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When Victoria Villegas learned how her cousin had fled the Dominican Republic, and was gay like her, she was moved to chart his life

There have been experimental, freestyling essay films and memoiristic documentaries around for years, going back to Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil or Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I. But just lately it feels like the sprawling poetic-realist subgenre is flourishing, especially in the sunny uplands of film festivals. Like an extension of the creative-writing exhortation to “write about what you know” young documentary-makers are increasingly shooting movies about not just who they are but also their family history. Sometimes family members are even corralled into play themselves or others, like some cinematic family drama-therapy experiment.

If you want a few recent examples, check out Miryam Charles’s recent Cette Maison, or Moroccan director Asmae el Moudir’s The Mother of All Lies, both of which...

One of the most robust of Latin America’s emerging film industries, Dominican Republic cinema boasts a standout presence at this year’s Huelva Ibero-American Film Festival.

On Monday, Nov. 13, following a two-year alliance inked at the Cannes Festival by Dominican Republic film commission DGCine and the Huelva Festival, four Dominican projects at development stage will be presented at an event intended for film producers interested in Ibero-American co-production.

“The four projects are representative of the current Dominican cinema landscape, made by a new generation of filmmakers which demonstrates the diversity of voices and issues [addressed] in our film industry,” says Marianna Vargas Gurilieva, general director at DGCine.

“Víctor Piñeyro’s ‘El sueño’ is a universal and popular story, interesting for its references; Karlina Veras’ ‘La mansa’ has a singular tone, with passages through Spain; a striking project, Juliano Kunert’s “Maguana Racing” offers a tremendously peculiar premise, and Yinna de la Cruz...

Few American filmmakers of the last 40 years await a major rediscovery like Hal Hartley, whose traces in modern movies are either too-minor or entirely unknown. Thus it’s cause for celebration that the Criterion Channel are soon launching a major retrospective: 13 features (which constitutes all but My America) and 17 shorts, a sui generis style and persistent vision running across 30 years. Expect your Halloween party to be aswim in Henry Fool costumes.

Speaking of: there’s a one-month headstart on seasonal programming with the 13-film “High School Horror”––most notable perhaps being a streaming premiere for the uncut version of Suspiria, plus the rare opportunity to see a Robert Rodriguez movie on the Criterion Channel––and a retrospective of Hong Kong vampire movies. A retrospective of ’70s car movies offer chills and thrills of a different sort

Six films by Allan Dwan and 12 “gaslight noirs” round out the main September series; The Eight Mountains,...

Ahead of its world premiere screening as part of Berlinale’s Generation 14plus strand, Alief has swooped on global sales to Dominican director Victoria Linares Villegas’s second non-fiction feature, “Ramona,” and has provided Variety exclusive access to its first look trailer.

After its Berlin run, “Ramona” is set for a North American bow at the True False Documentary Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri this March, where Linares will receive the Visionary Award.

A postmodern look into the class divide and lives of an already vulnerable population, the project has emerged as a documentary with glimpses of scripted narrative, which the director credits to the adolescents she interviewed; their predicaments became paramount.

“I started developing ‘Ramona’ in 2016 as a fiction film, about a pregnant teenager who escapes the outskirts of Santo Domingo in search of a casting call for her favorite telenovela,” Linares recounted in a statement.

“As I was writing the screenplay,...

The Berlin Film Festival has unveiled the final titles for its Generation sidebar of youth and children’s films, adding the animated feature Greyhound of a Girl, which features the voices of Irish actors Brendan Gleeson and Sharon Horgan; the Ukrainian documentary We Will Not Fade Away on teenagers living in the war-torn Donbas region; and the highly-anticipated German drama Will It Be Again Like It Never Was Before from director Sonja Heiss to its lineup.

Directed by Enzo d’Alò, Greyhound of a Girl is an adaptation of Roddy Doyle’s children’s book about a 12-year-old girl and her beloved, joke-cracking grandmother who is nearing the end of her life. In addition to Gleeson and Horgan, the film’s voice talents include Mia O’Connor, Charlene McKenna, and Rosaleen Linehan. When Will It Be Again Like It Never Was Before, based on the autobiographical bestseller by actor and writer Joachim Meyerhoff...

The Berlin Film Festival’s youth-focused sidebar Generation 14plus is set to open with “When Will It Be Again Like It Never Was Before,” the anticipated next film of Sonja Heiss and und Zeevonk von Domien Huyghe.

Based on Joachim Meyerhoff’s eponymous novel, “When Will It Be Again Like It Never Was Before” tells the comedic and moving story of a childhood and youth spent on the grounds of a psychiatric clinic.

Meanwhile, Domien Huyghe’s moving film “Sea Sparkle” will kick off the Generation Kplus competition. The film follows 12-year-old Lena who relentlessly battles with the tides of her grief after the death of her father, which she blames on a sea monster.

The Generation selection pans 25 feature-length and 31 short films, including 40 world premieres. The Berlinale team said this year’s lineup will invite audiences on an “exploration of young perceptions of the world.”

“The films in this...

Working through familial memory is often as complicated as it is difficult. Dominican filmmaker Victoria Linares embarks on this very process in her feature debut Lo que se hereda (It Runs in the Family), about the near-erasure of her cousin Oscar Torres’s existence in their native Dominican Republic. As the film unfolds, Linares learns how similar she is to Torres, despite the two being separated by an entire generation. Lo que se hereda is hinged upon Linares’s personal discovery of her cousin’s unproduced screenplays and film reviews he wrote in the ’50s during Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. From 1930 until his […]

The post “Nonfiction is the Most Successfully Explored Genre in the Dominican Republic”: Victoria Linares on Lo que se hereda (It Runs in the Family) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Working through familial memory is often as complicated as it is difficult. Dominican filmmaker Victoria Linares embarks on this very process in her feature debut Lo que se hereda (It Runs in the Family), about the near-erasure of her cousin Oscar Torres’s existence in their native Dominican Republic. As the film unfolds, Linares learns how similar she is to Torres, despite the two being separated by an entire generation. Lo que se hereda is hinged upon Linares’s personal discovery of her cousin’s unproduced screenplays and film reviews he wrote in the ’50s during Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship. From 1930 until his […]

The post “Nonfiction is the Most Successfully Explored Genre in the Dominican Republic”: Victoria Linares on Lo que se hereda (It Runs in the Family) first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

True/False, the preeminent non-fiction festival, returned as an in-person event Thursday, drawing documentary notables and fans of their work to a Missouri college town for the first lineup under the artistic direction of Chloe Trayner.

There were 31 features and 19 short non-fiction films at the fest, which had more of an international tilt than usual and concludes March 6. Eight features, including “Fire of Love,” “I Didn’t See You There” and “The Territory,” had previously debuted virtually at Sundance in January, but screened for the first time for public audiences at True/False.

Their respective directors — Sara Dosa (“Fire of Love”), Reid Davenport (“I Didn’t See You There”) Alex Pritz (“The Territory”) – were among the filmmakers making the trek to Columbia for the 19th edition of True/False. Fellow Sundance 2022 doc directors including Isabel Castro (“Mija”) and Joe Hunting (“We Met in Virtual Reality”) also attended.

“Sundance was amazing, but True...