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Jeonju 2024: Walker, A Chronicle in Spirals, Puan
Lee Kang-sheng demonstrates his Walker technique at the Jeonju International Film Festival
“I’m so happy,” producer Park Tae-joon said at the Jeonju Cinema Project awards, one of the ceremonies indicating the festival was drawing to a close. “Every day I drank […] festival drinking.” Park’s admission was funny and honest, the kind of thing no one on-stage at an American festival would say even/especially if it were true (bad optics). But in fact, Jeonju was one of the most temperate festivals I’ve ever attended, with official parties ending by 10:30 or 11 and many choosing to go back and sleep after that. They could, if they liked, go to Soseul, unofficially dubbed “the Hong bar” (a letter from Hong Sang-soo to the owner hangs on the wall) and locally beloved enough to… Read more
10 Lessons on Filmmaking from Roger Corman
The following interview, in which producer and director Roger Corman broke down the filmmaking rules he lives by, was conducted in 2013 and is reposted today on the sad occasion of Corman's passing last Thursday at the age of 98. R.I.P. Roger Corman. The legendary Roger Corman is America's proto-independent filmmaker, having produced literally hundreds of films and directed dozens more, most of them genre films made under a "fast, cheap and profitable" model that still offers guidance for new filmmakers everywhere. And while Corman is best known for films made during an earlier independent era, one in which regional distribution circuits and drive-ins offered screens for movies made far away from Hollywood, Corman is still innovating -- and monetizing. Corman's… Read more
“When We First Started It Was a Variation of the Salon des Refusés…”: Slamdance President Peter Baxter on Accessibility, Community and Moving to L.A.
A Slamdance 2024 audience (Photo: Lauren Desberg)
Slamdance announced last week that the Slamdance Film Festival will move from Park City, Utah, where it's been since its founding in 1995, to Los Angeles beginning with next year's edition. The dates will shift slightly to February 20-26, and the move will afford the festival bigger and more professional screening facilities, including at Landmark Theatres and the DGA Theater complex. As Slamdance co-founder and President Peter Baxter notes in our interview below, Slamdance has long had a Los Angeles presence, through both its year-round office but also through its summer AGBO+Slamdance Summer Showcase. About the move, filmmakers and AGBO co-founders Anthony and Joe Russo said in a press release, "Our journey in the film industry began at Slamdance, and our… Read more
“We Were Together 24 Hours a Day for Six Weeks”: Bill and Turner Ross on Gasoline Rainbow
Gasoline Rainbow
Gasoline Rainbow, the seventh feature by Bill and Turner Ross, marks a return to a world of young people familiar from the brothers’s early efforts 45365 (2009) and Tchoupitoulas (2012), which centered, respectively, on residents of Sydney, Ohio and New Orleans, Louisiana. Like those formative works, the duo’s latest is uniquely attuned to adolescent emotions and the rhythms of small town America—except with a broadened perspective and formal command afforded by 15 years of working in a variety of modes and milieus. The film follows five high schoolers from the fictional town of Wiley, Oregon who take to the open road for one last adventure before deciding between college and getting a real job. But what begins as a carefree road… Read more
Jeonju 2024: Cinema Projects Past and Future
Direct Action
It’s not necessarily that, in a pathetic version of Henry Hill’s childhood desire to be a gangster, I’ve “always wanted to attend a pitch forum.” But I’ve admittedly been curious to see how this particular part of the festival-film apparatus works and never had ready access; impelled by both that and ties of friendship, I went on my third day at this year’s Jeonju International Film Festival to the Jeonju Cinema Project pitching panel. Fellow Filmmaker writer and pal Blake Williams was one of the seven projects—four Korean, three international, with one finalist selected from each category—selected to pitch at the Next Edition section of this year’s iteration of Jeonju’s initiative, which is similar in aspects to the Venice Biennale… Read more
“This Is a Safe Space for People Who Are Against Genocide, And Who Want to See a Liberated Future for All”: Inney Prakash Previews Prismatic Ground 2024
Fertile Life
Returning for its fourth edition, the experimentally-focused Prismatic Ground film festival will once again host a series of screenings across several NYC theaters and via a free streaming platform. Running from May 8 through 12, the program kicks off with an appropriately urgent Opening Night screening at the Museum of the Moving Image of Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory (1981), preceded by a reading from poet Hala Alyan and concluding with a post-film discussion between Bidoun magazine’s Tiffany Malakooti and researcher, writer and curator Adam HajYahia. “Most of my energy and attention in the last several months has been focused on resisting institutional complicity with the genocide in Gaza,” Prismatic Ground founder and programmer Inney Prakash tells Filmmaker. “For a while,… Read more
