Filmmakers

The Miami Jewish Film Festival’s 23rd annual Opening Night brings a Film Premiere, Reception, and great Live Music.  Like many survivors of the Holocaust, after World War II, Saul and Ruby moved to America, started families and careers, grew old, and retired to South Florida. For them, settling near Fort Lauderdale could have been the last chapter in their story. But then … +

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood visits 1969 Los Angeles, where everything is changing, as TV star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his longtime stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) make their way around an industry they hardly recognize anymore. The ninth, and arguably most personal, film from the writer-director is a paean to Hollywood’s golden age, an era whose end was … +

“This is perhaps the only science-fiction film that can be called transcendental.” – Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly Modern science fiction wouldn’t be what it is today if not for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the seminal –sci-fi film that depicted a multicultural, dystopian future filled with massive corporate advertising, thick pollution, and flying cars. Central to this world are replicants, human-like androids with … +

“A movie like none other I have seen before…a film in which the inner chambers of the soul are laid bare.” – Roger Ebert “One of the great hallucinatory experiences in cinema, a visually intoxicating horror trip. A perfect introduction for those eager to travel down more rarely explored routes of international film.” – Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo Digital Fifteen years after Alejandro … +

CGAC pays tribute to exploitation auteur Doris Wishman with a screening of a new digital preservation of her sci-fi classic, Nude on the Moon, a 1961 romp about a tropical society of topless aliens on the moon, filmed in Homestead’s Coral Castle. Ms. Wishman moved to Coral Gables in the mid 1980’s, worked at The Pink Pussycat Boutique on Main Highway in … +

Joon-ho Bong is not a vaping accessory, he is one of the greatest directors to have come out of South Korea and pretty much one of the greatest directors around today.  You may know him from his Netflix collaboration OKJA, or perhaps his cult Sci-Fi movie, Snowpiercer.   Mostly recently, he won the coveted Palme d’Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival for … +

Deering Estate in partnership with the MIAMI short FILM FESTIVAL presents a new series that provides screenings of selected short films. The Movie Labyrinth; Are we there yet?; Then there was you and Slippery Corners of the Mind and more shorts will be screened as a part of the event. Individual tickets on sale. The Miami short Film Festival is dedicated to … +

For teenage Nola (Sabrina Carpenter), home is the open road. Her self-reliant father (Steven Ogg) is her anchor in a life of transience. The pair crisscross the United States in a lovingly refurbished RV, making ends meet through odd jobs while relishing their independence. A shocking rupture, though, casts Nola out on her own. She makes her way to Albuquerque, New Mexico … +

Twenty years in the making, Edward Norton’s passion project Motherless Brooklyn finds the famed actor working quadruple duty as writer, director, producer and star of this inventive adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s novel of the same name. Growing up an orphan with Tourette syndrome, Lionel (Norton) spent his early years trying to find his place in the world. Then private detective Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) took him … +

Inspired by a true story, Oscar-nominated director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) has crafted a riveting character drama in The Two Popes, which sees Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce in a verbal battle of wits over the future direction of the Catholic Church. When Pope Benedict XVI (Hopkins) breaks with tradition and decides to retire from the papacy, he invites his soon-to-be successor Cardinal Bergoglio (Pryce) – who … +

In the Park, is a trip to the past. The year is 1962. The subject, a Sunday day in Bay Front Park, Miami, when the world was still innocent. The hidden camera, the free cinema, allows us to observe from a distance, to be voyeurs without being discovered. We see young and old in a sweet-and-sour situation, which gives the viewer a … +

A chronicle of New York’s drag scene in the 1980s, focusing on balls, voguing and the ambitions and dreams of those who gave the era its warmth and vitality. This landmark documentary provides a vibrant snapshot of the 1980s through the eyes of New York City’s African American and Latinx Harlem drag ball scene. Made over seven years, PARIS IS BURNING offers an intimate … +

One-time-only unrated screening of WALKING ON WATER, an uncensored look into the process and personal relationships of the renowned artist Christo as he sets out to realize The Floating Piers, a project he conceived many years prior with his late wife Jeanne-Claude. The film, which world premiered at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival, will be followed by a Q&A with director Andrey … +

Pedro Almodóvar’s highly anticipated Pain and Glory will open the 2019 GEMS Film Festival on Thursday, October 10 at MDC’s Tower Theater Miami. The GEMS Opening Night event will transform MDC’s Tower Theater Miami into “Casa Almodóvar” with a gallery exhibit of classic Almodóvar film posters, images in vignettes, and a post-screening gala party, Sabor de Almodóvar, sponsored by Estrella Damm. Featuring characters from Almodóvar films at the Estrella Damm photo … +

In Leave the Bus Through the Broken Window, what starts as a traditional documentary about the Hong Kong art world becomes an intimate and comedic study of loneliness within an increasingly globalized world. Upon realizing that the film he thought he would make is not going to happen, filmmaker Andrew Hevia turns the camera on himself while continuing to engage with Hong … +

Led by Gay Chorus Conductor Dr. Tim Seelig and joined by The Oakland Interfaith Gospel Choir; the tour brings a message of music, love and acceptance, to communities and individuals confronting intolerance. Over 300 singers travelled from Mississippi to Tennessee through the Carolinas and over the bridge in Selma. They performed in churches, community centers and concert halls in hopes of uniting … +

Written and directed by Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almódovar, Tacones Lejanos is a murder mystery centering on flamboyant actress Becky del Paramo (Marisa Paredes) and her daughter Rebecca (Victoria Abril), a television anchorwoman. After being estranged for 15 years, Becky re-enters Rebecca’s life when she comes to perform a concert. Rebecca, she finds, is now married to one of Becky’s ex-lovers, Manuel (Feodor … +

When Pepa Marcos’ (Carmen Maura) lover Ivan (Fernando Guillén) suddenly leaves her without any explanation, she embarks on a strange journey to discover why. On the way she meets a variety of eccentric characters, including Ivan’s son from a previous relationship (Antonio Banderas), his fiancee Marissa (Rossy de Palma) and a Shiite terrorist cell who have been secretly holding her best friend … +

In the 1940s and ’50s, Havana’s love affair with Hollywood saw movie stars like Ava Gardner, Marlon Brando, and Gary Cooper flock to the Caribbean—and immortalize the tropical island’s paradise and pleasures on the silver screen. The 2018 documentary follows the history of the American cinema craze in Cuba to one actor’s mountaintop meeting with a young Fidel Castro before the Revolution. … +

Male nurse Benigno (Javier Cámara) becomes infatuated with a complete stranger when he watches dancer Alicia (Leonor Watling) practicing from the anonymity of his apartment. After being injured in a car accident, Alicia is brought to a nearby hospital, where Benigno serendipitously happens to be her caregiver. When wounded bullfighter Lydia (Rosario Flores) is brought into the same ward, her companion, writer … +

1986. Mexico City. Seventeen-year-old Carlos doesn’t fit in anywhere: not in his family nor with the friends he has chosen in school. But everything changes when he is invited to a mythical nightclub where he discovers the underground nightlife scene: post punk, sexual liberty, and drugs that challenges the relationship with his best friend Gera and lets him find his passion for … +