A new video podcast is asking a simple question: where do revolutions begin?

Living for the City, hosted by MacArthur Fellow and bestselling author Hanif Abdurraqib, traces music movements back to the neighborhoods, record stores, and street corners where they started. The eight-episode first season focuses on Detroit, exploring how the city shaped Motown, techno, and hip-hop.

Abdurraqib, known for his work in The New Yorker and books like A Little Devil in America, sits down with artists, DJs, producers, and the people behind the scenes who built these movements from the ground up. It’s his first time hosting on camera.

“I am someone who has a deep investment in not just sounds, but the roots of the sounds, the hands and hearts that went into making the sounds,” Abdurraqib said.

The series premieres May 13 on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts, with new episodes dropping every Wednesday. Future seasons will spotlight other cities that have shaped music across generations.

Living for the City is produced by Side Stage, a network from Live Nation and Magnet Originals.

For creators trying to understand how local scenes go global, this one’s worth watching.

Foster the People are hitting the road this fall with a 25-date North American tour that promises to bring their latest live show vision to cities across the U.S. and Canada.

The “Good Mourning Sunshine” tour kicks off September 9 in Phoenix and wraps October 23 at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. Goth Babe joins most dates, with The Beaches supporting at Red Rocks. The run includes stops at Forest Hills Stadium in New York, Red Rocks in Colorado, and Toronto’s RBC Amphitheatre.

The tour follows a massive 2025 world tour behind Paradise State of Mind, the band’s third Top 10 album. That record earned praise from Billboard, NME, and Forbes before selling out shows across North America, Europe, and Latin America.

Foster the People debuted a reimagined live show at Coachella earlier this year, built around a 1950s utopia that unravels into psychedelic chaos. It’s a visual commentary on the modern world that they’ll now bring to amphitheaters and theaters nationwide.

Citi presale starts May 5 at 8am local, followed by artist presale at 10am. General on-sale is May 8 at 10am via fosterthepeople.com.

For indie and mainstream acts alike, fall tour season just got a lot more interesting.

Teenager Cata is having a pretty normal summer on Mallorca, swimming in the Mediterranean and flirting with a Swedish boy. Then her grandmother dies. One day, she slips into her abuela’s dress and feels something pull her closer to the woman she just lost.

That’s the setup for “Forastera,” a Spanish ghost story that trades scares for something quieter and more unsettling. Director Lucía Aleñar Iglesias uses the sun-drenched island as the backdrop for a film about grief, memory, and the strange ways the dead stay with us.

The debut feature won the FIPRESCI Prize at Toronto International Film Festival and picked up awards at festivals across Spain, including Best New Director for Aleñar Iglesias at Seminci Valladolid. Critics are calling it tender, poetic, and a revelation for star Zoe Stein.

“Forastera” opens May 29 at Film Forum in New York. The title translates to “stranger,” which feels right for a movie about becoming someone else while trying to hold onto someone you’ve lost. It’s the kind of ghost story that lingers because it’s less about hauntings and more about what we carry forward.

What happens when a bestselling fantasy author is a decade past deadline and completely out of ideas?

Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, the duo behind Criminal and Kill Or Be Killed, are exploring that nightmare in Unfinished Tales, a new original graphic novel coming this winter from Image Comics.

The story follows Finnegan Blake, a wildly successful author whose epic fantasy series became a massive TV show. There’s just one problem: he’s ten years overdue on the final book and has no clue how to finish it. When an old friend arrives with a solution to his writer’s block, things spiral into dark territory fast.

“I’ve always been fascinated by why people write, or in this case, why they don’t,” Brubaker said. “It’s a deep dive into the world of writers and publishing, the pressure to succeed, and what that may cost you. It’s also a very fucked up thriller about egos and ambition.”

The book mixes Stephen King’s Misery with The Talented Mr. Ripley, and somehow threads the needle for fans of both Tolkien and Megan Abbott.

Unfinished Tales hits comic shops November 11 and bookstores December 8. For indie creators grinding through their own deadlines and creative demons, this one might hit a little too close to home.

A trio of stories connected by an ancient ginkgo tree just won director Ildikó Enyedi the Sloan Science on Screen Award.

SFFILM announced the honor for Enyedi’s Silent Friend at the 69th San Francisco International Film Festival, which runs through May 4. The film stars Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Léa Seydoux, and Luna Wedler as souls linked across a century. Enyedi takes home $5,000 along with the award.

But the bigger story is the $115,000 in grants going to five filmmakers developing science-driven screenplays. The Sloan Science in Cinema Initiative, now in its tenth year, pairs writers with science advisors to shape stories where discovery becomes drama.

Destiny Macon’s Talk Black follows a Black engineer battling gentrification and workplace sexism. Justin Kim WooSŏk’s The Green Corridor tracks a Korean-American anthropologist searching for a rumored tiger in the DMZ. Each receives $35,000.

Three more writers split $20,000 grants for early-stage projects inspired by real scientific breakthroughs. Lane Unsworth’s Hello Neighbor imagines how NASA would announce alien life. Sid Gopinath and Aditya Joshi’s One Inch From Earth chronicles the scramble to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa.

“We’re getting to support a filmmaker at the screenplay stage while the story is being shaped,” says SFFILM’s Masashi Niwano.

Since 2015, the initiative has supported 40 artists. The goal? Help audiences connect to science through cinema that gets the facts right.

