EXCLUSIVE: RTG Features, the sister studio to basketball media company Slam, is partnering with arts organization Heartland Film to launch the first annual Slam Film Festival dedicated to basketball-themed movies.
EXCLUSIVE: RTG Features, the sister studio to basketball media company Slam, is partnering with arts organization Heartland Film to launch the first annual Slam Film Festival dedicated to basketball-themed movies.
Ethan Shanfeld The Sundance Institute unveiled the lineup of 53 short films for the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, taking place Jan. 18-28 in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah. The film fest will happen in person, with a selection of titles available online from Jan.
Prince Harry indicated that he would be more than willing to leave Hollywood behind as he expressed his enthusiasm for Japan on Wednesday While on a solo trip to Tokyo, the 38-year-old Duke of Sussex told the crowd at the International Sports Promotion Society (ISPS) Sports Values - Summer Edition event that he would "happily live" in the East Asia country. "Well, firstly, hello everybody," Harry said as he joined the panel on stage for the discussion on sports, community and philanthropy.
The Duke of Sussex has been pictured shortly after he touched down in Tokyo, Japan ahead of his appearance at the ISPS Sports Values Summit-Special Edition. Harry, wearing a dark shirt and baseball cap that featured the Archewell Foundation logo, was joined by his close friend and polo teammate Nacho Figueras for his arrival today, Tuesday, August 8.
Christopher Nolan’s mega-hit Oppenheimer features dozens of historical characters, but among them you won’t find Ted Hall. And yet Hall, who went to work on the Manhattan Project as a teenage wunderkind physicist, occupies a significant place in the overall story. As a fresh-faced and idealistic youth, he shared top secret details of the atom bomb’s design with Soviet agents — but he was never prosecuted for it.
“There’s something I have to tell you:” As an 18-year-old undergraduate at Harvard, Ted Hall was recruited to help Robert Oppenheimer and his team develop a weapon that would alter the course of human history. When the Atomic Bomb was detonated twice the following year, over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hall did not share in his colleagues’ enthusiasm for the Manhattan Project.
Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Documentary specialist Autlook Filmsales closed a raft of sales at a vibrant market during the Copenhagen documentary festival CPH:DOX. “Subject,” directed by Camilla Hall and Jennifer Tiexiera, got picked up by Sweden’s SVT, Denmark’s DR, Norway’s NRK, Norway’s VGTV, The Netherlands’ VPRO, Israel’s Yes Doc, and Madman for Australia and New Zealand. Dogwoof released the film early this month in the U.K. “Subject” is an examination of the relationship between nonfiction filmmakers and their subjects. It raises important ethical questions during a golden of age for documentaries, when docs are screened by millions of viewers. The film re-visits protagonists of some of the most viewed documentaries of today – “The Staircase,” “The Square,” “Hoop Dreams,” “The Wolfpack” and “Capturing the Friedmans.”
The Eva Longoria-directed Flamin’ Hot, Imran J. Khan’s Mustache and the upcoming ESPN bio-doc about NBA icon Bill Walton were among the audience award winners revealed Monday for the 31st SXSW Film & TV Festival.
Bill Walton feels things more intensely than just about any human being on the planet. The former basketball star – a legend in college and the pros – communes with nature at almost a cellular level, taking in the beauty of his beloved Oregon, for instance, with rapt pleasure. He can tell you perhaps every body of water in the state, and its metaphorical significance (a river he compares to a fast-break in basketball).
A Compassionate Spy” and will release it later this year. Directed by two-time Oscar nominee Steve James (“Hoop Dreams”), “A Compassionate Spy” tells the story of Ted Hall, who at the age of 18 was the youngest physicist to work on the Manhattan Project with Robert Oppenheimer.
Magnolia Pictures has acquired North American rights from Participant to “A Compassionate Spy,” the new documentary from Steve James (“Hoop Dreams,” “Life Itself”). The film, which world premiered at the Venice Film Festival ahead of its North American launch at Telluride, is a real-life spy story about Manhattan Project physicist Ted Hall, who provided nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, told through the perspective of his wife Joan, who protected his secret for decades. Magnolia will release the film in theaters later this year. “A Compassionate Spy” is presented by Participant and is a Mitten Media and Kartemquin Films production produced by Mark Mitten p.g.a., Dave Lindorff, and Steve James. Executive producers are Jeff Skoll, Diane Weyermann, Tim Horsburgh and Gordon Quinn.
