3/9/07
BATTLE TESTED
By Jason Guerrasio
It’s been two years since Sin City introduced audiences to the world of Frank Miller. Under the direction of Robert Rodriguez, who shot actors using blue screen technology and then added the computer-generated backgrounds in post, Miller’s graphic novel made it to celluloid as a depraved trio of vignettes that both updated film noir and pointed towards a new way of making motion pictures. Now director Zack Snyder (2004’s Dawn of the Dead), employing the same production method as Rodriguez, takes on Miller’s 300, a blood-soaked retelling of the battle of Thermopylae. The result is as breathtaking to watch as it is entertaining. [continue]

2/22/07
COLMA ROCKS THE INDIE WORLD
By Justin Lowe
Accustomed as we are to lavish, star-studded productions like Dreamgirls, Chicago and Moulin Rouge, it’s rare to hear the words “low-budget” and “musical” uttered in the same sentence.
Contrary to high-priced expectations, however, Colma: The Musical is an upstart indie produced on a shoestring budget in the San Francisco Bay Area that has built a groundswell of support on the festival circuit over the last year, earning awards and prominent placement on year-end critics’ lists. [continue]

1/29/07
PODCAST: WHITE PLASTIC FLOWER
Jamie Stuart takes on the Sundance Film Festival in his latest short. Click above to watch. Click here to download.

1/25/07
SNAKE EYES
Visualizing the world of Black Snake Moan.
By Bob Fisher
Part of Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. In Black Snake Moan Christina Ricci plays Rae, a nymphomaniac wracked by vivid memories and dreams of being sexually abused during her childhood. Also in Craig Brewer’s follow-up to his Sundance-hit Hustle and Flow is Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Lazarus, a God-fearing farmer who picks at his guitar, sings blues songs about sin, and, after a chance encounter, attempts to oversee Rae’s salvation. [continue]

1/25/07
CHRISTOPHER ZALLA
writer/directors: PADRE NUESTRO.
By James Ponsoldt
Part of Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. Padre Nuestro exemplifies the modern, international face of American independent cinema: the first-time director, Christopher Zalla, was born in Kenya, raised overseas (and is fluent in Spanish), schooled at Columbia, and created a stylish thriller that begins in Mexico and winds up in New York City. A smart film that — one could argue — uses its border-hopping protagonist’s stolen identity as a metaphor for globalization, Padre Nuestro will certainly spark debate at Sundance. [continue]

1/24/07
DAVID KAPLAN
writer/directors: YEAR OF THE FISH.
By James Ponsoldt
Part of Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. A veteran of Sundance with his short films — including the cryptic, menacing fairy tales, Little Red Riding Hood (starring Christina Ricci and Quentin Crisp!), Little Suck-A-Thumb, and The Frog King — which are regularly shown to film students as examples of exemplary short-form filmmaking, David Kaplan returns to the festival with his first feature, Year of the Fish. [continue]

1/24/07
DAN BUSH/DAVID BRUCKNER/JACOB GENTRY
writer/directors: THE SIGNAL.
By James Ponsoldt
Part of Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. Making a feature film, independent or otherwise, isn’t easy (understatement of the century). The seemingly impossible hurdle of gaining financing — not to mention the tiny details of actually executing the film and then seeking distribution — seem Herculean enough to scare off most would-be filmmakers.
Now imagine directing a feature film with two other directors. [continue]

1/24/07
ANOCHA SUWICHAKORNPONG
writer/director: GRACELAND.
By James Ponsoldt
Part of Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. Anocha Suwichakornpong, known by her friends as Mai, is at home on a film set. Case in point: while most filmmakers would kill to watch their film screen in front of a Sundance audience, Mai is on the other side of the world, shooting her next short film, Days and Days and Days and Days. [continue]

1/20/07
JAMES C. STROUSE
writer/director: GRACE IS GONE.
By James Ponsoldt
Part of Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. Certain films arrive at Sundance with a special type of anticipation, whether it’s due to star presence, subject matter, timeliness, or some ineffable quality that is the stuff of buzz. At Sundance 2007, Grace is Gone is one of those films. The directorial debut of James C. Strouse, who wrote Lonesome Jim (the Steve Buscemi-directed film screened at Sundance in 2005), the film tells the heart-wrenching story of a father, played by John Cusack, who must find a way to tell his children that their mother has been killed in Iraq. [continue]

1/20/07
CHERIEN DABIS
writer/director: MAKE A WISH.
By James Ponsoldt
Part of Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. Supported by numerous prestigious grants — including the Jerome Foundation’s New York City Media Arts Grant, the New York State Council on the Art’s Electronic Media and Film Distribution Grant, and National Geographic’s All Roads Film Project Seed Grant — Itmanna (Make a Wish), the most recent short film by writer/director, Cherien Dabis, will quickly follow its Sundance bow with screenings at Berlin and the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival. [continue]

