentary (100 min.) out in theaters since yesterday, paints a controversial picture of the taser gun industry--namely, one industry since all of the world's taser guns are manufactured by one outfit called Taser International. The film, written and directed by Nick Berardini, raises the proverbial question of whether taser guns are safer than traditional guns. Berardini looks at safety

Entrenched in a small village in Italy's Umbria region, under the close supervision of her protective father, young Gelsomina sees little of the outside the world. She doesn't ask too many questions, either. On the farm where she lives with her young and sisters and her parents she helps out in the family's beekeeping business. Her fate appears sealed. And yet, two events will soon inject some much-needed chaos: her family hosts a young man who's right out of juvie, as part of a social rehabilitation program, and a reality show comes to the area to do an on-site taping.

PARIS - The upcoming film VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (2017) has a bang up cast (Cara Delevingne, Dane DeHaan and Clive Owen), will employ a twelve-hundred-person crew, take six months to shoot (with principal photography starting in January) and has been in the preparatory phases for two years. From a Frenchman's viewpoint, at least, it's a big deal. And yet, instead of being able to shoot

Fortissimo Films announced today that it has acquired global sales [...]

The few movies that have been made about the electronic dance music scene in the last twenty years have come and gone like mere blips and blops, in part because of weak plots and sub-plot and bad casting choices but also because techno, like drugs or sex, tends to make for boring on-screen subject matter. Movies about music need to have vivid characters that jump off the screen, like those in Cameron Crowe's 2000's ALMOST FAMOUS.

Time to dust off the Frantz Fanon reader. Colonialism, as well as Africa, its oil, gold and religion are the ambiguous motifs this new documentary film slated for release next week aims to confronts. For WE COME AS FRIENDS filmmaker Hubert Sauper swooped down into the context of his story, literally. He and his crew built a small aircraft especially for the film and flew it to the filming location, in South Sudan. This young nation