Authors — Nick Dawson
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LA BARBE’S OPEN LETTER ON WOMEN & CANNES
The French feminist collective known as La Barbe (French for “The Beard”) printed an open letter in France’s daily newspaper Le Monde earlier this week addressing the complete absence of films directed by women in the Competition section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. La Barbe is made up of actress Fanny Cottençon, writer/director Virginie Despentes and director Coline Serreau, who have also set up an online petition which has been signed by numerous luminaries, including feminist icon Gloria Steinem and filmmakers such as Ry Russo-Young, Gillian Armstrong and Ava DuVernay. The British newspaper The Guardian ran a translation of the […]
by Nick Dawson on May 18, 2012 -
Paul Thomas Anderson and Robert Downey Sr. on Babo 73
Here’s friends and fellow directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Robert Downey Sr. talking about Babo 73, one of the five early Downey features included on Criterion’s new box set from their no-frills Eclipse series, Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr., which comes out next week on DVD.
by Nick Dawson on May 18, 2012 -
JONATHAN CAOUETTE’S “WALK AWAY RENEE” TO HAVE ONLINE PREMIERE
When discussing the lineup at the upcoming BAMcinemaFEST a while back, I noted that a new cut of Walk Away Renee, Jonathan Caouette’s long-awaited follow-up to Tarnation, would be playing as part of the festival on June 27. While that’s exciting news on its own, now comes word of a very savvy move by IFC to capitalize on the interest in the film by giving the film a simultaneous online premiere on SundanceNOW’s Doc Club, the SVOD (Subscriber Video-on-Demand) series curated by documentary maven Thom Powers. “Walk Away Renee makes a perfect headliner for the June [Doc Club] theme of […]
by Nick Dawson on May 18, 2012 -
WES ANDERSON IN CANNES AND NYC
Wes Anderson, the cover star of the latest issue of Filmmaker, kicked off the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday with his new film, Moonrise Kingdom, which opens Stateside on next Friday. (The estimable David Hudson, now operating at Fandor, collects the critical consensus on the movie here.) If you, like me, are not on the Croisette this year, you can still get your Anderson fix via the Cannes website, which takes a special look at Anderson’s body of work through the prism of his use of pop music, collecting together clips from a string of movies plus an interview with […]
by Nick Dawson on May 18, 2012 -
WALTER: A NEW WAY TO EDIT
NYU student Elena Parker has created an intriguing device called Walter (named for the legendary Walter Murch) which tackles editing in an innovative new way. Here’s the description from the university website’s about her “eye-ware kinetoscope”: Walter watches your eyes as you watch a film, and every time that you blink, it edits the video. Based on the theories of Walter Murch in In the Blink of An Eye, I’ve transformed the subliminal action of blinking into a method of interaction with the film. By cutting every time that you blink, Walter creates a customized narrative for you, without interrupting […]
by Nick Dawson on May 17, 2012 -
NOBUDGE LIVE SCREENING SERIES KICKS OFF TONIGHT
Just a quick heads up to alert you to the fact that the excellent NoBudge film website — run by indie actor/director Kentucker Audley, one of our 25 New Faces in 2007 — is running an innovative “live screening series” featuring filmmaker Q&As, starting tonight. Eight films will screen during the next two weeks, and each night the director of that day’s featured film will do a Q&A online. Programmed for the next two weeks are the shorts Cochran (James Gannon, 2009), Prom Queen (Ben Siler, 2007), Bruno (Sam Goetz, 2007), and Repeat (Donal Foreman, 2009). The features portion includes Seattle-based […]
by Nick Dawson on May 14, 2012 -
IFP ANNOUNCES 2012 DOCUMENTARY LAB SLATE
This morning, the Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) announced the 10 films selected to participate in its 2012 IFP Documentary Lab, which takes place all this week in New York City. The slate for this eighth edition of the doc labs is very geographically diverse, with participants hailing from Washington, Kentucky and Berlin in addition to the usual indie strongholds of Los Angeles and New York City. Each year, 20 indie films with budgets under $1 million — 10 documentary and 10 narrative — are selected for participation in the IFP post-production labs, which gives filmmakers strategic help and guidance regarding […]
by Nick Dawson on May 14, 2012 -
THE GLOBAL HIGH-CONCEPT GROUP FILM
New technology is increasingly opening up filmmaking options to people all around the world, and that’s no more evident than in the upcoming The Owner. The movie is first project of CollabFeature, which is described on its website as “a group of independent filmmakers from all over the world who have come together to create multi-director feature films. Each filmmaker writes and directs a segment of the bigger story in his or her own country. By pooling our talents and resources, we are creating something bigger than the sum of its parts — a kind of film that has never been […]
by Nick Dawson on May 14, 2012 -
Alex Holdridge: “I’ll Never Go to Los Angeles Again”
I fell in love with Alex Holdridge’s gorgeous, smart black-and-white LA-set romantic comedy In Search of a Midnight Kiss when I saw it on the film festival circuit in 2007, and later interviewed Holdridge for Filmmaker when Kiss was released theatrically in 2008. In the intervening years, Holdridge and I were in occasional contact, and through Facebook I was aware that he had left L.A. and decamped to Berlin. But little more than that. When I read earlier this spring that he was in postproduction on his follow-up feature, Meet Me in Montenegro – a film co-written by and co-starring Holdridge […]
by Nick Dawson on May 7, 2012 -
ADAM YAUCH (1964 – 2012)
It was with great sadness today that we read of the tragic passing of Adam Yauch at the age of just 47. As a member of the Beastie Boys, Yauch was an icon of American music, and for the last decade his involvement with Oscilloscope Laboratories, the film company he co-founded, made him a beloved figure within U.S. independent cinema. Until earlier this year, Yauch was an IFP board member, and on the IFP website Executive Director Joana Vicente offers the following tribute: On behalf of the IFP staff and board of directors, we are deeply saddened by the passing […]
by Nick Dawson on May 4, 2012