A farmhand’s simple life gets upended when village elders force him to march across Transylvania with a dangerous stranger. Their mission: take down the region’s murderous viceroy.

That’s the setup for Regicide, a new ongoing series from Image Comics launching August 12. Writer Patrick Kindlon (Tigress Island, Gehenna: Naked Aggression) and artist Ludovic Lalliat (Akutezoïde) are promising a bloodsoaked fantasy that mixes Dracula with Berserk.

“True monster-of-the-issue storytelling where you are guaranteed sensational and sensual battles for the souls of our heroes every month,” Kindlon said. “Violence you can feel in a world so dripping with evil the droplets will hit your head as you read.”

The series will feature multiple covers for the first issue, including variants by Atomcyber and Kerbcrawlerghost, plus a blank sketch cover for artists. Digital versions will be available through Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, and Google Play.

For indie creators working in dark fantasy, this is the kind of swing-for-the-fences project that shows there’s still room for uncompromising horror storytelling in comics.

A daughter goes home to face the family tragedy that broke everything.

“Hearse Chasing,” the new documentary from director Teresa Alfeld, follows singer-songwriter Cassidy Waring as she returns to Calgary with her brother Cooper to confront their mother’s death and the violence that led to it. The film screens at VIFF Centre on Mother’s Day, May 10th, with a live performance from Waring and her band.

Growing up in 90s suburban Calgary, Waring’s family looked stable until addiction and abuse shattered it. Years later, now deep into her music career, she’s diagnosed with Complex PTSD and starts unpacking what really happened. Through therapy sessions, home movies, and her songwriting process, the film traces what healing actually looks like when the past won’t stay buried.

The doc premieres on TELUS Optik TV and TELUS Stream+ on May 13th, then drops free on YouTube the same night during Mental Health Awareness Month. A live chat will run alongside the online premiere.

“My relationship with my mom is such a big part of both the film and my music,” Waring says. “I know this day can bring love and celebration, but also grief and heartache.”

Waring’s new album, “If I Had Only Been Better,” digs deeper into her experience with complex trauma. For indie artists turning their pain into art, this one hits close.

One of the greatest documentaries ever made about filmmaking is getting the deluxe treatment it deserves. Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse hits 4K UHD on May 19, exclusively through Lionsgate Limited.

Eleanor Coppola’s raw, unflinching chronicle of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s chaotic production of Apocalypse Now remains a masterclass in documentary filmmaking. She captured everything, the disastrous weather delays, Martin Sheen’s health crisis, the political turmoil in the Philippines, and Francis spiraling under the weight of his own ambition. The documentary even includes secretly recorded conversations with Coppola at his most vulnerable.

The three-disc collector’s edition is loaded. Beyond the 4K restoration of the 97-minute doc, it includes audio commentary from Eleanor and Francis, plus a new featurette titled “Eleanor Coppola: Art Is All Around Us.” A third disc dives deep into Eleanor’s broader body of work, featuring her shorts from the ’70s and behind-the-scenes docs she shot on films like Marie Antoinette, The Virgin Suicides, and CQ.

Eleanor passed away in 2024, making this release a fitting tribute to an artist who understood that the struggle behind great art is often as compelling as the finished work itself. Pre-orders are live now at Lionsgate Limited for $79.99.

A surly middle schooler who only cares about plants might be the most relatable protagonist you’ll see this year.

“Mabel” opens today at Cinema Village in New York, marking the feature debut of director Nicholas Ma. The coming-of-age story centers on Callie, a biracial teen played by newcomer Lexi Perkel, who’s more interested in botany than people. After her family moves and she has to switch schools, Callie talks her way into a high school science class taught by substitute teacher Ms. G (Judy Greer). There, she starts an experiment growing chrysanthemums in complete darkness and somehow convinces her bubbly younger neighbor Agnes to help.

Christine Ko and Quincy Dunn-Baker round out the cast. Ma co-wrote the script with Joy Goodwin, and the film was produced by Ben Howe, Luca Borghese, and Helen Estabrook.

“Mabel” screened at the 2024 San Francisco Film Festival before landing its theatrical release. The film hits digital on April 21, just four days after its Cinema Village run begins.

It’s refreshing to see an indie coming-of-age story that ditches the usual teenage angst for something more specific. A precocious kid using plants as a bridge into adolescence? That’s a new one.

A grocery run. A commute. Planting a tree in the yard. These mundane moments became the raw material for something unexpected.

IT GOES THAT QUICK follows two families across eight years as filmmakers Ashley Connor and Joe Stankus blur the line between documentary and fiction. What began as a playful project, casting their own relatives in short films about everyday life, evolved into something deeper as the cameras kept rolling.

Set against strip malls and highways in the American Northeast, the 70-minute feature captures the texture of ordinary existence. But as years pass and the filmmakers keep shooting, those trivial routines start to mean something. The result is part time capsule, part meditation on why we pick up cameras in the first place.

Connor, a cinematographer nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for MADELINE’S MADELINE, brings her eye to HBO’s THE CHAIR COMPANY and features like REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES. Stankus, a Brooklyn writer/director whose shorts have played New York Film Festival and Rotterdam, makes his feature debut here.

The film premieres April 25 at MoMI’s First Look Festival, with both directors in attendance. For indie filmmakers wrestling with how to make something personal without a budget, this one’s worth watching. Sometimes the best stories are hiding in your parents’ driveway.