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Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Joan Micklin Silver on the set of Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979). Trailblazing filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver, best known for films Hester Street (1975) and Crossing Delancey (1988), has died. In an interview with Film Comment in 2017, Silver described the will she possessed as a woman filmmaker who wished to spotlight stories about female relationships and women's labor: "I didn’t want to feel like the woman director. I wanted to feel like one of many women directors."The 71st edition of the Berlin Film Festival will be replacing this year's physical event with a virtual European Film Market in March, and a "mini-festival with a series of onsite world premieres" in June.The International Film Festival Rotterdam has also announced the lineup for this year's hybrid multi-part 50th edition, to be presented between February 1-...

"Hey, is that real? She couldn't be." So says Sean Thornton (John Wayne) in John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952). The "that," the "she" in question is Maureen O'Hara's red-headed, red-skirted Mary Kate Danaher. He catches sight of her in the long space of lighting a cigarette as she passes by shepherding a flock of sheep through the idyllic Irish countryside. Her vibrant redness appears with such Technicolor glory that we may feel the same––has there ever been a red so seemingly unreal against nature's sprawling green?"Red is more durable," the Rev. Cyril Playfair (Arthur Shields) comments on the door of Sean Thornton's refurbished cottage "White O'Morn," which he has painted green––emerald green, a shade "only an American would have thought of." That is the remark of the Reverend's wife, who admires it as looking the way Irish cottages should "and seldom do." Sean Thornton spent...

Films by Charlie Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, and Buster Keaton are among the “hundreds of thousands” of books, musical scores, and motion pictures that will enter the public domain on January 1, according to The Atlantic. All of the works were first made available to audiences in 1923, four years before the introduction of talkies. Due to changed copyright laws, this will be the largest collection of material to lose its copyright protections since 1998.

Artists looking to incorporate black-and-white era throwbacks into their modern creations will have lots of new options. The Atlantic consulted unpublished research from Duke University School of Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, which shared with IndieWire a list of 35 films that will soon become available to all.

“Our list is therefore only a partial one; many more works are entering the public domain as well, but the relevant information to confirm this may...

New York’s Anthology Film Archives has announced the lineup for its ambitious Woman With a Movie Camera: Female Film Directors Before 1950,” which runs September 15 — 28. Among the spotlighted filmmakers are Gene Gauntier, Lois Weber and Alice Guy-Blaché, though many more will be featured during the two-week series as well. Full lineup below.

“The Girl Spy Before Vicksburg” (Sidney Olcott & Gene Gauntier)

“Further Adventures of the Girl Spy” (Sidney Olcott)

“The Colleen Bawn” (Sidney Olcott & Gene Gauntier)

“Broadway Love” (Ida May Park)

“The Adventures of Prince Achmed” (Lotte Reiniger)

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“The Rosary” and “Suspense” (Lois Weber & Phillips Smalley)

“Shoes” (Lois Weber)

“The Holy Night” (Elvira Notari)

“Humankind” (Elvira Giallanella)

“The Drunken Mattress” (Alice Guy-Blaché)

“The Strike” (Alice Guy-Blaché)

“The New Love and the Old” (Alice Guy-Blaché)

“The Roads That Lead Home” (Alice Guy-Blaché)

“The...

Jack Huston cast in 'Ben-Hur' remake? 'Boardwalk Empire' actor to follow in the footsteps of Ramon Novarro and Charlton Heston Jack Huston, best known for playing World War I veteran-turned-bootlegger-cum-assassin Richard Harrow in the HBO series Boardwalk Empire, may star in the latest Ben-Hur "remake," to be jointly produced by Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. I have "remake" between quotes because officially this fourth big-screen version of the semi-biblical epic (more on that below) isn't an actual remake of either the multiple Oscar-winning 1959 Ben-Hur or its 1925 predecessor, but a direct adaptation of former Civil War general Lew Wallace's 1880 bestselling novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, which happens to be conveniently in the public domain. Timur Bekmambetov, whose credits include the Angelina Jolie-James McAvoy thriller Wanted and the supernatural cult classic Night Watch, has been attached as director of what is in fact A Tale...

In exciting news, Irish Film & TV (Iftv) Research Online, a Trinity College project, is making available nine dramatized films about the Irish, made in Ireland and America by Sidney Olcott and others during the period of 1910 to 1915. Canadian-born Alcott, who was of Irish heritage, moved to Ireland and made several films there. He even had plans for a permanent studio in Beaufort, County Kerry, but the First World War intervened. Iftv says that almost all the Irish-themed fiction films released in this period were produced by foreign filmmakers, but during 1916 to 1920 Irish filmmakers working mainly for the Film Company of Ireland also made innovative and challenging films. ----------------------- Read more: More movie news from IrishCentral Sean Quinn’s wife and children could face bankruptcy hearing to repay banks History of Ireland’s War of Independence changed by Kerry students ----------------------- Five of the nine films are concerned with aspects of...

Biff Productions will present the Irish Premiere of feature doc 'Blazing the Trail: The O'Kalems in Ireland' documentary at this year's Galway Film Fleadh. Written and directed by Peter Flynn and produced by Tony Tracy (Huston School of Film, Nui Galway), 'Blazing the Trail' follows Sidney Olcott and Gene Gauntier of the New York based Kalem Film Company who made close to 30 films in Ireland in the early 1910s.

Video / Trailer for "Lad from Old Ireland" / Click here This year the Boston Irish Film Festival present a unique multimedia event that takes you back to the early 1910s when pioneering screenwriter/actress Gene Gauntier and director Sidney Olcott of the Kalem Film Company blazed a trail from New York to Killarney—and into history. Affectionately known as the “O’Kalems,” Gauntier, Olcott, and their crew became the first American filmmakers to shoot overseas and the first to produce films that reflected the realities of the Irish experience. A sentimental mix of rebel dramas, folk romances and tales of exile and emigration, their films proved tremendously popular with the Irish in America and helped ease the ease the pangs of being so far from home. At the Boston Irish Film Festival on Monday, November 23, Blazing the Trail presents a selection of these rarely-seen films with live musical accompaniment and interspersed...