Fruitvale Station

When the 17th annual American Black Film Festival kicks off in Miami Beach this weekend, one of the highlights is sure to be Fruitvale Station, based on a true story of a young man killed by a cop in an Oakland train station.

The film won top prizes at Sundance and Cannes, but "what people don't know," ABFF founder Jeff Friday says with no small amount of pride, "is that the director, Ryan Coogler, got his start with us. His Fig won the short film competition at the ABFF three years ago."

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Wikipedia CC

The last time James Franco was in Miami on a cultural mission, it was to show his own art at OHWOW's Art Basel satellite fair. That might be where Franco hooked up with fellow OHWOW exhibitor Harmony Korine, who later directed a cornrowed, gold-toothed Franco in this year's Spring Breakers.

But Franco's upcoming visit to the Magic City will have nothing to do with barely legal babes in bikinis. Franco will be honored with the HBO Latin America Ally Award "for his career accomplishments and his unwavering support of the LGBT community," according to a statement from the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival.

See also:
- James Franco to Exhibit at OHWOW's It Ain't Fair

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Director Kathryn Bigelow

Sure, women are making strides in Hollywood. There's Kathryn Bigelow directing fact-based thrillers such as Zero Dark Thirty and Jennifer Westfeldt with off-center comedies like Friends With Kids. Unlike their male counterparts, the majority of films made by women show a broader spectrum in genres, subjects, and styles.

And yet, women represent only 7% of film directors and nine-tenths of movies are made from the male perspective. It's no wonder that the images of women, and the subject matter of films about them presented to the general public, are often just updated versions of dated stereotypes.

The Women's International Film & Arts Festival (WIFF), running March 20-24, is working to change that.

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Ghost Graduation

What's that you say, Mildly Xenophobic Film Fan? If you wanted to read while people make incomprehensible noises for two hours, you'd plop down on the least sticky Metromover seat and take a couple of laps with the latest Life & Style?

Well, get off at the Omni Terminal and take one of several mostly insect-free bus lines to the Miami International Film Festival, where surprises and delights await even the most fickle and/or squinty of eyeballs. Behold: six foreign films at MIFF 2013 for people who don't usually like foreign films.

Whether you want to step out of your comfort zone, impress a potential lover, or just want to celebrate that Hooked on Phonics worked for you, below you'll find a selection of great movies that will suit your unique needs.

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River Phoenix in Dark Blood.

Like the phoenix of his name, River has risen again, exhumed for one last movie. The James Dean of Generation X, actor River Phoenix died in 1993 at age 23 from a drug overdose. Now, 20 years later, the movie he was shooting at the time of his passing, Dark Blood, has seen its first light of day, thanks to a painstaking reconstruction from its original Dutch director, George Sluizer (The Vanishing). It premiered last month in Berlin and will enjoy its North American premiere at the Miami International Film Festival this Wednesday.

In this final version, in which Sluizer provides narration and still photographs to compensate for a handful of unshot or destroyed scenes, Dark Blood feels like a lost masterpiece, a dusty and desolate psychodrama that's equal parts Voyage to Italy, Days of Heaven, and Straw Dogs.

See also:
- River Phoenix's Dark Blood: Not the Epitaph He Deserves
- River Phoenix's Last Film to Make U.S. Debut at Miami International Film Festival
- Miami International Film Festival Announces 2013 Lineup: Viggo Mortensen, River Phoenix, Venus and Serena

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When River Phoenix died in October 1993, he was three weeks away from completing his performance in Dark Blood, an $8 million indie film making its North American premiere at the Miami International Film Festival March 6. The production had already done five weeks of shooting on location in southern Utah. In this lurid modern film noir, Phoenix was cast as "Boy," a mysterious, part-Hopi Indian widower living in the shadow of the Los Alamos nuclear site, where he comes to the aid of two distressed motorists, a Hollywood actor (Jonathan Pryce) and his wife (Judy Davis) en route to a lover's weekend in the desert. Inviting the couple back to his ramshackle squat, Boy at first appears to be their savior. As he proceeds to delay fixing their broken-down Bentley or using his own truck to drive them to the nearest town, it becomes clear he is in fact their captor.More »

Bernardo Britto's Places Where We Lived

More good news for the filmmakers of Borscht Corp: Four selections from this year's Borscht Film Festival have been selected to screen at SXSW in Austin next month.

There are just 34 films in the festival's Narrative Shorts category, so having five of them come from Borscht helps to validate Miami as a regional indie film hub. Check out the selections after the jump.

See also:
- Borscht Film Festival: The Good, the Bad, and the WTF
- Borscht Film Festival's #PostModem Accepted to Sundance

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Jaie LaPlante and Ruth Shack announce this year's MIFF selections.

Miami film buffs, clear your calendars. The 30th anniversary of the Miami International Film Festival is upon us, featuring 10 straight days of celeb-studded documentaries, world premieres, and critically acclaimed tributes.

This year's lineup will feature 117 feature films and 12 shorts from a total of 41 countries. Notable mentions include Venus and Serena, a documentary on the superstar siblings; River Phoenix's last flick, Dark Blood; and Viggo Mortensen flaunting flawless Spanish in Everybody Has a Plan.

See also:
Lee Brian Schrager's Culinary Cinema To Debut At Miami International Film Festival
River Phoenix's Last Film to Make U.S. Debut at Miami International Film Festival

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erpb

Upstream Color

Bold, impassioned, ecstatically beautiful, Shane Carruth's Upstream Color -- a lyric reverie on loss, love, and various invasions of the body -- was in a class by itself at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. Well, let's say it was a class shared by a more conventional but no less heady consideration of coupledom and the cosmos, Richard Linklater's Before Midnight, the third (but one hopes not the last) in Linklater's series of scintillating gabfests co-scripted with stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.

See also:
- Watch The Apocalypse, the Mind-Blowing Borscht Film Festival Short That Screened at Sundance
- New Times' full coverage of the Sundance Film Festival

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Andrew Zuchero's short film The Apocalypse was one of the audience favorites at the Borscht Film Festival last month. Turns out, that audience had pretty great taste, because the film was accepted to screen at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, running now through Sunday.

What's not to love? You've got quality actors like Martin Starr, of the hilarious and underappreciated comedy Party Down. You've got an opening topic everybody can relate to: boredom. And you've got a series of explosive surprises that'll turn your head inside out. (See what we did there?)

See it for yourself after the jump.

See also:
- Borscht Film Festival: The Good, the Bad, and the WTF
- Sundance 2013: America's Black Indie Film Renaissance
- More news from the Sundance Film Festival

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