Authors — Dan Schindel
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The Gotham Pages: Three Filmmakers Reflect on the Short-to-Feature Pipeline
Farihah Zaman—a writer, director and producer with extensive experience working on both short and feature-length projects—has a story they like to share about “shorts prejudice.” After accepting the Nonfiction Short Film Jury Award for Ghosts of Sugar Land at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, they encountered another filmmaker backstage. “They said, ‘I bet you’ll be back here with a feature one day.’ And I was like, ‘I have already been here with a feature,’” they recount. “It was such an indication of this idea of a hierarchy, that there’s a straight line [from doing shorts to doing features]. I encourage […]
by Dan Schindel on Mar 18, 2025 -
“I Can’t Run a Control Experiment with No Cameras”: Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber on War Game
On January 6th, 2023 in Washington, DC, the advocacy group Vet Voice stage an elaborate mass role-playing scenario inspired by the attempted insurrection in the Capitol two years before. The loser of a presidential election declares the result illegitimate and encourages the public to rise up, and an extremist militia group with sleepers inside the National Guard does just that. Within the simulation, one side roleplayed the incumbent presidential administration (with former Montana governor Steve Bullock portraying the president), while the other was the terrorist “Red Cell” attempting to stop Congress from certifying the election results. If the Red Cell […]
by Dan Schindel on Aug 1, 2024