1/19/07
FELLIPE BARBOSA
writer/director: SALT KISS.
By James Ponsoldt
Part of Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. Salt Kiss, the second short film by writer/director Fellipe Barbosa to screen at Sundance (following last year’s La Muerte Es Pequena), has none of the tropes commonly associated—by Americans—with “Latin American” cinema. That means no knife-fights, gambling, gang violence, or overt poverty. Yet Salt Kiss is absolutely a Latin American film—Brazilian, to be exact—because its creator told a film straight from his heart, and yes, he happens to be from Brazil. [continue]

1/19/07
NANOBAH BECKER
writer/director: CONVERSION.
By James Ponsoldt
Part of Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. Conversion, the ambitious second short film by Nanobah Becker, clocks in at only nine minutes, and is described simply tantalizingly as: “Christian missionaries make a catastrophic visit to a Navajo family.” Becker’s first short, Flat, has screened in festivals internationally, and she is a recipient of a 2005 Sundance Institute Ford Fellowship and a 2006 Media Arts Fellowship for her feature screenplay, Full. [continue]

1/19/07
HOPE DICKSON LEACH
writer/director: THE DAWN CHORUS.
By James Ponsoldt
Part of Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. Hope Dickson Leach’s short film, The Dawn Chorus, tells the story of two siblings who annually reenact—with other survivors—the plane crash that killed their parents. An MFA thesis film for Columbia University’s Film program (where Hope graduated with honors), The Dawn Chorus explores the process of grieving and, hopefully healing. [continue]

1/19/07
IAN OLDS
writer/director: BOMOB.
By James Ponsoldt
Part of Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. It isn’t easy to glean a sense of Ian Olds’ identity from his films — they’re too diverse, too global. From Occupation: Dreamland (short-listed for an Academy Award), a breathtaking documentary that avoids simple political interpretation by opting to tell the story of the Iraq War from the perspective of the entire city of Fallujah — including both native Iraqis and U.S. troops — to Bomb, his most recent film, which explores teenage heartache against the backdrop of a decrepit bombing range and junkie malaise, Olds seems to be imbued with an unusual sense of humanism and empathy for individuals stuck in agonizing situations. [continue]

1/19/07
LILAH VANDERBURGH
writer/director: BITCH.
By James Ponsoldt
Part of Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. Bitch, the kinetic, black-and-white, Harold Lloyd-meets-Jello Biafra love story, is one of the most visually sophisticated and stylized films to emerge from that Sundance short film-factory, Columbia University’s MFA Film Program (eight shorts screening at the festival this year!). The film’s director, Lilah Vanderburgh, is obsessed with skater culture, punk-rock, underground comics, and displays the hip film literacy of another director with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture. [continue]

12/22/06
A NEW HUMANITY
Acclaimed director Alfonso Cuarón uses science fiction to conduct an "exploration on the state of things" in his latest, Children of Men.
By Jason Guerrasio
Set in 2027, Alfonso Cuarón’s latest picture, Children of Men, takes place in a bleak England where it’s been 19 years since the last baby was born. Mankind’s future seems grim, and most of the world has devolved into anarchy. Random security checks and bombings have become an everyday occurrence as Great Britain franticly tries to protect its island from illegal immigrants. [continue]

12/5/06
PODCAST: CORNER-DWELLER
Jamie Stuart's short from the IFP Gotham Awards Nominee Reception with the NYC Mayor's Office Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. Click above to watch. Click here to download.

11/27/06
ON THE MOVE
By Jamie Stuart
Ellen Kuras operates like a perpetual-motion machine. One moment she’s photographing Michel Gondry’s latest feature. The next, shooting The Rolling Stones for Martin Scorsese. There are meetings with Lou Reed about an upcoming concert project. Also, a long-gestating documentary she’s been directing at every opportunity. And in between all of that, she found time to replace her old car that just died and pick up her new tailless cat from the vet. [continue]

11/8/06
LOS ANGELES FILM FESTIVAL
By Jason Sanders
Like the real estate agents say, it’s all about location, location, location, and this year the Los Angeles Film Festival (June 22-July2) proved it by swapping its previous strip-mall digs for the more expansive realm of Westwood Village. [continue]

11/8/06
KARLOVY VARY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
By Howard Feinstein
The old section of Karlovy Vary, a town which caters to tourists and those seeking medicinal effects from some of the town’s 60 springs, is beautiful, quaint—and restored. One of the most visited spots in the Czech Republic, it is surrounded by large woody patches and gorgeous old mansions at a slightly higher altitude. You don’t have to go too far, however, to see the rest of the town. [continue]

11/8/06
TELLURIDE FILM FESTIVAL
By Isabel Sadurni
If you took a plane to Denver, then a charter flight to Montrose or Grand Junction and then a jitney through and over the San Juan mountain range of southwestern Colorado, then down into a forested, steep canyon, you would arrive in the small mountain village of Telluride, site of one of the most highly revered film festivals in the world. [continue]

11/8/06
VENICE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
By Belle Burke
In this spectacularly beautiful city, the 63rd Venice International Film Festival (Aug. 30-Sept. 9) tended to pass over the spectacular, both in films and in star power, awarding the Golden Lion for best film to a low-key Chinese film, Still Life (Sanxia Haoren) directed by Jia Zhang-Ke, a "surprise film" not named until the last minute. And although Zhang-Ke has passionate fans, in my opinion Still Life was a missed opportunity. [continue]

