For many supposedly serious cinema folk, there is no secret pleasure more pleasurable than the disaster film. What makes the genre so familiar – predictable plotlines, one-dimensional characters and an ever-present threat that only kills the people who deserve it – is also what makes it so damn fun. In the late ’90s, people cheered when the alien spaceship blew up American monuments. A full decade after September 11th, it’s still hard to imagine that happening now. During the past decade, disaster films have become more serious, less The Towering Inferno and more District 9, but it is only in the […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Dec 20, 2011The writer of Con Air and the writer of The Fighter walk into a bar and take a seat next to an aspiring writer with no credits, no agent, no manager and no connections. The aspiring writer strikes up a conversation. This is neither the set up for a cruel joke nor a channel surfing induced fever dream – it’s just one of the many scenes I witnessed at the Austin Film Festival & Conference, one of the few festivals dedicated to celebrating the screenwriter both fledgling and legendary. In addition to its film competition, Austin holds a contest for unproduced writers, […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Nov 2, 2011More Reports: Filmmaking in Afghanistan, L.A. Rebellion, Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center amphitheater.
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Oct 21, 2011This interview with Jon Foy, director of Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, was originally published during the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, where the film won the Documentary Directors Award. The film opens today at the IFC Center in New York, with Foy and his collaborators doing Q & A’s at the evening shows. There are few professions in the world that demand more from their practitioners than documentary filmmaking — most filmmakers spend years (if not lives) toiling away in obscurity, with little keeping them going beside the faith that theirs is a story worth sacrificing everything […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Sep 2, 2011In the opening scene of Zeina Durra’s debut, The Imperialists Are Still Alive!, Asya, a young artist, poses naked for the camera. A hijab on her head, a machine gun in hand, she explains to an off-screen assistant her rationale for why the religious freedom fighter she’s portraying might have waxed her pubic hair. It’s a scene that is as funny as it is politically loaded, much like the movie that follows. Although its milieu — the young, privileged and the artistic — is the stuff coming-of-age movies are made of, The Imperialists Are Still Alive! is more than just another […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Apr 12, 2011This past weekend, the documentary as a tool for change was discussed at “Envision: Addressing Global Issues Through Documentary,” a forum co-sponsored by the IFP in partnership with the United Nations Department of Public Information. In her introductory remarks, Joana Vicente, IFP’s executive director, said that the goal of the event was to unite the “filmmaking community with the activist [community].” It was a sentiment echoed by Kiyo Akasaka, the Under-Secretary-General for Communications at the UN who encouraged the activists and filmmakers in the attendance to partner with each other “to envision a better world” and “meet the needs of […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Apr 11, 2011Ever since Jane Pauley left the Today Show, the trials and tribulations of network television personalities have been the stuff of dinner table fodder. However, few contract negotiation battles captured as much attention as the recent skirmish over who would host The Tonight Show, Jay Leno or Conan O’Brien. What started out as a simple transition turned into an epic battle for late night’s soul, one that Leno won — even if many consider it to be a pyrrhic victory. One of the most anticipated films at SXSW, Rodman Flender’s Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop follows a bruised O’Brien in the […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Mar 13, 2011Documentarians get their ideas from all sorts of places — newspaper stories, family albums, an overheard story on a train — but rarely does inspiration come from as poetic an activity as stargazing — unless, of course, the documentarian in question happens to be filmmaker Ian Cheney. While gazing at the New York City skyline, Cheney realized that he lived in a place where stars don’t really exist. Determined to find out how much he’s missed when he lost the night sky, he started interviewing scientists for a project that would become The City Dark, a meditation that explores how the […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Mar 12, 2011When two young activists from Midland Texas were arrested with Molotov cocktails at the 2008 Republican convention, their story became a media sensation, but documentarians Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega couldn’t escape the feeling that there was more to this story than the good-kids-turned-domestic-terrorists version the media was reporting. So, they did what any skilled documentarians do: they took a leap of faith, jumped a plane and started talking to people involved with the case. The result is Better This World, a documentary that explores what happens when idealistic, angry young activists stop being polite and start getting mixed up […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Mar 11, 2011Over the years film lovers have accused everything from sound to television of destroying the cinematic altar at which they worship. But rather than wallow in nostalgia for a time before this newfangled digital world, director Sebastian Gutierrez decided to take this streaming media thing out for a whirl to see what she could do. He developed his latest feature, Girl Walks Into a Bar, exclusively for web distribution. Sponsored by Lexus, it will be available in the YouTube Screening Room on the same day as its SXSW premiere. The best part of the whole free-on-the-internet thing? Well for Gutierrez, it’s that […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on Mar 9, 2011