Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Reflections on Independent Film and 33 Years of Filmmaker
In 2017, for the 25th anniversary of Filmmaker, we commissioned a radical redesign and also initiated a new upfront section: Reflections. For four issues we published pieces looking back at the history of the magazine as well as ones that meditated anew on its enduring concerns, such as struggles of early career filmmakers, the changing models of independent producing, the role of print magazines in a digital culture, and the shifting definitions of the word “independent.” When our anniversary year was over, I decided to keep the section, reasoning that “reflections” didn’t have to just refer to the past; these […]
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Everything is Fine (Maybe?)
As I devoted more time and energy to the Filmmaker newsletter throughout the last decade-plus, I’d often find myself in some form of dialogue with producer, strategist and consultant Brian Newman. His invaluable Sub-genre newsletter arrives on Thursdays (now, biweekly), mine on Fridays, and, like me, he’ll often comment on the production and distribution challenges facing independent filmmakers in an increasingly commercialized, politically cautious and algorithmically-driven media landscape. So, many Fridays, I have found myself trying to add something new to Brian’s erudite musings on the topic of the week, often defaulting to just throwing him a link. But our […]
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Big Art/Little Debt/Together
I first met producer, director and non-profit executive Esther Robinson in the early aughts, when she was Film/Video Program Director at Creative Capital, a still invaluable organization that not only funds bold work but helps artists in their paths towards overall sustainability. Later, in 2006, I selected her for our 25 New Faces while she was in production on her luminous documentary A Walk Into the Sea, about her uncle, Danny Lyons, a filmmaker at Warhol’s Factory. In the years since, Robinson has been a contributor here, conducting the occasional interview but most notably writing columns that spoke uncomfortable but […]
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My Best Work as (Mostly) an Editor
When I realized I’d be laid off (via: restructuring) from the publication I’ve worked at for 11+ years, I went back through the print archives to round up work I was proud of as an interviewer and commissioning editor. It holds up better than I hoped: I came out swinging in my second print issue with what I’m reasonably sure was the first non-video, written-out English-language interview with Roberto Minervini for Stop the Pounding Heart; his next film, The Other Side, is a defining work of the decade. There’s a solid mixture of European arthouse known quantities (Arnaud Desplechin, Mia […]
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The Best Films of 2025 As Chosen By Some of Its Key Directors
As 2025 unfolded, returning to the ritual of asking filmmakers about the films that moved them feels both fragile and necessary. This exercise appears days after yet another grotesque display of interventionism in Latin America, an event so swiftly normalized that its violence dissolves into the background noise of the present. In this context, cinema—even in its most superficial, market-driven or seemingly shallow dynamics—reasserts its essence: a place of resistance, a safer space, a memory capsule. Against a futile and often despicable world, the cinema persists not because it is pure, but because it is collective, embodied, and stubbornly alive. […]
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Notable Tech Trends in 2025
Telluride is not on my annual festival calendar—too distant, too costly—and rarely I’m at Toronto, only with a film. So as a New Yorker, my personal fall awards season kicks off with the New York Film Festival. Like Telluride, it’s a non-competitive festival that showcases and celebrates the best of each year’s new crop, and it has the advantage of relying less on premieres and more on outstanding films gleaned from earlier festivals like Berlin, Cannes, and Sundance. As such, it’s a pretty good sampler of the latest trends coursing through the art and practice of cinematic expression. This year […]
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Learning From Amos Poe
The following essay about Amos Poe appears in Filmmaker’s Winter, 2026 print edition in a section, Reflections, that looks back on 33 years of American independent film and Filmmaker Magazine. Upon the sad news of Amos’s passing on Christmas Day, 2025, we are posting it and sending condolences to Amos’s family and friends. — Editor Back when I was editing Filmmaker’s precursor, The Off-Hollywood Report, I’d attend the IFP’s Independent Feature Film Market. Filmmakers—some wearing sandwich boards or costumes—were hawking acquisition titles outside New York’s Angelika theater that were screening past the escalators inside, and the event always had an […]
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30 Years On, The Heat Is Around The Corner. And In Several TV Shows
Released 30 years ago, Michael Mann’s Heat is an almost-three-hour-long odyssey through Los Angeles and the minds of two ideologically opposed men who inhabit it. Codes are established and broken, thrills are tempered by sobering terror, paths are chosen and exit routes mapped. If high-level thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) has steeled himself to sever relationships to anyone or anything at a moment’s notice, the man pursuing him, police detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), is defined by a refusal to let go. He holds on to his angst, he tells his wife (Diane Venora), refusing to engage in cathartic […]
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“My Method is Invisible Editing”: Editor Amir Etminan on “It Was Just an Accident”
From its opening head-on shot of a family driving down an unlit road to its devastating, confrontational climax, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident frequently deploys long takes to situate the audience within moral discomfort. While that formal restraint runs through the entire film, it still leaves room for a diverse editing style befitting Panahi’s first feature since the suspension of his twenty-year filmmaking ban. (Following the film’s release, the Iranian government has subsequently sentenced him to one year in prison in absentia for “propaganda activities.”) In its shot selection and fluctuating cutting rhythm, It Was Just an Accident […]
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An Open Letter to SAIC Regarding Video Data Bank
On November 12, 2025, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) “gutted” Video Data Bank (VDB), the essential moving-image art distributor, archive and streaming platform. The elimination of 60% of its staff, including director Tom Colley, and announcement that it would as a result of this reduction no longer acquire new work, sent shock waves through the video art community, including the hundreds of artists represented by the distributor, an illustrious roster including, to name a few, Bruce Nauman, Miranda July, Martha Rosler, Tiffany Sia, Christopher Harris and Elisabeth Subrin. One artist included in VDB’s catalog is an […]
