Laura Poitras Announced As Guest Of Honor At Doc Fest IDFA

John Stamos and Lori Loughlin make a couple of funny faces in a new, and now viral, TikTok.

Patti LaBelle is set to guest star in ABC’s “The Wonder Years.” The legendary singer will portray Bill Williams’ (Dulé Hill) mother, Shirley Williams, in a two-episode arc in the upcoming second season, which will premiere midseason and has yet to announce a release date.Shirley is also the church choir director. Known affectionately as “Mother Williams,” she is “as sweet as she can be but has another side to her when choir members don’t quite hit the right notes,” per her character description.A reimagined version of the ’80s Emmy-winning original series of the same name, “The Wonder Years” is a coming-of-age comedy that tells the story of the Black middle-class Williams family during the late 1960s in Montgomery, Alabama — all through the point of view of creative 12-year-old Dean.

Lori Loughlin’s post-jail career is kicking off.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor U.S. director-producer Laura Poitras, who won an Oscar and an Emmy with Edward Snowden film “Citizenfour,” and recently took the Golden Lion at Venice with opioid epidemic pic “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” will be the Guest of Honor at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. The 35th edition of the festival takes place from Nov. 9 to 20. Poitras will be honored at IDFA with the Retrospective and Top 10 programs, in which she curates 10 films. The Top 10 program includes reflections on political imprisonment (“Hunger” by Steve McQueen; “This Is Not a Film” by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb), incarceration and psychiatry (Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies”), and genocide (Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah”). As part of the Top 10, Poitras will be in conversation with several of her selected filmmakers during the festival’s public talks program.

The People’s Choice Award from the just wrapped 2022 Toronto International Film Festival has gone to Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans.  First Runner Up is Canada’s own Sarah Polley’s Women Talking. And Second Runner Up was Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. The Documentary Award went to Black Ice, and the Midnight Madness winner was Weird: The Al Yankovich Story             .

The Oscar race came into sharper focus at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, with actors like Brendan Fraser and Michelle Yeoh cementing their lead contender status, and big-budget studio efforts like The Fablemans and Glass Onion premiering to raves.

Diane Garrett On Friday, during the 18th edition of the Camden Intl. Film Festival, organizers unveiled a Diane Weyermann Fellowship at Points North Institute.Weyermann, the former chief content officer at Participant and former director of the Sundance Institute’s documentary film program, died last October of cancer.

Love Island presenter Laura Whitmore made her West End debut last night in spooky production 2:22 A Ghost Story. The Aftersun host, 37, joined Matt Willis, Tamsin Carroll, and Felix Scott in the cast of the show at the Criterion Theatre in London. Fellow Love Island star and husband Iain Stirling attended the press night for the show to see Laura tread the boards in her new role.

NewFest said Thursday that HBO’s upcoming Mama’s Boy, the documentary about the life of Oscar-winning Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, will be the opening-night film for the New York LGBTQ+ Film Festival. The fest, which also announced its full lineup, kicks off its 34th edition October 13.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras sharply criticized the Toronto and Venice film festivals today for programming documentaries connected with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, suggesting the decision bordered on a “whitewashing” of history.

Adam Benzine Guest Contributor Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras slammed the heads of the Venice and Toronto film festivals for “engaging in a kind of whitewashing” by programming glossy documentaries from the Clinton family. Her comments come as TIFF this week hosted the Canadian premiere of Poitras’s “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” a documentary about the artist and activist Nan Goldin, and just days after the film won Venice’s top prize, the Golden Lion. It is the rare doc to land slots at the superfecta of Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York, and Poitras said she thought “long and hard” about whether or not to voice criticism at the same venues feting her latest work. Nevertheless, she said, “journalists need to ask hard questions.”

Holly Jones A vast landscape of refuse and the community that survives by salvaging its waste is central to the plot in the debut feature from Nicaraguan writer-director Laura Baumeister.  “Daughter of Rage,” which world premiered at the Toronto Film Festival on Saturday, will also make its European premiere as part of the New Directors competition at the San Sebastian Film Festival later this month. The narrative follows 11-year-old María (Ara Alejandra Medal) and her mother, Lilibeth (Virginia Sevilla), who pick through a littered shore to ensure their survival. Lilibeth, forced to travel to town to settle debts, leaves María to fend for herself at a sweatshop where children sort garbage for resale. With newfound pal Tadeo by her side, María grapples with an uncertain future, dreaming up fantastic scenarios to cope with the abandonment that looms over her head like an eerily dark sky before a storm.

Neon snapped up theatrical rights on Aug. 18 prior to the documentary’s world premiere at Venice Film Festival.

HBO Documentary Films has acquired U.S. television and streaming rights to Oscar winner Laura Poitras’s film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, fresh from its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival and sneak preview at Telluride.

On an abnormally hot summer day in Oslo, a strange electric field surrounds the city as a collective migraine spreads across town. TVs, lightbulbs, and electronics go haywire, the chaos reaching a debilitating crescendo when suddenly, it’s over.