Ioncinema

Of all the major film festivals, it’s perhaps the Sundance folks who have built the deepest ties with the filmmaker community and much of this stems from the alumni relationships formed from having programmed a short and sometimes, as is...

Among the select few documentary short films chosen for the 2025 Sundance Film Festival is Death Education, a poignant story set in China in places we don’t always associate with the final resting place. Following a high school teacher who...

For the second consecutive year, we reviewed all the shorts from the eight program lineups that make up the Short Film selections and narrowed down our top ten best shorts from a total of 57 (out of 11,153 submissions). While...

The acerbic war film comedy that doesn’t really take place in a war zone (Iraq) but instead, a manufactured training base landed the top honors at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Hailey Gates’ feature debut Atropia claimed the coveted US...

In the Name of the Father: Honore Pays Homage via Identity Crisis “I only exist when I am working on a film,” Marcello Mastroianni once said, who is, of course, resurrected through the prism of his daughter Chiara Mastorianni in...

Ripe Fruits: Kanawade Taps the Bittersweet Rind of Going Home Again While there’s been an uptick in contemporary LGBTQ+ films from India over the past two decades, many have maintained a low international profile with the exception of a few...

Love Me If You Dare: Broe Explores Love in a Hopeless Place Harlan Ellison’s publication Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled might be a more fitting title for Sauna, the directorial debut of Danish filmmaker Mathias Broe, in essence a...

All DJs, Great and Small: Unkovski’s Debut Can’t Stop the Music While its location might feel inherently unique, the happenings in Georgi M. Unkovski’s narrative debut DJ Ahmet sing a familiar tune. A coming-of-age trajectory defined by the formidable temptation...

One of the only two films selected for the Spotlight section (films that have premiered elsewhere on the festival circuit), Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili continues to distinguish herself with international programmers and audiences – the Park City splash for April...

A Poison Tree: Khatami Deconstructs the Psychoses of Patriarchy For his third feature, Iranian American director Alireza Khatami formulates a powerful psychodrama unspooling through the microcosm of normalized patriarchal dysfunction in Turkey with The Things You Kill. Employing a surreal...