The Hamptons International Film Festival will host its 9th annual Screenwriters’ Lab cosponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation this April 3 – 5 in East Hampton, NY. Over the course of one long weekend, emerging screenwriters will have the opportunity to meet one-on-one each day with established screenwriting mentors who will advise them on how to develop their scripts and move their projects closer to production. Within this supportive environment, the screenwriters are encouraged to tak...

The 33rd edition of the Seattle International Film Festival (SIFF) initiated its marathon 24 day run on Friday, May 25, with 18 films bursting out of the starting gates at six festival venues strategically located around the city from the landmark Space Needle to the University District (and a seventh across the lake in satellite city Bellevue). The opening event I chose to attend was "An Evening with Lisa Gerrard", hypnotic Australian song-bird/composer, introducing the screening of a mystico-...

The Pusan International Film Festival (PIFF), which takes place every October in the south-eastern port city of Busan, South Korea gears up for its 11th edition, its largest thus far. In fact, the festival has grown to such proportions that US entertainment media Variety will begin publishing dailies at PIFF this year, something it until now had only done for the world’s top three film festivals, Cannes, Berlin, and Toronto. In Seoul, South Korea at an unusually crowded press conference, PIF...