9/22/06
FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL
Director Paul Rachman retraces the history of punk rock.
By KJ Doughton
Paul Rachman’s American Hardcore is a salute to the U.S. underground punk scene that exploded in 1980. Inspired by Steven Blush’s 2001 book American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Feral House), Rachman’s blunt documentary was culled from over 120 hours of interview footage, as well as a stack of archival concert videos compiled from closets, shoeboxes and fan memorabilia stashes. [continue]

9/21/06
HOLY WAR
The team behind the award-winning documentary Boys of Baraka are back with a new film that focuses on Evangelical children training to be “soldiers in God’s Army.”
By Annie Nocenti
Early on in Jesus Camp, Pentecostal minister Becky Fischer asks an auditorium full of children and parents: “Do you believe God can do anything?” A young mother grabs her child’s arm and raises it. [continue]

8/16/06
FILM FIX
Director Nicolas Winding Refn on “The Pusher Trilogy.”
By KJ Doughton
Halfway through “Pusher,” Nicolas Winding Refn’s first installment in what would ultimately become an epic trilogy, the director faced a predicament. Suddenly, the genre marked by guns and car chases held no interest. [continue]

7/16/06
HEAD TRIP
Co-director Keith Fulton reveals how to create an unlikely filmic Frankenstein like Brothers of the Head, welding a bizarre story of conjoined rock stars onto a fake-documentary framework.
By KJ Doughton
Ever heard of Tom and Barry Howe, conjoined twin frontmen from seminal seventies punk rock band Bang Bang? Remember “Two Way Romeo,” their signature live hit, when Barry would pull up his shirt and display the shared flesh-band that forever connected them at the midsection? No recollection? Then what about the British band “Spinal Tap,” with the exploding drummer? [continue]

6/16/06
AGENT PROVOCATEUR
With The Outsider, cinematic badboy James Toback gets in front of the camera for first-time filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki.
By Kevin Canfield
“Who is James Toback?” That’s the question documentary filmmaker Nicholas Jarecki poses in The Outsider, a freewheeling and highly watchable portrait of the director of idiosyncratic films like Fingers and Black and White.

6/16/06
SOUND JAM
The director of Head-On investigates the rich musical culture of his homeland.
By Jeremiah Kipp
The soundtrack and score of the critically acclaimed, adrenaline fueled doomed romance Head-On was a fusion of punk, European electronica, hip-hop, British new wave and traditional Turkish laments, so it’s no great surprise that the Turkish-German director Fatih Akin’s new movie is a documentary about the vibrant and diverse music community in Istanbul.

5/12/06
NEW DIRECTORS/NEW FILMS 2006
By Erica Abeel
A woman falls for a transsexual (A Soap). A teacher addicted to crack connects with an adolescent girl (Half Nelson). A gay pre-teen develops a crush on a rookie cop (The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros). New Directors/New Films has always been eclectic — but at times the 35th edition (which unspooled in New York March 22 to April 2) felt like variations on a common theme: the odd couple. Doubtless the two-hander format was partly dictated by a low or no budget, making a virtue of necessity. But it also suggests, intriguingly, that love and connection flourish more readily in offbeat pairings than traditional couples.

4/24/06
THE INSUBORDINATES
Anthony Kaufman speaks with Sir! No Sir! director David Zeiger.
"Kill them all and sort it out later." Such was the edict given to soldiers fighting in Vietnam, says one anti-war veteran in David Zeiger's timely portrait of the G.I.-lead peace movement, Sir! No Sir! The film documents the rise and rise of dissent among military ranks, from early isolated resisters to the "9 for Peace" to the "Presidio 27" to the thousands of armed forces who eventually joined the crusade to end the conflict. Selected by Filmmaking Magazine as one of the Best Films Not Playing at a Theater Near You, Sir! No Sir!, on the contrary, is now coming to theaters near you.

4/21/06
THESSOLINIKI DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL
By Peter Bowen
Documentary film festivals, simply by the nature of their fare, present a sweeping spectacle of man’s inhumanity to man. At this year’s Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival (March 10 —19), for example, film after film chronicled war, poverty, racism, violence and other dubious human achievements. To be fair, the films are, as the Festival’s overarching theme “Images of the 21st Century” suggests, merely reflections of the times we live in. In dark times as these, documentaries bear the responsibility to illuminate such tragedy. But many of the films pushed to inspire as well. The opening night documentary, Danish filmmakers Simone Aaberg Kaern and Magnus Bejmar’s Smiling in a War Zone was about a plucky Danish artist/flyer who navigated a tiny Piper-Colt airplane from Copenhagen to Afghanistan to meet a young teenager girl who wanted to become a fighter pilot — just in case the Taliban returned.

