Attention Hoarder Hordes: TAMI Wants (Some of) Your VHS Tapes
There’s a really special group here in Austin that is helping to preserve Texas’ moving image history every day. It’s called TAMI – the Texas Archive Of The Moving Image. This October they are doing their latest Round-Up. This is a mass digitization collection in which people are encouraged to send in Texas-related home movies […]
1970: The Year In Auteur Cinema
Hindsight is a tremendous aid to critical thinking. And fifty years of it allows for a great deal of critical thinking about any art form – even a bit of overthinking, if we’re honest about it. But that’s part of the fun of auteur cinema. With the benefit of the five succeeding decades of reflection […]
Watch This: Marcello Mastroianni Turns on the Charm for Letterman, 1987
Marcello Mastroianni (born September 28, 1924) was one of the great actors of the screen and an international superstar for decades. For Americans, who saw many of his best films during the art cinema import boom that began in the late ’50s, he simultaneously embodied a kind of swaggering screen presence that was no longer […]
Watch This: A Super Awkward 1955 Educational Film on How to Vote
Jean-Luc Godard once said that all Americans are good actors. We’re guessing that he missed the following educational short film on how to vote from 1955. Only a portion of it features dialogue, but that portion is certainly worth the (free) cost of admission. It’s always curious to see how people behave differently when a […]
Watch This: Behind The Scenes with John Woo on his First American Movie
Back in 1992, Hong Kong director John Woo (born on September 22, 1946) was still a bit of a cult figure among adventurous American cinephiles. It wasn’t until he made his first Hollywood films HARD TARGET (1993), BROKEN ARROW (1995) and FACE OFF (1997) that he became well known to mass audiences as an action […]
Toronto International Film Fest 2020 Highlights, Part 1: Lars Nilsen
AFS Lead Programmer Lars Nilsen shares his highlights from this year’s virtual Toronto International Film Festival. Stay tuned for Head of Film & Creative Media Holly Herrick’s picks coming soon. The experience of film festivals for a professional programmer or buyer is usually a pretty intensive one – building a plan of must-see titles, a […]
WATCH THIS: Breaking Down the Brilliance of Bong Joon Ho
Today we celebrate the birthday of one of our favorite modern filmmakers, Bong Joon-Ho (born Sept. 14, 1969). While Bong only recently became a household name thanks to last year’s unprecedented Oscar win, his cinematic mastery goes back decades (which is no secret to those who have kept up with AFS’s programming over the years). […]
Watch This: Richard Linklater’s Jewels in the Wasteland Home Edition
(UPDATED SEPTEMBER 9, 2020) With many of us home-bound and stuck indoors indefinitely, we wanted to share some film recommendations to help you pass the time. Where better to start than one of AFS’s most popular series, Jewels in the Wasteland, curated and hosted by AFS Founder and Artistic Director Richard Linklater to spotlight some […]
Meet the 2020 AFS Grant Recipients
The AFS Grant is at the heart of AFS filmmaker support programs. Since 1996, the Grant has nurtured the leading edge of Texas’ creative community by providing cash grants to emerging artists, with a focus on filmmakers who are underrepresented in the industry. This year the grant for feature filmmakers was expanded to provide much-needed […]
Watch this: Robert Rodriguez Revisits The Mexico Trilogy at AFS Cinema
Robert Rodriguez’s career arc is the kind of thing you can’t make up. As a young, broke indie filmmaker, he took a skeleton crew to a rural town in Mexico with seven grand in his pocket (half of which he’d earned as a guinea pig in pharmaceutical trials) to make what he considered a practice […]
Streamers: Austin Pride Month Picks from OUTsider Fest’s Artistic Director Curran Nault
In honor of Austin Pride Month, we asked Curran Nault, author of Queercore: Queer Punk Media Subculture and the artistic director of Austin’s OUTsider Fest, to tell us about his journey with Queer cinema and make some home viewing recommendations. Read on for some exciting and unexpected streaming suggestions. Compiling this list of LGBTQIA (“queer”) film […]
Exclusive: Watch A Restored Cult Animated Short from Marcell Jankovics
There is nothing quite like the mind-bending animations of Marcell Jankovics, a master artist who has been overlooked outside of his native Hungary for far too long. Jankovics’ films bustle with a fluid, expressionistic energy that, combined with vibrating colors and continuously shape-shifting characters, produces nothing less than a lysergic effect. For the highest dose […]
