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Exclusive: The Jewish non-profit Reboot has launched its own production company Reboot Studios, which will provide seed funding for and develop Jewish content across theater, television, film, podcasts, music and publishing.

The new banner stems from Reboot’s past successes funding projects across all media, including Saturday Night Seder, with Jason Alexander, Billy Porter, Henry Winkler, Pamela Adlon, Cynthia Erivo and more. That virtual Passover production was put on as a means of bolstering the CDC Foundation’s Coronavirus Emergency Response Fund in the early days of the pandemic, and would ultimately raise more than 2.9M.

Reboot Studios’ advisory board, comprised of distinguished industry leaders and creators who will be actively shepherding and guiding projects, includes Showtime’s EVP of Scripted Programming, Amy Israel; Oscar, Grammy, Tony, and Golden Globe Award-winning songwriter Benj Pasek (Dear Evan Hansen); Searchlight Pictures President David Greenbaum; Amblin Partners’ President of Production Jeb Brody; Tony...

Sundance Institute and Sandbox Films announced 12 filmmakers who will be in the next batch to receive support for their projects, along with eight films selected to receive unrestricted and non-recoupable grants totaling $255,000, through the Sandbox Fund.

The Sandbox Fund aims to elevate the voices of independent artists working in the realm of science and nonfiction storytelling as they produce and promote work and discourse the highlights that overlap science and art in the U.S. and abroad.

The filmmakers and projects receiving grants are Márton Vizkelety and Zoltán Moll’s “Give Love Create,” Lacey Schwartz Delgado and Mehret Mandefro’s “How Free People Think,” Tasha Van Zandt’s “A Life Illuminated” and Eleanor Mortimer’s Untitled Deep Sea Taxonomy Documentary. Also in the group are Leandro Listorti’s “Herbaria,” Francisco Forbes, Ferran Romeu and Matthew Barton’s “Science Fiction,” Natalia Solórzano Vásquez’s “Space Is a Monstrous Animal” and Julie...

“All of us know a great deal about their music and the culture and the fashion and the films. But I didn’t realize how really groundbreaking they were in terms of their careers,” explains Dr. Mehret Mandefro, who is Emmy-nominated for Best Documentary or Nonfiction Series for the “American Masters” documentary “How it Feels to Be Free”; she produced it along with Michael Kantor, Lacey Schwartz Delgado, Elliott Halpern, Elizabeth Trojian, Julie Sacks and Grammy winner Alicia Keys. Based on the book of the same name by Ruth Feldstein, the film chronicles the art and activism of Lena Horne, Nina Simone, Pam Grier, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll and Cicely Tyson. Watch our exclusive video interview with Mandefro above.

SEESee chats with 5 Emmy-nominated TV showrunners: ‘The Boys,’ ‘Black-ish,’ ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race: Untucked,’ ‘Mahalia,’ ‘Black Lady Sketch Show’

The six artists profiled in the film represent the progress made by...

The Woodstock Film Festival will resume indoor screenings at its 22nd annual edition this fall, and also will recognize Neon founder and CEO Tom Quinn with a career honor.

This year’s festival will run from September 30 to October 3. It has carved out a notable place in the fall fest circuit because of its location, which is 110 miles north of New York City and also close to a number of film industry figures in the Hudson Valley. The surrounding region has also become more active in terms of film and TV production in recent years, adding multiple new soundstages.

Quinn will receive the festival’s 2021 Honorary Trailblazer Award. Before Covid-19 turned the 2020 edition into a hybrid affair with drive-ins and online screenings, Quinn had been scheduled to get the award last year, on the heels of Neon’s triumph with Parasite. The film, which had its world premiere in Cannes...

Sundance Institute has announced its latest class of fellows, a group of 10 young filmmakers selected for the yearlong Sundance Ignite x Adobe fellowship. They’ll participate in a year of mentorship, workshops, and receive other support and will have their films screened at Sundance Film Festival: London in August.

