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See the full list of the 2016 Film Independent Spirit Awards, including Spotlight, Room, Beasts of No Nation, Tangerine, and more.
Watch Martin Scorsese discuss the restoration of Rocco and His Brothers:
Paul Schneider on his top 10 Criterion films:
I saw Blue for the first time when I was in film school. I checked out a VHS tape from the library and watched it on a twelve-inch TV/VCR. The movie finished and I sat staring at the dark screen while the tape auto-rewound. When it reached the beginning, I pressed “Play” and watched it a second time. When it stopped the second time, I turned everything off, went to bed, and stared at the ceiling. A week or so later, I finished the trilogy and thought, If these are called movies, we need a new name for everything else.
Watch a video essay on the themes of Tangerine:
Mubi‘s Matthew Harrison Tedford on experiments in aesthetics and ethnography in Sweetgrass:
Sweetgrass (2009) opens with a shot of a snowy Montana mountain scene, devoid of motion save for tall grasses succumbing to the wind. The following shots zero in on a rusted antique car, a metal shed or trailer, and then a large herd of sheep standing idly in the snow and staring at the cameraman, or just staring blankly as sheep seem to do. The film, directed by Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, documents a family of Montana sheepherders who were among the last ranchers to graze their animals in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness near Yellowstone National Park. Sweetgrass follows a long line of documentary films focused on cultural practices on the decline in a world of global capital and accelerated technological development. But through thoughtful cinematography and sound design, the directors avoid romanticizing the sheepherders and their business, while dutifully presenting the awesomeness of the Montana backcountry and the remarkable spectacle of 3,000 sheep.