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Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSEl Conde (Pablo Larraín).Natalie Portman will star opposite Julianne Moore in Todd Haynes's next film, May December, which begins filming later this year. In the film, an actress (Portman) meets with the woman she is due to portray (Moore) in a film that dramatizes her tabloid scandal.After Spencer, Pablo Larraín's next project with Netflix will be El Conde, a pitch-black comedy that will portray Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a 250-year-old vampire.Pedro Almodóvar has announced a new 30-minute Western, Strange Way of Life, which he will shoot in August. The short stars Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as two gunslingers, long separated, who must cross the Spanish desert to reunite. Almodóvar's next feature—an adaptation of Lucia Berlin's A Manual for Cleaning Women led by Cate Blanchett—begins filming early next year.

Celluloid film prints will now soon be coming back to a theater near you.

The Film Exhibition Fund, a new grants-giving 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting the continued screening of celluloid film prints, has officially announced the first two recipients of grants. IndieWire can exclusively share that New York’s Anthology Film Archives and Microscope Gallery are the inaugural grantees.

The Anthology Film Archives are using the 2,500 grant for upcoming screenings of Andy Warhol’s “Sleep” (1963), “Empire” (1964), and “Chelsea Girls” (1966). The first two films run over five and eight hours long, respectively, while “Chelsea Girls” involves over three hours of dual-screen projection. The series is set to screen in August.

“Preserving the experience of theatrical projection — and especially the projection of 35mm, 16mm, and 8mm film prints — is at the core of Anthology’s mission,” Anthology Film Archives Film Programmer Jed Rapfogel said. “We’re motivated by the conviction...

For their 5th annual event, which is set to run Sept. 8-11, the Sydney Underground Film Festival is looking a little more demented than ever. And that’s saying a lot for this scrappy, still relatively young fest, which typically offers ample twisted cinematic offerings.

The fun kicks off with the Opening Night film, the demented superhero comedy Super, written and directed by former Troma go-to screenwriter James Gunn (Tromeo & Juliet); then ends with the Closing Night wallowing in Sydney’s seedy underbelly, X, by homegrown filmmaker Jon Hewitt.

Crammed between these two excursions into violence and depravity is a lineup filled with perverse visions, scandalous public figures, sickening horror, experimental pop culture remixes and more.

For Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film, the highlight of the fest is Usama Alshaibi‘s Profane, a complex psychological, psychosexual, spiritual morality play about a Muslim sex worker who endures a “reverse...

The 39th annual Festival du Nouveau Cinema is set to run in Montreal on Oct 13-24. But, within the overall, massive festival is the Fnc Lab, the avant-garde and experimental section that will be having screenings and live film performances every night on Oct. 14-22.

This year, the Fnc Lab is showcasing two retrospectives; plus, a short film program of strictly 16mm films, films from the Korean Jeonju Digital Project, four feature-length projects and several special one-of-a-kind performances.

The retrospectives are of two key American women experimental filmmakers. First, in conjunction with the Double Negative Collective, the fest presents a career overview of Chick Strand, the eminent ethnographic filmmaker who sadly passed away last year at the age of 77.

Then, there’s also a retrospective of playful avant-garde filmmaker Marie Losier, who is well known for her collaborations with and film portraits of key underground figures like George Kuchar, Tony Conrad and Genesis P-Orridge.