The fellows, who hail from around the world and are between the ages of 18-25, submitted 1- to 15-minute short films as part of their applications, which totaled a record high of 1,600. The fellows kicked off their fellowship year on Monday with the Sundance Ignite Digital Filmmakers Lab on Sundance Co//ab. The week-long lab prepares the fellows for the year ahead, with focuses on presenting one’s artistic self, pitching projects, case studies, and goal-setting.

Earlier this month, Sundance announced a series of layoffs and consolidations in reaction to the financial hits endured during the pandemic. While the organization announce...

Djibouti’s “The Gravedigger,” Morocco’s “Zanka Contact” and Ethiopia’s “Sweet Annoyance” were among the major winners in the post-production and development categories of the second edition of the Marrakech Film Festival’s Atlas Workshops.

“The Gravedigger,” by Khadar Ahmed, and “Zanka Contact,” by Ismaël el Iraki, won the top awards – €20,000 and $11,000 respectively – in the post-production competition, and “The Gravedigger” also won the new $3,300 Naas prize for film circulation. Both pics are first features.

Ethiopia’s “Sweet Annoyance,” by Hiwot Admasu Getaneh, Morocco’s “The Original Lie,” by Asmae El Moudir, and Rwanda’s “Ikimanuka – Seasons of the Weary Kind,” by Samuel Ishimwe, were the winners in the development competition, and received $11,000, $5,500 and $5,500 respectively.

The new $6,660 Artekino prize attributed during the workshops was awarded to Morocco’s “Les Meutes” by Kamal Lazraq. This is the first time that French-German broadcaster Arte has attributed an award in an African film festival.

Lacey Schwartz's "Little White Lie" is now streaming on Netflix, after an international film festival run... When I was growing up, a lot of kids would ask each other: “What are you mixed with?,” especially when they saw someone who couldn’t be easily placed into the categories of white, black, Latino, Asian, etc. The question, particularly among my black peers, would become as common as asking someone their name. My peers would spout off racial and cultural groups- Indian, Creole, black. Yet, in a society so defined by racial identification, what happens when a child who is clearly “mixed” to others, is...

Lacey Schwartz's "Little White Lie" is now available on home video platforms, after an international film festival run... When I was growing up, a lot of kids would ask each other: “What are you mixed with?,” especially when they saw someone who couldn’t be easily placed into the categories of white, black, Latino, Asian, etc. The question, particularly among my black peers, would become as common as asking someone their name. My peers would spout off racial and cultural groups- Indian, Creole, black. Yet, in a society so defined by racial identification, what happens when a child who is clearly “mixed” to...

When I was growing up, a lot of kids would ask each other: “What are you mixed with?,” especially when they saw someone who couldn’t be easily placed into the categories of white, black, Latino, Asian, etc. The question, particularly among my black peers, would become as common as asking someone their name. My peers would spout off racial and cultural groups- Indian, Creole, black. Yet, in a society so defined by racial identification, what happens when a child who is clearly “mixed” to others, is taught to identify as white? This question is thoroughly explored in Lacey Schwartz's feature documentary "Little White Lie," which follows her journey to uncover her...

Amy Berg's An Open Secret

While the world premiere of Marjorie Sturm's The Cult Of Jt Leroy joins Doc NYC, Amy Berg's An Open Secret is still up in the air.

Gracie Otto's The Last Impresario on Michael White, Andrea B. Scott's Florence, Arizona, Keva Rosenfeld's All American High Revisited, Thomas Wirthensohn's Homme Less, Dave Jannetta's Love And Terror On The Howling Plains Of Nowhere, Norah Shapiro's Miss Tibet: Beauty In Exile, Rich Hill by Tracy Droz Tragos, Little White Lie by Lacey Schwartz and Dan Rybicky and Aaron Wickenden's Almost There, connect with Richard Gere's performance in Oren Moverman's Time Out Of Mind, Marion Cotillard in Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne's Two Days, One Night to Michael Keaton's Birdman in Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman Or The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance, turning questions of identity into passages of time.