When Steven Soderbergh was 13 years old, his father enrolled him in an animation class taught by Louisiana State University students. Soderbergh could draw but quickly became bored with the tedious process of bringing those drawings to life. Instead, he pulled the film camera off the copy stand and began shooting whatever he pleased.
From the very beginning, Soderbergh had no interest in doing things as prescribed. Whether alternating between the commercial and the experimental, challenging traditional release conventions or embracing new technologies in a quest to expedite the filmmaking process, Soderbergh has spent his career upending the status quo.
That iconoclasm extends to his dual life as “Peter Andrews,” the pseudonym Soderbergh has used while serving as his own director of… Read more
With 2017’s Kuso, the first feature from polymath Steve Ellison (a.k.a. musician Flying Lotus, a.k.a. rapper Captain Murphy), a respectable claim is made to the title of history’s most disgusting commercially released film, with such amusements as vomit baths, sentient wart coitus and a large talking cockroach residing in the prolapsed anus of funk godhead George Clinton. Ellison’s comparatively dialed-back followup Ash restricts itself to a combustible head, giving Scanners a run for its money, faces that liquefy like so many crayons under a blowtorch and a malevolent amoeba extracted from a waking patient’s skull via robo-surgery—without anesthetic. Any maturation in his sophomore outing has more to do with form, as the lifelong autodidact—Ellison got his feet wet making stop-motion… Read more
Reports of Sundance’s death are greatly exaggerated. Even before this year’s festival was over, industry journalists rushed to declare its demise, from The Wrap’s Sharon Waxman (“Low Sales. No Standouts. Slow Sundance. Where Does Independent Film Go From Here?”) to The Ankler’s Richard Rushfield (“Get it Together, Indie A-Holes. What part of ‘extinction event’ do you not understand?”). But let’s not jump to conclusions.
Maybe “the vibe was off,” as one producer notes, but what do you expect after twin catastrophes—the Los Angeles fires and the inauguration of Donald Trump—were still smoldering during the event?
“I think the market was stronger than how it was portrayed in earlier reports, before the festival even took off,” says one sales agent. “Buyers waited to see the full… Read more
During the making of his 2001 film about lesbian and gay Orthodox Jews, Trembling before G-d, documentary filmmaker Sandi DuBowski met one potential subject, rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, a “queer bio-dad” who also founded Lab/Shul, the “everybody-friendly, God-optional” congregation. But, as Dubowski relays below, aside from not really fitting the film’s specific brief, Lau-Levine "was too much of a diva and wanted his own movie.” With his most recent picture, Sabbath Queen, DuBowski has more than obliged, following the dissident rabbi for over 21 years, turning what could have been a straightforward biographical portrait into a rich and complex saga that sets its vibrant, iconoclastic subject — descended from 39 generations of Orthodox rabbis — across decades of change within the… Read more
The Documentary Film in the Public Interest Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy announced today a new award for documentary film — The Henry Awards for Public Interest Documentary —and its first list of 15 semi-finalists. "The Henry Awards recognize nonfiction films that advance public understanding of the critical issues of our time while demonstrating outstanding cinematic achievement," the Center announced today in a press release. "Guided by the hallmarks of ethical practice, rigorous investigation, and courageous storytelling, the Henry Awards are intended to honor and encourage a documentary filmmaking practice grounded in its essential role to a thriving society and focused on the public good."
“We are living through historic shifts in where,… Read more
Diciannove, the autofictional debut feature of director Giovanni Tortorici, captures one year in the life of a young Italian man, Leonardo, who decamps from a London business school to study literature in Siena, where he soon becomes obsessed with the study of 17th century Jesuit writer Daniello Bartoli. Wandering amidst the medieval architecture of this small central Italian city when he's not holed up at home, reading from among his stacks of books, Leonardo mostly eschews social invitations from attractive female students while, with quickly fading bursts of enthusiasms, engaging in a series of anti-social actions, including a revenge campaign against a critical professor and stalking a 15-year-old boy he spies on the internet. But if the discussion of these… Read more
Iva Radivojević has established a reputation for crafting precise yet elliptical filmic enigmas that use voiceover and reconstruction to reduce narrative to its most essential components. Her latest feature, When the Phone Rang, which premiered at Locarno last year, reimagines the director’s own childhood during the breakup of Yugoslavia through the lens of Lana, a doppelganger living with her sister and parents in an unnamed but familiar town and country. The film’s title refers to a moment which serves as the basis for everything that follows, and to which we keep returning as the narrative progresses. Tight, vivid close-ups shot in 4:3 on 16mm create an atmosphere of tense uncertainty as they picture a world closing in on itself, now… Read more
Refusing a single dominant system of values in Lebanon as the secular daughter of a working class Lebanese Jewish father and an Egyptian aristocrat mother provided filmmaker Heiny Srour with what she has called a “wide-angle view of the world,” from which she has felt fit to critique, without embellishment, failures of the Arab left. Though ultimately disappointed by the revolutionary Middle East organizations of the ‘60s and ‘70s, who could lapse into anti-semitism or sexism, she’s noted the exceptions of the Lebanese Communists (who were, however, too weak to enact a substantial difference for women) and the DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine). For Srour, the idea that the oppression of women would magically dissolve with the… Read more
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Michael Fassbender and Steven Soderbergh on the set of Black Bag