First-Look Image From Kiah Roache-Turner’s ‘Sting,’ Cornerstone Inks DealsProduction has wrapped in Sydney, Australia, on Kiah Roache-Turner’s Sting. Cornerstone is handling worldwide sales and distribution on the pic. Studiocanal has inked a deal to release in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Benelux. Additional deals include Lucky Red (Italy), Diamond Films (Latin America, Spain, Portugal), Nordisk (Scandinavia), Kinoswiat (Poland), Pasatiempo Pictures (Baltics, CIS), Karantanija (Ex-Yogoslavia), Italia (Middle East), Filmfinity (South Africa) and Terry Steiner International (airlines). The film synopsis reads: One cold, stormy night in New York City, a mysterious object falls from the sky and smashes through the window of a rundown apartment building. It is an egg, and from this egg emerges a strange little spider… Check out the first image from the pic above.
Selome Hailu As part of their overall deal with Warner Bros. Television Group, Lena Waithe’s company Hillman Grad Productions will adapt “The Book of Mycah,” a novella written by Joshua Bennett. “The Book of Mycah” takes place in an alternate history America where Malcolm X came back from the dead in 1965. The television project is based on Bennett’s novella of the same name, which leads his most recent collection, “The Study of Human Life.” The book was published on Sept. 20 by Penguin Random House. Waithe and Hillman Grad CEO Rishi Rajani will serve as executive producers on the TV adaptation, while creative executive Sylvia Carrasco will oversee the production. Bennett is a professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. Along with “The Study of Human Life,” he is the author of three books of poetry and literary criticism: “The Sobbing School” (Penguin, 2016), which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award; “Being Property Once Myself” (Harvard University Press, 2020); and “Owed” (Penguin, 2020). He is repped by Yorn, Levine, Barnes, Krintzman, Rubenstein, Kohner, Endlich & Gellman.
When September rolls around, it means one thing for many of the top filmmakers in the world – time to hit the road. Venice, Telluride and Toronto come in rapid succession, to the point of overlapping. But for documentary filmmakers eager to showcase their work, there’s another important stop to make in September: the Camden International Film Festival in mid-coast Maine.
Diane Weyermann’s impact continues to be felt throughout the documentary field, with her presence evident on some of the fall’s most talked about nonfiction films, including Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed and Steve James’s A Compassionate Spy.
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.
Addie Morfoot Contributor The Telluride Film Festival’s emphasis on documentary has not wavered in recent years. But the prominence of nonfiction fare at the 49th edition has arguably made this year’s Telluride the autumn Sundance, where some of the biggest buzz is for docs. The lineup, kept under wraps until the eve of the fest’s opening on Sept. 2, includes 16 docs from novice and veteran documentarians, including Steve James (“A Compassionate Spy”), Matthew Heineman (“Retrograde”), Chris Smith (“Sr.”) Ondi Timoner (“Last Flight Home”) and Ryan White (“Good Night Oppy”). (Additional “secret” screenings have yet to be announced.) The rising level of documentaries at the Colorado fest is largely due to the influence of Telluride executive director Julie Huntsinger.
Guy Lodge Film Critic Just before director Christopher Nolan’s upcoming “Oppenheimer” plants a fixed image of Ted Hall in the popular imagination, along comes Steve James’s sensitive, studious documentary “A Compassionate Spy” to preemptively set any records straight. Unpacking the life and work of the prodigious teenage Manhattan Project physicist who passed key information about the endeavor to the Soviet Union — cuing an adulthood dogged by suspicion and secrecy — the film demonstrates its director’s characteristic nose for strong material and knack for gripping, straightforward storytelling. If the filmmaking is more televisual than in James’s best work, with its flourishes limited to some unnecessary dramatized passages, that should be no impediment to “A Compassionate Spy” commanding a sizable audience on multiple platforms.
As a child growing up in the United States, you’re taught that betraying the country is a terrible act, punishable by death. Every morning, in most public schools, you’re forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which overtly puts your patriotism at the forefront of the day’s events.
Given the fragile state of world peace at the moment, it seems like a good time for the latest film from Hoop Dreams director Steve James, a piece of little-known history from the cold war that could potentially have devastating consequences today. Sadly, James’ Venice Film Festival out of competition title A Compassionate Spy just doesn’t deliver the drama and tension you might expect from the high-stakes story of a mild-mannered American scientist who passed sensitive nuclear secrets to the Russians out of a mixture of idealism and naivety.
