Authors — Alicia Van Couvering
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I Melt With You Freakout Clips
Save a few careful trailers and some hushed pre-festival press screenings, most producers are iffy about letting any actual footage into the world before their Sundance premiere. Music video veteran and ARLINGTON ROAD director Mark Pellington’s new movie is making a small and tantalizing exception with very brief clips of normally kind and comic actors losing it. JEREMY PIVEN RUBS HIS FACE IN ANGUISH THOMAS JANE ROLLS DOWN A HILL AND SCREAMS ROB LOWE SPEAKS POETRY, MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE A TERMINAL ILLNESS?
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jan 19, 2011 -
Jade Healy
“I once had a director cry when she walked through the main character’s set because she was so moved. That was definitely one of the most rewarding moments for me as a designer.” In the past few years, production designer Jade Healy’s hands have touched a diverse selection of notable independent films: Ti West’s House of the Devil, Zeina Durra’s The Imperialists Are Still Alive!, Sundance success happythankyoumoreplease and Joe Swanberg’s Alexander the Last. She began in production, as an assistant producer on Asia Argento’s The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, after interning for Muse Production’s Chris Hanley; next […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jul 17, 2010 -
Holden Abigail Osborne
In February 2009, Holden Abigail Osborne’s brother Zach was released from prison and put under house arrest. In grad school at NYU Film School, Osborne grabbed a camera and jumped on a plane to Missouri. She wouldn’t understand why she had done it until the short film the footage became was completed. “It was my form of intervention,” she says. The result was Solitary/Release, a two-part short film that premiered at SXSW this year. Solitary is a documentary about her brother transitioning back into society while under house arrest, navigating a complex reentry into the lives of his family after […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jul 17, 2010 -
Zac Stuart-Pontier
If you go to the website of Zac Stuart-Pontier (zac-edits.com), your browser heading will display the following: “Zac edits really, really, really well.” This cheeky claim was earned in early 2010 when the three feature documentaries that Zac had been working on since he graduated NYU in 2006 premiered within a month of each other: Jody Lee Lipes and Henry Joost’s NY Export: Opus Jazz, which premiered on PBS and took to the festival circuit with gusto in March, via SXSW; James Rasin’s biographical doc Beautiful Darling, about the Warhol superstar Candy Darling and the loves she left behind, which […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jul 17, 2010 -
Trieste Kelly Dunn
A number of new talents have come from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in recent years, and one recurring theme has been the face of Trieste Kelly Dunn. Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather and Brett Haley’s The New Year made significant festival splashes this year, and beach-party styled Vacation!, by Zach Clark, seems positioned to do the same. Despite very different tones and directing styles, Dunn is each film’s center, and she makes perfect sense in every movie. “In college, the professors used to talk about knowing what play you’re in,” says Dunn. “You do Ibsen, French […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jul 17, 2010 -
The Set Up: Three Pairs of DPs and Production Designers Reveal the Creative Synergies Between These Two Departments
Without an environment to shoot, cinematographers have nothing; without directors of photography to shoot their sets, production designers have no purpose. It takes a lot of people to build a world for the camera to film, and while the director may inspire and supervise its creation, it takes a production designer and a cinematographer to get it in front of the lens. The creative and practical collaboration between these two key crew members often gets personal. It is always co-dependent. We spoke to three such teams about their most recent projects together – Inbal Weinberg and Andrij Parekh of Blue […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jul 1, 2010 -
NEW CHANCE FOR OLD MOVIE : ANTONIONI’S LE AMICHE
Literally translated as “The Girlfriends,” Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le Amiche was made in 1955, but never given a proper US release. A restored print by Cineteca di Bologna arrives at Film Forum next week in New York and will play DC, LA and beyond, courtesy of an exquisitely curated new distribution company, The Film Desk. Reported features of the movie: a picnic by the sea that foreshadows L’Avventura; a collection of deep, and deeply troubled, female characters; a tea party — this is much more than a completionist’s dream come true!
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jun 11, 2010 -
NEISTAT BROTHERS TV SHOW SHOW
Though it’s become a ubiquitous descriptor of anything short, visual, funny or shocking, setting out to make a “viral” video is like trying to make a “hit” movie. Videos go viral because they make people freak out a little bit. 2006 25 New Faces Casey & Van Neistat have made hundreds and hundreds of videos, earning their infectiousness the old-fashioned way: by getting forwarded, blogged, cited in court cases, covered on CNN, and — beginning this month — turned into a TV show on HBO. “I hate the word ‘viral.’ Any successful online short is ‘viral.’ A short that no […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jun 2, 2010 -
TRIBECA 2010: ALEX MAR, “AMERICAN MYSTIC”
Premiering in the documentary competition at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, Alex Mar’s American Mystic is a poem of a film, following three young people in America who have chosen to make their spiritual practice the center of their lives. A pagan priestess who proudly defines herself as a witch, Morpheus has moved to the outskirts of rural California to create a pagan sanctuary on a small plot of land. Kublai, a Spiritualist medium, works on a farm in upstate New York but spends his off hours with his head in the hands of elderly women, learning to channel […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Apr 22, 2010 -
SXSW IS ALL SMILES
Hangin’ at the Austin Chronicle party at Lazona Rosa last night, everyone was in fine spirits: …tall person Zachery Levy, a panelist this year whose Strongman played the festival last year, towering over short person Ben Kasulke, DP of Humpday, The Freebie, Nights and Weekends and more… … A New York minute: Greencard Pictures’ Nick Kadner, here supporting IFC TV’S Food Party, Olivia Thirlby of Juno fame, David Call of Tiny Furniture, and Catfish director Henry Joost… …Gabriele Caroti of Bam Cinematek, who is approaching his deadline to lock the program for BAM Cinemafest, enjoying the rainy evening with Jim […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Mar 16, 2010
