Josh and Benny Safdie’s Uncut Gems and Robert Eggers’s The Lighthouse topped the nominations list with five nominations each as Film Independent announced today the 2019 Film Independent Spirit Award nominees. Chinonye Chukwu’s Sundance winner Clemency, Julius Onah’s Luce and Alma Har’el’s Honey Boy also received multiple nominations as did lesser-promoted films such as Kirill Mikhanovsky’s Give Me Liberty and Tom Quinn’s Colewell. And so did one festival sleeper that premiered in Tribeca before then going to Netflix: Stefan Bristol’s See You Yesterday. That particular Spirit blend of higher-profile titles mixed with smaller ones continues throughout the rest of the […]
In 1996, flying home from Slamdance, I was stuck on the tarmac at the Salt Lake City airport in a blizzard. After an hour and a half, a Sundance actor and I tried to talk the flight attendants into playing a VHS tape of my film Omaha (The Movie) in the cabin. They were happy to but said we had to clear it with the pilot and led us into the cockpit. The pilot thought it was a cool idea, too, but ultimately wondered whether the corporate office might object and decided he probably shouldn’t play the film. To this […]
Ukrainian director Roman Liubyi’s Iron Butterflies examines the ramifications of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down by Russian forces as it passed over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, killing all 298 passengers on board. With an intricate nonfiction narrative laid out by Liubyi and Mila Zhluktenko, Iron Butterflies confronts the political aftermath of this atrocity. Liubyi and Zhluktenko discuss the process of cutting Iron Butterflies, as well as their involvement in the Babylon’13 film collective. See all responses to our annual Sundance editor interviews here. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your […]
With You Resemble Me currently playing at the Angelika Film Center, Filmmaker presents two guest posts about the film’s self-distribution, one by the film’s writer and director, Dina Amer, and, below, one by producer Elizabeth Woodward. After a beautiful premiere in Venice, 30 festival awards from over 70 festivals around the world, our special film You Resemble Me did not have any meaningful distribution offers on the table. We could not believe that our only option was to take a deal that not only would place the film in a catalog of films that we didn’t feel were of the […]
If there’s any film festival that could possibly benefit from this pandemic era’s new virtual normal, consider the one in the most remote major city in the world, Honolulu. (The city’s closest neighbor with a population over 500k is San Francisco, a mere 2386 miles away). The launch pad for Hawaiian filmmakers, a cultural centerpiece for cinematic voices across the Pacific Islands and Polynesia, and a proven showcase for East Asian genre and arthouse cinema, the Hawai’i International Film Festival has always spread its proverbial audience net far and wide, with theaters filled with high-school surfers one moment, and the […]
Some filmmakers spend their summer vacations on a Greek island, lounging with their Peloponnesian lover while watching old VHS bootlegs of Cassevetes films. I, on the other hand, spent my summer vacation going to an average of one meeting a day in order to become a TV director. Mind you, I’m not giving up on indie film, but we all know the drill by now: TV is the new indie film. It pays well, it’s more creative, it’s more instantly gratifying and all the cool kids are doing TV now. Hell, the Amazon pilot list alone has more Sundance alumni […]
Documentarian Doug Pray has made films about grafitti artists (Infamy), an iterant surfing family (Surfwise), Seattle punk scene (Hype!) Hip Hop DJ’s (Scratch) and truckers (Big Rig), and now, with Art & Copy, he profiles the living legends of corporate advertising. Advertising has a complicated relationship to filmmaking — for one thing, many feature and documentary directors make a living doing commercials. The men and women profiled in Pray’s film have been responsible for most revolutionary campaigns of the ad business — VW’s “Lemon” and “Think Small” were by George Lois, who also provoked controversy with his Esquire Covers and […]