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Fall 2020 Winners Announced for the Final Edition of the SFFILM Westridge Grants
SFFILM, in partnership with the Westridge Foundation, announced today the six films that will receive a total of $100,000 in funding as part of the SFFILM Westridge granting program. One of the few grants available to narrative filmmakers in the development phase, a SFILM Westridge grant helps "protect filmmakers’ creative processes, and allows them the time and space to concentrate properly on crafting their story, structure, characters, and themes, and refining their projects before diving into financing, production, and beyond." SFFILM and the Westridge Foundation also announce that this sixth edition will the last for this grant, which was initiated in 2017. "We are deeply proud of this three-year partnership with the Westridge Foundation, and its innovative approach to direct support… Read more
“It Came Out of Feeling Like I Didn’t Actually See Myself in the Movies…”: Claudia Weill on Girlfriends
Melanie Mayron in Girlfriends
Claudia Weill is a director whose work meant so much to me at such a formative age that I was almost hesitant to interview her; the two features she directed, Girlfriends (1978) and It’s My Turn (1980) spoke to me on such a profoundly personal level that I feared speaking with her could only be a disappointing experience—either because she wouldn’t live up to my image of her or because I would be so intimidated that I’d turn into a blabbering idiot. One of Weill’s many talents is to create work so intimate and precise that it always feels like there’s a direct emotional link between the director and the individual viewer; a former documentarian, Weill has an astonishing ability… Read more
Watch: Alison Nguyen’s my favorite software is being here Online and In Person
my favorite software is being here, by Alison Ngyuen. (Installation photo: Dario Lasagni)
Artist and filmmaker Alison Nguyen -- selected for Filmmaker's 2018 25 New Faces and a contributor to this Summer's Pandemic Diaries -- is showing new work featuring her Andra8, "a computer-generated woman based on the artist's physicality." As part of her current virtual exhibition at the Hartnett Gallery, i broke my mind at the link in the bio (running through December 18), Nguyen will screen today, Monday, November 23, her new my favorite software is being here, which captures the data-driven emotional rhythms and perceptive swings of her virtual creation. The piece, which is highly recommended, screens free today 6:30 PM Eastern and will be followed by a Zoom artist talk by Nguyen and collaborators collaborators Jonathan Beilin, Scott Kiernan, Tim Bruniges, and Rachel… Read more
Ghost Dog, Moonstruck and Libeled Lady: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Moonstruck
Criterion adds another excellent title to its collection of Jim Jarmusch films this week with the Blu-ray and DVD releases of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, a 1999 feature that stands alongside Dead Man as one of Jarmusch’s richest and most fascinating movies. Like Dead Man, Ghost Dog follows a stripped-down narrative that’s made extraordinarily complex by the sophisticated network of cinematic, literary, and historical allusions Jarmusch weaves through it; in another director’s hands the same story could be a routine genre programmer, but the force and depth of Jarmusch’s philosophical vision elevates the film to a level of mythic grandeur while simultaneously packing the frame with realistic anthropological details. While Dead Man riffed on the American Western,… Read more
Trailer Watch: Lance Oppenheim’s Some Kind of Heaven
Some Kind of Heaven
Opening in theaters and on demand January 15, 2021 from Magnolia Pictures is the debut feature from documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim, Some Kind of Heaven. Featured in Filmmaker's 2019 25 New Faces, Oppenheim makes documentaries that are as attuned to their subjects' interior lives -- their fears, dreams, insecurities and aspirations -- as to their physical surroundings. "How fantasy informs the way people live their lives, the camera has to do the same," he told me when I interviewed him. "The only way to get into these people’s lives and their stories is to accurately depict the headspace they are living in.” About Oppenheim's dreamy and at times disquieting feature, which portrays a group of seniors at Florida's retirement community, The… Read more
How Virtual Sets are Replacing the Green Screen
In my 25 New Face profile of Victoria Rivera, I quoted the writer/director on how, for her upcoming ocean-set feature Malpelo, she and her producer are exploring using the virtual background technology recently employed by The Mandalorian. The benefits of this technique are explained nicely in this Vox video, in which Charmaine Chan, a compositor who has worked for ILM, shows how virtual backgrounds improve upon traditional green screens in various ways, including lighting and camera movement.
“The Violence in the Film is Simply a Reflection of the History of Human Beings”: Writer/Director Jim Jarmusch and Actor Forest Whitaker on Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
With Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai newly released by Criterion Collection today, Filmmaker is publishing online for the first time Peter Bowen's interview with Jarmusch and actor Forest Whitaker from our Winter, 2000 print issue. In Jim Jarmusch’s latest adventure, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, the title character, played by Forest Whitaker, is set on a collision course with the mob after a local boss’s daughter (Tricia Vessey) witnesses him making a hit. Soon, Ghost Dog is declared a “liability,” and a hit is ordered on him as well. Naturally, this mysterious urban samurai easily eludes the bumbling mob until he meets up with one final opponent—a two-bit foot soldier who saved his life years earlier. And… Read more
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