Even in the heart of the Midwest, where driving past rural pastures dotted with cows is not uncommon, I rarely thought of where my food came from. How often as a child or young adult, chomping on a spicy chicken sandwich from Wendy’s or slurping up Cincinnati-style chili at my mother’s dining room table, was I confronted intellectually with the fragility and inhumanity of our modern food production system, especially when it comes to the most popular proteins in the American diet, beef and chicken? I doubt a meal went by that wouldn’t cause my older self anxiety. It’s almost shameful …

Last year on the Filmmaker website, we ran a series of pieces in which we profiled a group of finalists for the San Francisco Film Society’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking grant, run through the organization’s Filmmaker360 program. Now there’s a new set of finalists, and we are once again putting the spotlight on all those shortlisted for the grant. You can read Part 1 of this current series here and Part 2 of the series here.   JONAS CARPIGNANO (WRITER/DIRECTOR), A CHJÀNA Synopsis: After leaving his native Burkina Faso, Ayiva makes the perilous journey across the Sahara and Mediterranean in search of a better life in Europe. Once in Italy, he …

In a moment where American independent cinema seems to be primarily focused with character and regional setting, Antonio Campos stands in stark contrast with his peers. Concerned with intricate problems posed by framing, camera movement and editing, Campos used a formal investigation into the medium to guide him through his debut feature, Afterschool, which is a kind of materialist examination of how reality is affected by the digital representation thereof. With his latest film, Simon Killer, Campos is less concerned with a topical milieu than he is with the mental state of the troubled eponymous individual; in the process of …

Few filmmakers bring to life social issues as vividly as Ken Loach. Whether helming grand historical dramas about family, love and civil war (The Wind That Shakes the Barley, Land and Freedom) or character-driven films detailing the plight of the working class (Kes, Riff-Raff, Sweet Sixteen, Bread and Roses) Loach is a master of creating universal stories that are immensely relatable regardless of time or place. His latest effort, a documentary, The Spirit of ’45, which had its world premiere at this year’s Berlinale, continues the grand tradition with a story as relevant today as it was over half a …

Sally Potter spoke to a sold-out, mostly female audience on a springlike afternoon in Toronto. She was the latest world-renowned director to sit in the interview at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, and she discussed with journalist Johanna Schneller her experiences and views on filmmaking while clips of her films burst on the screen including her latest, Ginger & Rosa. The session started with a moment from her little-seen 1979 short, Thriller. It’s an experimental short consisting of grainy black-and-white photos married to the opera La Boheme and Bernard Hermann’s theme from Psycho. “The decisions I made were about trying to bring …

“Gentrification is the opposite of the apocalypse. The apocalypse would pause history, level the built world to a pile of trash, and most likely lower rents considerably. Gentrification churns history forward, takes out the trash, carts away rubble, hides the poor, makes you work more and more to manage your rent, and encrypts the past, when you didn’t have to work so many jobs just to fucking live here, behind its glossy surfaces.” – Kristin Dombek, “How to Quit”, n+1 issue 15 Colson Whitehead, in an essay about how his adopted neighborhood of Fort Greene was changing and would continue …

In 1974, Francis Ford Coppola and the cast and crew of The Godfather Part II took over a Lower East Side block in Manhattan. An NYU film student and resident of that block, Mark Kitchell, focused his camera on the proceedings. The result, The Godfather Comes to 6th Street, was not a fluffy “making of” film but a document of the good, the bad and the ugly that happens when a film crew descends on a neighborhood. A portrait of a community, the film also captured the efforts of a group of local activists who objected to the film’s presence; …

With an exacting intelligence, a hyper-articulate quality that brings to mind the characters of American systems novels, Dan Sallitt’s The Unspeakable Act meditates on the burgeoning mutual attraction of two Brooklyn siblings in a manner that, while leaving many unsettled, has already marked his third feature as a potential breakout for the critic-filmmaker. The scions of an old-school Brooklyn bohemian writer, Jackie Kimball and Matthew Kimball (Tallie Medel and Sky Hirschkron) have long harbored a forbidden desire for one another, although it is most intensely felt on Jackie’s side. Medel’s big green eyes under dark, foreboding bangs fill in all the gaps …

Keith Miller readily admits that when he first tried to make a film he didn’t really know how to talk to actors. He wasn’t quite sure of himself. He thought he was doing a feature; he ended up with a film that was a half-hour long. But over the next few years he kept writing, kept shooting. After a time, he gained his footing, thanks in no small measure to the fellowship he found amongst the directors, writers and actors of the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective. These days he’s confident enough in his vision — and his collaborators — that he …

Opening the 10th anniversary edition of CineKink NYC tonight is writer/director (and “habitual submissive”) Cheyenne Picardo’s Remedy, a look at the business side of BDSM through the eyes of a character crafted from Picardo’s personal experience Filmmaker spoke with the accidental director – who originally set out to be a critic – about converting a barn into a NYC dungeon, casting non-kinksters, and why Steve Martin’s The Jerk is more influential than Godard. Filmmaker: I noticed this quote from you in the press notes, “I’m hoping to demystify professional BDSM in a way that’s personal and accessible by showing it …