Authors — Nick Dawson
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Trailer Watch: Ari Folman’s The Congress
Ari Folman’s excellent animated doc Waltz with Bashir was a hit at Cannes five years ago, and the Israeli director’s back on the Croisette this year with The Congress. The first trailer just hit and it looks like as bold and inventive a film as one would expect from Folman, a mixture of Body Mind Change Labs and Charlie Kaufman, but with animation in there too. I’m very interested to learn more once it premieres.
by Nick Dawson on May 13, 2013 -
2013 IFP Documentary Lab Projects Announced
This morning the 10 projects selected for the 2013 IFP Documentary Labs were announced. All are works by first-time directors and have budgets of less than $1 million, and filmmakers are provided with an immersive mentorship experience to guide them through post-production and looking ahead to the festival circuit and beyond. The films selected include Sara Dosa’s doc on mushroom hunters, Roots and Webs, produced by Court 13’s Josh Penn, and David Thorpe’s Do I Sound Gay, which has How to Survive a Plague‘s Howard Gertler on board as producer. Spike Lee is the executive producer on Darius Clark Monroe’s Evolution of a […]
by Nick Dawson on May 13, 2013 -
BAMcinemaFest 2013 Lineup Announced
When it replaced BAM’s season of Sundance favorites some years ago, BAMcinemaFest emerged as a stronger and much more Brooklyn-centric event, a true festival rather than just a Park City greatest hits package. This year, it bookends proceedings with festival favorites from two our “25 New Faces” of previous years, David Lowery’s gorgeous period outlaw drama Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and Destin Cretton’s SXSW-winning social worker drama Short Term 12. Michael M. Bilandic’s artworld satire Hellaware — which was featured in our Summer 2012 article “The Shooting Parties” — is the sole world premiere, however the focus here is on local […]
by Nick Dawson on May 8, 2013 -
Soderbergh x 2: Listen to His SFFS Keynote and Read His Twitter Novella
Steven Soderbergh has retired from movies — for now, at least. But while we wait for his HBO Liberace biopic to arrive, there’s a couple of recent things to remind us of his continuing greatness and furious productiveness. Firstly, his San Francisco Film Society keynote speech at the weekend drew a lot of attention for decrying the Hollywood system for destroying cinema. Via TOH, you can listen to the entire speech below. It’s a typically smart and thoughtful piece of oratory, and well worth a listen. And after that, why not start following the Bitchuation account on Twitter, where Soderbergh […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 30, 2013 -
Submission Deadlines Approaching for IFP’s Independent Film Week Project Forum
A quick public service announcement, in case you’re not aware that the deadlines for Independent Film Week — organized by IFP, the publisher of Filmmaker magazine — are quickly approaching. Here’s all the info you should need: Independent Film Week (September 15-19, 2013) is the oldest and largest forum in the U.S. for the discovery of new projects in development and new voices on the independent film scene. The Project Forum is a meetings-driven forum connecting filmmakers with producers, funders, distributors, broadcasters, sales agents, festival programmers, and more. The three sections of the Project Forum with open applications are: Emerging […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 26, 2013 -
Five Questions with John Lurie
John Lurie has never allowed himself to be pinned down, let alone pigeon-holed. The multi-talented Lurie — this month the subject of a mini-retrospective at the Nitehawk Cinema in Brooklyn — has been for many years a highly respected musician and composer, putting out records both as a solo artist and with his band the Lounge Lizards. In film, he has directed short films and music videos, composed numerous soundtracks, and been an actor in films by Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law), Wim Wenders (Paris Texas), Martin Scorsese (The Last Temptation of Christ) and David Lynch (Wild […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 26, 2013 -
Five Questions with Trash Dance Director Andrew Garrison
Since its world premiere at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival, Andrew Garrison’s documentary Trash Dance has been a festival favorite, picking up audience awards at both Full Frame and Silverdocs. The film chronicles innovative choreographer Allison Orr’s attempts to wrangle a group of garbage men and turn them, and their trucks, into the participants in her latest project. Filmmaker spoke with the Austin, Texas-based Garrison, an experienced non-fiction director known for such films as Third Ward TX and The Wilgus Stories, about the process of making Trash Dance, which opens at the reRun Theater in Brooklyn today. Filmmaker: Why did […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 26, 2013 -
Jeff Nichols on Mud and the Realities of the Contemporary Indie Director
Jeff Nichols, a product of the vibrant class of the North Carolina School of the Arts film program that also produced David Gordon Green, Craig Zobel, Michael Tully, Jody Hill, Tim Orr, and Danny McBride, announced himself as a highly talented young filmmaker with his 2007 debut Shotgun Stories. The slow-burning rural drama was gorgeously shot in Scope and revealed Nichols’ ambition to create cinema on a big canvas, even when his budgets were small. Four years later, his sophomore feature, Take Shelter, about a father who believes an apocalyptic storm is coming, caught the imagination of both critics and […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 26, 2013 -
Now Online: Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer’s Insane Adventures of Christopher Bosh in the Multiverse!
The product of the brilliantly inventive and mischievous minds of 2012 “25 New Faces” Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer, the animated intergalactic basketball fantasia Adventures of Christopher Bosh in the Multiverse! premiered last December at the Borscht Film Festival. The movie played at the Miami event run by Leyva and Mayer despite the pair having received letters from the NBA and Miami Heat player Bosh — played in the film by another 2012 “New Face,” Terence Nance — demanding the film be suppressed due to “an infringement of [Bosh’s] publicity rights, privacy rights, and common law trademark rights.” Now, wonderfully, the film […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 24, 2013 -
Filmmaker360’s Michele Turnure-Salleo on Latest SFFS/KRF Grant Recipients
We recently ran a series of articles on the filmmakers shortlisted for the San Francisco Film Society’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation grants, and the eight projects which were chosen to receive support were as follows: Jonas Carpignano, writer/director — A Chjana — $45,000 for preproduction Grainger David, writer/director — Nocturne (working title) — $35,000 for screenwriting Ian Hendrie and Jyson McLean, co-writers/directors/producers — Mercy Road — $40,000 for development Maryam Keshavarz and Paolo Marinou-Blanco, cowriters — The Last Harem — $35,000 for screenwriting Richard Levien, writer/director and Chad Burris, producer — La Migra — $20,000 for development Tommy Oliver, writer/director/producer — […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 24, 2013
