Some of the participants are incredibly generous with their time and advice, and overall there is a welcoming atmosphere, and excitement at the prospect of engaging with new filmmakers.
Following five years in the life and career of an independent filmmaker, supported by dozens of interviews, posing one question: how does an indie filmmaker survive in the current film business?
Teachers everywhere will give a smile of recognition as an experienced teacher takes a new colleague through his class list – “nice, nice, not nice, not nice at all…”
Quasi-documentary about a group of Parisian school kids.
The action, when it comes, is introduced with an impact that will make you drop your popcorn, and you’ll be on the edge of your seat for what follows.
Tormented by a past life, garbage man Clean attempts a life of quiet redemption. But when his good intentions mark him a target of a local crime boss, Clean is forced to reconcile with the violence of his past.
There's so much here that, as with cleaning, it goes through the fabric, past the underling, to the structure, the joists, the soil.
When illness forces her away from her beloved trauma cleaning business, Sandra faces up to her traumatic past and begins a search for her birth mother.
Ridley may not be in the top league of current action stars but she can handle herself, and she is at any rate more convincing as a former soldier than she is as a member of the working class.
Environmental activists hijack a gala, taking 300 hostages. After one extremist seizes control, planning mass murder as a message to the world, it's up to a former soldier turned window cleaner to save the day.
What begins with shrewd character observation and a good deal of bitter humour gradually sheds its skins and becomes something more blatantly horrific.
As a means to distract herself from an affair, a love-addicted woman befriends a cleaning lady, badly scarred by burns. She soon learns, these scars run much deeper than the surface.
Bueno supports the interviews with clips from the film and behind-the-scenes archive footage chosen not just for colour but to let us see what is under discussion at every stage.
A documentary about the making of the original Ghostbusters.
LeVeck has more story ideas than are initially apparent and saves the best till last.
Millennial entrepreneurs, Drew and Max, run a webcast that streams live exorcisms that are, in fact, elaborately staged hoaxes. They get their comeuppance when today's actress becomes mysteriously possessed by a real demon that holds the crew hostage.
Despite the raw power of its performances, the film suffers from an impulse to spell out some of its points.
Years of carrying out death row executions have taken a toll on prison warden Bernadine Williams. As she prepares to execute another inmate, Bernadine must confront the psychological and emotional demons her job creates, ultimately connecting her to the man she is sanctioned to kill.
What does happen is likely nothing at all like what you expected to happen.
Reeling from a one-sided break-up, heartbroken Karen breaks into her ex’s lakehouse. There, she
strikes up a complicated relationship with provocative younger woman Lana.
We spend most of our time inside the house in spaces which could as easily be rendered on a stage, but presenting it as film allows the actors to go deeper inside their characters, improvising the dialogue, with Sanders knitting together the best stuff.
Returning to their childhood home on the Isle of Wight, a house filled with art and the songs and poetry their mother once wrote, Dorothy and Phoebe deal with conflicting feelings about the difficult woman who raised them.
While it's got some quirks it's relatively inoffensive, and if it feels like damning it with faint praise to say it's got nothing drastically wrong with it then fair enough.
A girl who is struggling to fit in finds a new best friend, but after the pup grows up he attracts the attention of a genetics company, forcing the pair to go on the run.
The film is like a shout, dying in the throat, with the sound turned down, so that everything is expressed through the eyes and nothing is resolved, nor talked through, like it would be in a Bergman movie.
Study of an emotional crisis within a fractured relationship in Istanbul.
This is animation used for a purpose, and likewise the film’s genre elements, which enable it to get right to the core of what it means to find oneself sharing one’s flesh, one’s emotions, one’s life chances with somebody else.
A climber who has recently miscarried after a car accident is determined not to miss out on the world championships, but she begins to receive text messages from what is apparently another, still pregnant version of herself.
It literally lets you see the artist’s works more closely than you are likely ever to have done before, as they go under the microscope to reveal forensic secrets. The results will change the way you think about Vermeer forever.
A forensic examination of the Vermeer paintings collected for the 2023 Rijksmuseum exhibition, also exploring emerging information about the stories behind them.
Rather than watching Sam from a distance, with curiosity, we are very much aligned with him, experiencing the world as he does, noticing the things that don’t make sense about other people.
A young man happens to encounter with an old friend on his way back home to a dreaded family reunion that forces him to confront long-buried memories.
A meditation on both memory and movies as well as ageing and a hankering for the past that is informed by the melancholic knowledge that nostalgia is inevitably rose-tinted.
A TV show looking into the mysterious disappearance of an actor leads a director on a journey into his own past while making discoveries in the present.
Its biggest problem is that his deadpan approach leaves it feeling tonally flat - right up until a poignant ending which far surpasses what has gone before.
Following her mother's funeral and a recently ended relationship, Nina flies to Los Angeles in search of her missing sister.
The Polish director understands that the work of searching is also the work of deciding what not to show.
After his teenage son goes missing, Daniel scours the depths of the Vistula River, torn between the dread of a fatal leap and the hope that his son may still be alive.
Even though we’re essentially talking about a basic shot-reverse shot exchange, framed in creeping wide angles, juxtaposed with close-ups, the feeling is comparable to watching a getaway heist.
An online scammer, reselling faulty products at preposterously high rates, is on the run after some of his customers decide to hit back.
The focus is on showing that through the characters' arguments, whether related to minor everyday complaints or friendship, the darker side of humanity often hides behind social conventions.
In a collision of ancient legends and contemporary life, characters from the pages of mythology find themselves unexpectedly thrown into the world of today's youth.
The narrative proceeds at a controlled pace set to a jangling score of percussion and chants, which is enough to set viewers on edge without the disturbing scenes of food being tentatively eaten and then disgorged.
A teacher takes a job at an elite school and forms a strong bond with five students - a relationship which eventually takes a dangerous turn.
This could have been so preachy and political, but the performances from the young cast are excellent and Jackson has such natural authority he carries the audience with him.
Authoritarian basketball coach is hired to pull a run down Californian high school team together.
The depth and complexity of the characters in this film, together with an impressive performance from Eang, guarantee that viewers will be caught up in its human drama rather than simply gawping as the tourists do.
Three young men try to make it in a rapidly changing world.
If there's a key to unlocking the mystery it's pretty clearly signposted, shining even.
Eight-year-old Peter is plagued by a mysterious, constant tap, tap from inside his bedroom wall – a tapping his parents insist is all in his imagination. His concerned schoolteacher starts making enquiries after Peter shows clear evidence of trouble at home. But as Peter’s fear intensifies, he believes that his parents could be hiding a terrible, dangerous secret.
News and features
News & Features
Going ape
Antonin Niclass on character creation, empathy and animated short Into The Forest
Freeform
Will Niava on grief, new immigrant experiences and Jazz Infernal
In silence
Emir Kumova on child marriage in Türkiye, moral challenges and making The Witness