4/6/06
SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL
By Peter Bowen
The repeated critique of this year’s Sundance Film Festival was that the festival had evolved into a truly schizophrenic experience, oscillating between, on the one hand, a serious film festival for first- and second-time American directors and, on the other hand, a carnival of corporate sponsorship and media marketing. This split, which has been a long time coming, was even echoed by Robert Redford in Newsweek: “To the outside world, it’s a big fat market where you have people like Paris Hilton going to parties. Now, she doesn’t have anything to do with anything. I think the festival is close to being out of control.”

4/6/06
INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL ROTTERDAM
By Jason Sanders
“Rotterdam is a militant festival for film as art, in all its variations,” wrote festival director Sandra den Hamer in her blunt take-it-or-go-back-to-Sundance introduction to this year’s International Film Festival Rotterdam, which, like its 34 prior incarnations, rolled out a dizzying whirl of shorts and features, narratives and documentaries, zero-budget debuts and Hollywood epics, discussions and installations and more in its newly “streamlined” program, down from 300 full-length features to a “mere” 250.

3/31/06
HAMMETT GOES TO HIGH SCHOOL
Jason Guerrasio interviews Brick writer-director Rian Johnson.
Armed with a love for Dashiell Hammett novels and film noir, aspiring writer-director Rian Johnson began work on his own hard-boiled detective film six years ago. With Hammett’s style as his muse, Johnson used the staples of any good detective novel (fast-talking characters, tough-as-nails hero, sultry femme fatale) and placed them in the most unpredictable of settings: high school.

3/22/06
BEAUTY SCHOOL DROP-IN
By Bari Pearlman.
With her 2001 debut On Hostile Ground, documentary filmmaker Liz Mermin followed three American doctors through the tricky battle zone that is a woman’s right to choose. In her latest film, The Beauty Academy of Kabul, she follows eight American hairdressers through a literal battle zone to explore...a woman’s right to coiff. In the summer and fall of 2003 she traveled to the recently embattled Kabul for the opening of a beauty academy.

11/21/05
CLOSE TO THE BONE
An interview with Down To The Bone writer-director Debra Granik.
By Jeremiah Kipp.
Drug addiction is one of the more challenging subjects to represent on film, usually falling into the trap of being sentimentalized redemption or a miserable junkie hell.

10/11/05
OUTFEST 2005
By Peter Bowen.
In recent years, gay and lesbian film festivals like Los Angeles’s Outfest have become victims of their own success. Launched to counter the invisibility of queers in mainstream media, gay festivals have so championed gay representation that it now feels that every self-respecting cable or network television exec wants to include “the gays.” This success, Outfest executive director Stephen Gutwillig explained in his opening night remarks, has prompted some people to ask how much longer gay and lesbian film festivals will be necessary, especially in the increasingly gay-happy town of Hollywood.

9/18/05
PRESUMED MISSING
Shari Roman interviews Keane’s Lodge Kerrigan.
New York-based filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan is a former student of philosophy at Columbia and filmmaking at New York University, an Independent Spirit Award Winner, and the recipient of both Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships for his intense voyages into the frailty of the human soul. Even so, nothing could’ve prepared audiences for his unforgettable, downright disturbing indie debut Clean,Shaven (1994), which cast Peter Greene as a paranoid schizophrenic who attempts to reclaim his daughter from her new family. His next Claire Dolan (1998), starring Vincent D’onofrio and the late, great Katrin Cartlidge, was a realistically bleak look at the emotional life of a mid-range call girl.

8/30/05
2005 LOS ANGELES FILM FESTIVAL
By Jason Sanders.
“I never even knew Los Angeles had a film festival” were the not-so-promising initial words at this year’s, um, Los Angeles Film Festival, spoken by “Honorary Chair” Elijah Wood as he introduced the opening-night film Down in the Valley. Wood’s dubious confession (not exactly what you’d like to hear from an honorary chair, even if he is an ex-hobbit) left organizers nervously gagging on their complimentary Absolut tonics, but fortunately the 2005 edition of the LAFF proceeded to spread the word that Los Angeles does indeed have a film festival, one whose momentum is growing by the year. Its calculated addition of star-clogged new events (“Spirit of Independence Award” to George Clooney) manufactured an attraction glittering enough for individuals who, like Wood, would otherwise have barely noticed, but such top-heavy sparkle fortunately never detracted from what makes the LAFF so invigorating: its commitment to filmmakers and filmgoers who are shut out of such typical Hollywood dreamlands, and who demand — and create — something more; and its ability to actually connect these filmmakers to the industry.

8/16/05
FAMILY VALUES
Indie guru John Pierson takes his family on a South Pacific adventure in Reel Paradise.
By Jason Guerrasio.
For an episode of his IFC show Split Screen, John Pierson went out to discover the most remote movie theater in the world. He found it, the 180 Meridian Cinema in the Fijian island of Taveuni (population around 10,000) near the international dateline. In 2002, growing tired of the film industry, Pierson returned to Taveuni for a year to show free movies to the natives. Along for the journey were John’s wife, Janet, and their two teenage kids, Georgia (16) and Wyatt (13). While in Fiji, John decided to capture the experience on film and enlisted the help of documentary filmmaker Steve James to record the final month of their stay.