Manori Ravindran International Editor High-profile espionage cases in the post-war period often invoke the grisly fate of the Rosenbergs, the first U.S. citizens to be convicted and executed by electric chair for sharing atomic secrets with the Soviet Union in peace time. But in the new documentary “A Compassionate Spy,” filmmaker Steve James tells the incredible story of Manhattan Project scientist Ted Hall, who shared classified nuclear secrets with Russia — and got away with it. The Participant and Kartemquin Films-produced documentary, which has its world premiere in Venice on Sept. 2, is one of a number of films at this year’s festival that tackle the topic of nuclear disaster: Projects from Noah Baumbach’s feature adaptation of Don DeLillo’s “White Noise” through to Oliver Stone’s on-the-nose documentary “Nuclear” all contemplate some aspect of our nuclear past and future.
ARMAGEDDON TIME (d. James Gray, U.S., 2022) BARDO, FALSE CHRONICLE OF A HANDFUL OF TRUTHS (d. Alejandro González Iñárritu, Mexico-U.S., 2022) BOBI WINE, GHETTO PRESIDENT (d.
Addie Morfoot Contributor Laura Poitras’ “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” Steve James’ “A Compassionate Spy” and Evgeny Afineevsky’s “Freedom on Fire: Ukraine’s Fight for Freedom” are among 11 documentaries making their world premieres at the Venice Film Festival this year, with Poitras’ competition title vying for a Golden Lion — a rare feat for a doc at a major international film festival. The growing number of high-profile non-fiction films in and out of competition at Venice suggests that major European film festivals have finally accepted documentaries as viable, cinematic art.While docs at the Toronto International Film Festival and major U.S. fests, including Sundance, Telluride and South by Southwest, have long been the belles of the ball, the most prominent international festivals, including Venice, Cannes and Berlin, have been slow to embrace non-fiction content, especially in competition.
Addie Morfoot ContributorThe 18th edition of the Camden Intl. Film Festival, kicking off Sept. 15, will feature a handful of award-contending documentaries fresh off showings at Telluride and the Toronto film festivals.
Kanye West has become possibly the world’s most famous and revered rap star, dominating headlines with his music and his personal life. But there was a time – hard as it is to imagine – when he was pegged as “just” a great record producer, and not a performer in his own right.
When talking about the greatest sports documentaries of all time, there’s no denying 1994’s “Hoop Dreams” would rank very highly. Honestly, many would consider Steve James’ basketball film one of the best docs, period.
Hoop Dreams under their Hillman Grad banner along with Scott Huff, David A. Stern, and Colin Callender of Playground Entertainment, and Steve James, Peter Gilbert, and Frederick Marx.
Broadcast FilmAll In: The Fight for DemocracyDirected by Liz Garbus and Lisa Cortés | AmazonDavid Byrne’s American UtopiaDirected by Spike Lee | HBODisclosureDirected by Sam Feder | NetflixIn the Same BreathDirected by Nanfu Wang | HBOTinaDirected by Dan Lindsay and T.J.
Director Steve James has been making films for more than 30 years now, earning two Oscar nominations along the way: Best Editing for his landmark 1994 documentary Hoop Dreams, and Best Documentary Feature for the 2016 film Abacus: Small Enough to Jail.
Michael Schneider Variety Editor at LargeABC Owned Television Stations has partnered with Participant Media to produce the special “Our America: A Year of Activism,” which will stream beginning May 25 and feature three roundtable discussions of activism following the murder a year ago of George Floyd.Prominent artists, activists and journalists featured in the discussions include Fred Hampton Jr., filmmaker Steve James, Ai-jen Poo, April Reign, ESPN senior writer Jesse Washington, Jimmie
The city of Chicago does not lack for challenges — among them, an alarmingly high murder rate, longstanding racial divisions and a fractious relationship between police and minorities. That didn’t stop a record number of candidates from running for mayor in 2019, including, for a time, incumbent Rahm Emanuel.
Dino-Ray Ramos Associate Editor/ReporterNational Geographic has acquired the docuseries City So Real directed by two-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker Steve James (America to Me, Hoop Dreams) and his longtime producing partner Zak Piper (Life Itself, The Interrupters). The series paints a portrait of contemporary Chicago as it gives a multifaceted look into the soul the American city, set against the backdrop of its history-making 2019 mayoral election.
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