Filmmaker

Spring 2013: Click here to read interviews with Frances Ha's Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, The Act of Killing's Joshua Oppenheimer, Before Midnight's Richard Linklater and more...

Featured

5 Recommendations for the Northside Film Festival

Go Down Death Go Down Death

Kicking off this week in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the Northside Film Festival once again has invited a number of community partners, including Filmmaker, to curate programs of new independent, foreign and retrospective titles. Filmmaker‘s pick is Nicolas Provost’s bracing The Invader, a kind of African immigrant on Taxi Driver, which is receiving its New York premiere. Provost is a Belgian visual artist and filmmaker who recently moved to Bushwick, and he’ll be attending the Q&A. Below are five picks — including The Invader — you can plan your calendar around this week. Go Down Death. Amidst all the cookie-cutter indies, Aaron Schimberg’s Go Down Death casts a mysterious spell. The feature debut of this Brooklyn-based filmmaker is a dreamy, highly stylized…  Read more

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Five Questions with The Cold Lands Director Tom Gilroy

The Cold Lands The Cold Lands

In 2000, IFC Films released Spring Forward, the first feature directed by actor Tom Gilroy. Starring Ned Beatty and Liev Schreiber, it’s a quiet, unassuming film full of carefully observed interpersonal intricacies, focusing on the growth of the two men’s relationship over the course of a year while they work for the Parks Department in a small Connecticut town. One of the smartest, subtlest indie films of its era, Spring Forward won awards and an impressive array of rave reviews. Nevertheless, it took Gilroy nearly a decade to get going on his second feature, The Cold Lands, which is only just making the festival rounds now. “It wasn’t for lack of trying in between there,” says Gilroy. “My partner Paul…  Read more

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VOD Wars Heat Up

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Intel, the giant computer chip manufacturer, is joining the growing roster of tech companies entering the web-delivered video jamboree. In addition to Google’s YouTube and Netflix, Apple and Microsoft are carving out space on the web to offer live and video-on-demand (VOD) TV programming. Web video distribution can be executed either as Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) or as Over-the-Top (OTT). With IPTV, the digital signal is streamed and/or offered as VOD programming over a closed or proprietary network through a cable or telephone company. OTT refers to streaming and/or VOD programming distributed over an open or unmanaged video data stream that rides on top of an ISP’s network. OTT programming is accessed through a specialty set-top box like that offered…  Read more

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Fifth Time’s a Charm: BAMcinemaFest

White Reindeer, photo courtesy of Zach Clark White Reindeer, photo courtesy of Zach Clark

Something of a cinematic wunderkind, BAMcinemaFest (June 19-28) is the offspring of the three-year marriage, consummated in Brooklyn in 2006, between the Sundance Institute and BAMcinematek.  The festival jumped past the Sundance-only model, adding submissions and films from SXSW, Toronto, and True/False. Curator Florence Almozini expertly cherry-picks the best indies from the previous year; each is a New York premiere. Around the time the betrothal was dissolving, Almozini explains, “We were looking at the NYC festival scene to find our own niche. We felt that no other festival was actually focusing on new U.S. indie films. BAMcinemaFest as a showcase for new American indies was a natural and organic development.” She adds that most of the titles are in fact…  Read more

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10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Director Alejandro Jodorowsky

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Alejandro Jodorowsky premiered his first directorial feature in 23 years at Cannes this year with the fictionalized autobiographical film The Dance of Reality. The man behind cult favorites El Topo and The Holy Mountain delighted audiences with his magic-realist account of growing up in Tocopilla, Chile. It was met with a standing ovation, and the director called the film’s reception in France one of the proudest moments of his life. The Dance of Reality is marked by fantastic, surreal characters, from an opera-singing mother to an overzealous anarchist to a painted religious guru. It is easy to see how Jodorowsky’s blooming imagination took shape with such a beginning. His own son Brontis Jodorowsky plays his father in the film, an…  Read more

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The Scent: Interview with D.P. Stefan Müller

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What do you do when you get a new camera? Some people run out and shoot test footage, while others just gamble and use the camera on the next shoot they have lined up. When Stefan Müller, an Austrian freelance film director, d.p. and editor acquired a Canon C100, he went out and shot The Scent, a 12-minute short. One of the stars of this short is a black Labrador called Sky. Despite W.C. Fields’ admonition, “Never work with children or animals,” Müller captured a great performance from the dog, yet when asked if anything interesting or unusual happened during the shoot he replied, “Unfortunately, not really.” He did, however, answer our questions about the shoot, and offer some thoughts…  Read more

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Filmmaking

jodorowsky

10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Director Alejandro Jodorowsky

Alejandro Jodorowsky premiered his first directorial feature in 23 years at Cannes this year with the fictionalized autobiographical film The Dance of Reality. The man behind cult favorites El Topo and The Holy Mountain delighted audiences with his magic-realist account of growing up in Tocopilla,…  Read more

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Jun 17, 2013

Columns

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Shooting with a RED EPIC in Indonesia: Interview with David Kruta

Cinematographer David Kruta spent a week in Indonesia this February shooting footage for the SurfAid charity to use in their promotional and educational campaigns. He took with him a RED EPIC, and says that the goal was to “bring a cinematic approach” to something that…  Read more

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on May 24, 2013

Videos

Festivals & Events

The Congress

Cannes 2013: Five Questions with The Congress Director Ari Folman

It’s been five years since Ari Folman came out with the Academy Award-nominated Waltz with Bashir, an animated personal combat story. He’s back with an incredibly ambitious project, The Congress, that blends real life with fantasy in an adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s celebrated book. The…  Read more

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on May 28, 2013

VOD Picks

  • StrangerThings
    Stranger Things Drama
    New Video / Cinedigm
    Official site
    6/11/2013 VOD
  • upstream_color_xlg
    Upstream Color Drama
    Independent
    Official Site
    5/7/2013 VOD

Interviews

Call Me Kuchu Call Me Kuchu

Katherine Fairfax Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worrall on Call Me Kuchu

In 2009, a bill was proposed in the Ugandan parliament that would outlaw homosexuality, making the offense punishable by death. In response, the newspaper The Rolling Stone began outing members of the LGBT community with the headline “Hang Them.” The LGBT activist David Kato, the first…  Read more

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on Jun 14, 2013

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