7/14/05
BERMUDA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
By Peter Bowen
Why the Bermuda International Film Festival? Why invite people to sit in a darkened room all day in one of the most beautiful places in the world? This year, the unending rain during the Festival (March 18 – 24), provided one obvious answer. But there is a more meritous one. Unlike many resort film festivals which appear to exist only to beef up the chamber of commerce’s list of cultural attractions, the Bermuda International Film Festival (BIFF) offers a serious survey of contemporary cinema.

7/5/05
PIANO MAN
French director Jacques Audiard takes on Toback with The Beat That My Heart Skipped.
By Tobias Grey.
French filmmaker Jacques Audiard clearly has a penchant for 1970s U.S. cinema: Jerry Schatzberg’s road movie Scarecrow provided him with a template (one of several) for his first film, 1994’s See How They Fall; now he has taken things a step further by remaking James Toback’s cult movie Fingers.

6/15/05
2005 FULL FRAME DOCUMENTARY
FILM FESTIVAL
By Gabriel Paletz
A documentary is a hometown microscope and global satellite. It polishes history and explodes current clichés; turns portraits into social panoramas. At Full Frame, North Carolina first lady Mary Easley called documentary “the caviar of the moving image junkie.” Non-fiction also remains the most democratic film form in its array of subjects and styles. As befits documentary’s broad appeal, filmmakers and audiences mixed throughout the festival, up to the final Southern barbecue.

5/4/05
HOME MOVIE
An Interview With Writer-Director Matt Zoller Seitz.
By Jeremiah Kipp.
When asked whether he’s making a transition between film critic to filmmaker, Matt Zoller Seitz grows slightly defensive. But it’s an inevitable question he’ll face along the festival circuit. Home is Seitz’s assured debut feature after years of writing reviews for the Newark Star-Ledger and NY Press. “I don’t see why we need to think of it in either/or terms,” Seitz replies. “There are several people who make movies and still write about them regularly, often critically, including Bilge Ebiri, Peter Bogdanovich, Richard Schickel and Godfrey Cheshire. To me, filmmaking is an extension of criticism, expressed visually rather than in words.”

4/21/05
THE 12^th NEW YORK UNDERGROUND
FILM FESTIVAL
By Katrin Frick
With enough free Pabst Blue Ribbon to keep a hipster house party raging for days, the New York Underground Film Festival’s (NYUFF) entries seemed to mirror a party attendee’s iPod: classic selections, something cheeky and fun, some guilty pleasures, and a whole slew of experimental offerings.

3/28/05
STICKS AND STONES
Patrick Z. McGavin speaks with French writer-director Agnès Jaoui about her Cannes prize-winning social satire Look at Me.
Visiting the country home of the abrasive novelist and celebrated publisher Étienne Cassard (Jean-Pierre Bacri), Sébastien (Keine Bouhiza), a forlorn young suitor, is experiencing crushing romantic disappointment with the man’s daughter, the ironically named Lolita (Marilou Berry). Watching his glum, tortured expression, Étienne looks Sébastien over and says: “The cyanide is in the bathroom.”

3/23/05
THE SWEET SOUND OF SUCCESS
Chicago filmmaker Rusty Nails does it all: writes, directs, produces, acts, plays music, and most important of all, gets his films made.
By Alan Jacobson.
Directors of low-budget independent films must often become their own producers — grueling, time-consuming work that involves securing music rights, location scouting, dealing with actors, scheduling re-shoots, and otherwise managing the daily business of bringing a no-budget independent film project together — in order to get their films made.

3/3/05
ALUMINUM HOLOCAUST
The Films of Giuseppe Andrews
By Kier-La Janisse
Giuseppe Andrews may not be a household name, but the 24-year old actor’s screen time in films like Cabin Fever, American History X and Detroit Rock City have already cemented his position as a pre-teen love object. While the Internet is littered with fan sites devoted to nurturing his heartthrob status, the real Giuseppe Andrews is something markedly different: a movie director poised to take over the underground. [continue]

2/11/05
THE MIGHTY CELT
Dermot Corrigan talks with festival director Michael Dwyer about the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.
“We're bigger than Cannes,” boasts Jameson Dublin International Film Festival (DIFF) director Michael Dwyer, tongue placed firmly in his cheek, as he gets ready to launch the third annual festival from Feb. 11 ’Äì 20. Dwyer, of course, is only half kidding: with 96 feature films and two programs of short films the DIFF is roughly twice as large as the official selection at Cannes. Another important difference, of course, is the lack of tuxedos. Dwyer calls the DIFF “a festival for the people of Dublin,” and he means it.

1/26/05
ONCE UPON A TIME IN BHUTAN
Bari Pearlman speaks with¬ÝKhyentse Norbu, director of Travellers and Magicians, the first film ever to be shot in Bhutan.
With his first film The Cup, filmmaker Khyentse Norbu offered us a refreshing and inspired glimpse into the inner workings of a Tibetan monastery and its relationship with the burgeoning modern world around it. Known also as His Eminence Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, he is one of the most important incarnate Lamas in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and The Cup reflected his personal experience as both a young monk and as a¬Ýspiritual leader in¬Ýthe larger world. With his follow-up, Travellers and Magicians, Khyentse Norbu again turns his lens on a corner of the world few have seen, the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.

12/02/04
USING FILM TO TAKE ON THE MEDIA
The Making of WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception
By Danny Schechter
Journalism is more than a job. It is a calling — sometimes demanding a call to action. I have been a media maven all my life, starting as an investigative reporter for Ramparts, the muckraking magazine of the 1960’s, and later becoming an on-air newscaster and “news dissector” for Boston’s pioneering WBCN rock station. From there it was on to TV, first in local news and programming and then the start-up at CNN, and eight years at ABC News 20/20. However, I grew dissatisfied with the “infotainment” values that took hold as TV news was increasingly dumbed down and lightened up.

11/18/04
2004 HAMPTONS INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
By Jason Guerrasio
If you only know Long Island’s east end for its posh setting, multi-million dollar mansions and P. Diddy’s annual white party, you probably think the Hamptons International Films Festival is nothing more than another excuse for elite socialites to rub elbows and sip cosmos. But after covering it for the first time this year, I found that it’s the most important film festival for undistributed works post-Toronto, pre-Sundance.

11/5/04
THE INSIDE STORY
METALLICA: This Monster Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 336 pages, $24.95) offers a surprisingly candid behind-the-scenes look at the making of Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s rock documentary METALLICA: Some Kind of Monster, released earlier this year by IFC Films.
Joe Berlinger has kindly consented to allow our readers to download a PDF version of Chapter 5 (synopsized below) from the book he co-wrote with Greg Milner, which hits stores November 16.

10/25/04
ALL IN THE FAMILY
Numerous films, documentaries, and tabloid specials have already been made about Charles Manson but few have plumbed the depths of mortification, sleaze and horror as writer-director Jim Van Bebber’s The Manson Family.
This psychedelic collage portrays the Tate and LaBianca murders in terribly graphic detail. But it also taps into the sex ’n’ drugs allure of 1960s’ hippy counterculture with scenes of Manson’s followers, featuring idyllic bacchanals and performance art pageants on Spahn Ranch. It also acknowledges Manson’s brief foray into recording pop music.

10/21/04
CINEMA PARADISEINDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL
By Bari Pearlman
Cinema Paradise has to be one of the most accurately-named film festivals around. Housed in an old art theater in Honolulu’s University neighborhood just a stone’s throw from some of the world’s most famous surfing beaches, this scrappy little upstart is a great day at the beach and the cinema. Now in its third year, the week-long event running September 17-23, spooled out a provocative mix of films that were a hit with local cinephiles, community filmmakers and visiting veterans alike.

10/18/04
2004 IFP MARKET
By Mary Glucksman
I arrive at the Stony Brook Film Festival, which takes place on the campus of Stony Brook University, and I wonder if it’s not hiding in some spider hole. At the Staller Center for the Arts the only signs that the festival is happening are the ones curling in the windows announcing that Garden State has sold out. But within 10 minutes festival director Alan Inkles is taking me to lunch, swiping his meal card at the university cafeteria and thundering about the spirit of the festival — 10 days of premieres, features and documentaries.

10/03/04
2004 STONY BROOK FILM FESTIVAL
By Jim Pitt Harris
I arrive at the Stony Brook Film Festival, which takes place on the campus of Stony Brook University, and I wonder if it’s not hiding in some spider hole. At the Staller Center for the Arts the only signs that the festival is happening are the ones curling in the windows announcing that Garden State has sold out. But within 10 minutes festival director Alan Inkles is taking me to lunch, swiping his meal card at the university cafeteria and thundering about the spirit of the festival — 10 days of premieres, features and documentaries.

10/03/04
2004 NEW YORK VIDEO FESTIVAL
By Guy Cimbalo
This summer’s New York Video Festival (now in its 11th year) took its chosen medium seriously. Perhaps a little too seriously. The program highlighted the academic issues and rhetoric of surveillance and history. Video descriptions explained how one video, Peggy Ahwesh’s The Star Eaters, “interrogated and unsettled the performance of social behavior,” while another, Marcello Mercado’s Das Kapital version .07, provides “a moral and economic sketch of digital dissolution,” and a third, Stephen Connolly’s The Whale, refracts “the micro-politics of contemporary life.”

9/30/04
INDIE SHOP OF HORRORS
An Interview with ScareFlix Executive Producer Larry Fessenden. By Jeremiah Kipp
Just in time for Halloween, cult filmmaker Larry Fessenden presents a host of new independent horror movies through his production company, Glass Eye Pix. He has executive produced The Off Season, a ghost story set in an isolated resort town, and The Roost, a splatter-soaked B movie involving vampire bats and their undead victims. Add to that his involvement in the distribution of Douglas Buck’s violent meditation on suburban hell, Family Portraits, and the self-explanatory shocker Zombie Honeymoon. “This has been my idle year,” Fessenden quips. “The unifying theme: here’s what a filmmaker does while waiting for financing on his latest project.”

7/20/04
2004 IFP/LOS ANGELES FILM FESTIVAL
By Jason Sanders
This June over 40,000 guests preened their way through the doors of the IFP/Los Angeles Film Festival, helping celebrate its tenth anniversary this year. Amid 195 films, multiple symposiums, many discussions and countless parties, guests also witnessed the event finally blossom into one of the best film festivals in the United States.

7/9/04
SUBURBAN HOLOCAUST
An Interview with Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America Writer-Director Douglas Buck. By Jeremiah Kipp
Emerging as a maverick filmmaker along the horror and underground festival circuit, Douglas Buck has gathered together his “suburban holocaust” short films as Family Portraits: A Trilogy of America for an August DVD release.

7/7/04
THE CORPORATION & ITS DISCONTENTS
Matthew Ross talks with the creative talent responsible for The Corporation and The Yes Men, two recent documentaries that explore, in very different ways, the psychology of big business.
If a corporation is considered a “person” according to U.S. law, chances are he/she is a psychopath. That’s the argument Canadian filmmakers Joel Bakan, Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott make in their exhaustive, astonishing documentary The Corporation. An impeccably researched, intellectually rigorous blend of humor, history and high-minded critique (Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and others discuss their positions at length, alongside Fortune 500 CEOs and business strategists), the film is a unabashedly partisan indictment of big business. After premiering to raves at the Toronto Film Festival last fall and winning Audience Award for Best World Cinema Documentary at Sundance, The Corporation was released by Zeitgeist films in the U.S. in June.

7/7/04
LITTLE CLUBHOUSE ON THE PRARIE
Ray Pride visits the Winnipeg FilmExchange.
Think of it as Little Clubhouse on the Prairie: now in its fourth year, Winnipeg’s FilmExchange, touting itself as the only all-Canadian film festival, sponsored by the locally headquartered National Screen Institute/Canada, jam-packs five nights and four days with screenings, presentations, master classes and workshops in the elements of production and distribution. It’s as low-key — and productive — as you’d expect an event in early March — customarily the coldest of the year in that part of Manitoba, reaching as low as 40 below Celsius. Now that’s Canadian.

7/7/04
BILL OF FARE
Ray Pride samples the International Thessaloniki Film Festival’s documentary offerings at “Images of the Twenty-first Century”.
Thessaloniki, a city of just under a million in the north of Greece, is an unlikely locale for two major film festivals, but in the past six years the longstanding International Thessaloniki Film Festival of November has been augmented by March’s “Images of the Twenty-first Century.” As curated by Dimitri Eipides, the veteran programmer of the New Horizons section for both the Toronto International Festival and the November Thessaloniki event, it’s a standout showcase of committed voices and social-issue documentaries.

6/1/04
REMEMBERING “THE FABULOUS INVALID”
Robert Hawk talks with director Rick McKay, whose Broadway: The Golden Age looks back at a theatrical era in New York that is thought by many to no longer exist, except in the memories of those old enough to remember— including the privileged few who lived it and are interviewed by McKay in his award-winning documentary.
“As a theater-mad teenager from New Jersey, I began going into New York to see shows in the 1950s. After college, I moved to New York City and continued this passionate pursuit, and in the mid-’60s also began working Off-Broadway, beginning as a lowly-paid (i.e., non-union) techie. Eventually I became a union stage manager and went out on “the road.” Having done four shows in a row in San Francisco, I began to meet some of the independent filmmakers who found the Bay Area a particularly supportive environment for alternative artists. Eventually I met Academy Award-winning documentarian Rob Epstein (then 19 years old), and the first film I worked on was Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk. Since leaving there, I returned to New York, where I continue to work as an independent film consultant and producer. Everything I learned in the theater I still use in my film work— and I still avidly attend the theater, which for me is like returning to the well and refreshing my sometimes celluloid-weary eyes and brain.

5/11/04
LIFE APRÈS SKI: ASPEN SHORTSFEST
By Bari Pearlman
By the end of March in Aspen, Colorado, the snow bunnies are heading home, the lifts are closing down, and you can buy all things polarfleece for a song. But while the slopes are slowing down, things are just heating up for those with their minds on a different kind of “action”. For thirteen years, the Aspen Shortsfest has been hotdogging its way into the hearts and minds of this snow-capped, thin-aired resort town, drawing enthusiastic crowds to one of the most impressive selections of short films around. To call it a festival is an understatement, for it is a true celebration of the art of filmmaking at its diverse and eclectic best.

5/06/04
GLITTER IN THE ARCHIVE
Jeremiah Newton talks with director Craig Highberger, whose documentary Superstar in a Housedress resurrects the legendary Jackie Curtis.
One snowy evening on West 8th Street in 1966, through the introduction of photographer Diane Arbus, I met the playwright/performer Jackie Curtis. At the time, Jackie was just another cute teenager, but already considered by many to be a “boy genius”. As a playwright/performer he was passionately active in the exciting world of Off-Off Broadway, an era distinctly marked by large personalities and enormous creativity. I would later learn that seeing this human dynamo onstage was a huge treat. No one wrote comedy like Jackie and no one acted like Jackie onstage — and there was a large audience of sophisticated New Yorkers who eagerly looked forward to seeing his plays, performance pieces, cabaret acts, and later, his films and videos (the best for the Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey team).

5/04/04
THESSALONIKI FILM FESTIVAL
By Peter Bowen
While the city of Thessaloniki (founded about B.C. 315) is about as old as they come, its history tells a tale of instability and reinvention. Originally the capital of Macedonia, Thessaloniki soon became a Roman capital — that is, until it was overrun by the Turks and swept into the Byzantine Empire and finally liberated by the Greeks. And while such imperial takeovers are now a thing of the past, modern Thessaloniki must ride the tumultuous economic waves of the European Union, as well as weather the instability of the Balkan nations that surround it. Appropriately, then, while the Thessaloniki Film Festival highlights Greek cinema, it also finds space to question confines of nationality and national cinema alike.

5/04/04
VICTORIA INDEPENDENT FILM & VIDEO FESTIVAL
By Nick Twemlow
With a prefestival reception hosted by native Victorian Atom Egoyan and ingenious efforts to involve the local community, ranging from a festival-theme window-display competition to a media-attracting flap over local Starbucks stores’ pulling the apparently un-family-friendly festival program from its counters (you can see it at www.vifvf.com), the 10th iteration of the Victoria Independent Film & Video Festival (VIFVF) continued its commitment to bringing the cinema-savvy local population the best in Canadian and international film. Festival director Kathy Kay brought in 160 features and shorts, including 16 world or Canadian premieres, filled in with filmmaking workshops, panels, new-media exhibits and even a miniature festival for children.

5/04/04
NEW YORK UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL
By Spencer Parsons
Having done more than any other single festival to remap the territory of the underground, NYUFF takes a step back in its 11th year to survey what’s become of the flora and fauna. Low-fi grue and high-concept porn, cosmic abstractions and pavement politics mix it up all over the place from the gutter to the gallery to the gallery in the gutter, spawning lovely and alarming hybrids that should keep tunneling into lands beyond for years to come.

2/26/04
A FESTIVAL FOR THE PEOPLE
Dermot Corrigan visits the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival.
While preparing for last year’s first Dublin International Film Festival, sponsored by Jameson, novice Festival Director Michael Dwyer cited one of his favorite lines: “If you build it, they will come.” Well, last year both filmmakers and audiences came, and this year they returned in even bigger numbers. “It is a festival for the people of Dublin,” declared Dwyer as he launched this year’s event, which featured more than one 100 films from 38 countries over ten days.

2/26/04
PUDDLE TO DREAD
Broken Lizard’s journey from sketch to screen. By Rick Mowat.
“Dying is easy — getting a comedy made is hard.” Sir Edmond Keen didn’t exactly say that but he would have had he lived in Hollywood. The question is: How does a sketch comedy group come out of nowhere and get not one but three feature films made? No one is more amused by this than the members of Broken Lizard.

2/24/04
WHEN FATHER WAS AWAY ON BUSINESS
Thomas Allen Harris talks with director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun about Abouna.
The country of Chad has produced three feature films, two of which — Bye Bye Africa (1999) and Abouna (2002) — were directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, a native of Chad, now living in Bordeaux.

Abouna is the story of two brothers, 15-year-old Tahir and 8-year-old Amine, who wake up one morning to find that their father has mysteriously left their home in a small town in Chad. The brothers decide to find him and wander through the town. Deeply disturbed by his sudden disappearance, they begin to hang about, play hooky and go to the movies, where one day, they think they recognize their father on screen. They manage to steal the reels and look for his face on the film, but the police arrest them.

2/13/04
DID YOU HEAR THE STORY ABOUT THE RABBI WHO SLEPT ON THE COUCH?
Bari Pearlman talks with director Pearl Gluck about Divan.
As the first Yiddish Fulbright scholar, Pearl Gluck set off to Hungary in March, 1998 to collect oral histories for her graduate thesis in European Studies. With a small Hi-8 camera as a field research tool, she began what would eventually become Divan, a multi-layered documentary weaving the traditional Hasidic stories she found into the story of her own personal journey to understand how the identities we chose relate to our histories, our communities and our families. And then of course, there’s the story of the divan, a couch held onto by her family in Hungary because a great Rabbi once slept on it, and which she wants for her own. Fellow documentary filmmaker Bari Pearlman sat down on the divan in Pearl’s Manhattan apartment to discuss how and why it got there.

2/4/04
HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS
By Andre Salas.
Secret Things, Jean-Claude Brisseau’s tale of two women who set out to take on an amoral, Machiavellian, male-dominated corporation, only to become pawns of the machine itself, was named Cahiers du Cinema’s best film of 2002.

A former schoolteacher-turned filmmaker, highly respected in his native France but largely unknown in the States, Brisseau never loses control of his material, even when it spirals wildly from somber realism into the realm of fantasy.

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