Authors — David Leitner
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More 2026 Sundance Quick Takes
As Sundance 2026 wraps and the curtain drops on Park City, the Sundance 2026 awards have been announced. Films fortunate enough to be so honored by Sundance juries gain valuable visibility, boosting their chances at finding greater audiences. Several of the films mentioned in my first round of coverage won awards. However, many of the premieres at Sundance you will likely hear very little about. As director Eugene Hernandez commented at the awards ceremony, out of 16,000 submissions, 150 films were selected for this year’s Sundance. How many festival attendees, no less reviewers, are able to see more than 20-30 […]
by David Leitner on Feb 1, 2026 -
Sundance 2026 Quick Takes
While the East digs out from under feet of snow and ice, Park City is dry as a bone. Desiccated slopes encircling Main Street are gray and bare, devoid of powder or skiers. Meanwhile, Main Street, a pedestrian mall during the festival’s first weekend, is buzzier than ever, packed with Sundancers under sunny skies reveling at the festival’s last rodeo in Utah. The only precipitation in the forecast is another blizzard of great indie films. Last night’s premiere of Once Upon a Time in Harlem was the film’s first public screening ever, and it was met with two standing ovations. […]
by David Leitner on Jan 26, 2026 -
A Tech Writer’s Appreciation of Scott Macaulay
Scott Macaulay’s remarkable three-decade-plus tenure as Editor-in-Chief of Filmmaker, a magazine by and for indie filmmakers, coincided with momentous changes brought on by tech: the almost total supplantation of a century’s worth of film technologies—production, post-production, distribution, exhibition—by digital systems conferring high-end capabilities upon low-cost cameras and PCs, along with the birth of internet websites and online streaming. Scott, with his roaming intellect, taste for experimental theater and film, and open spirit, was the right person at the right time to captain Filmmaker magazine through these epochal transitions. I know, because my association with Filmmaker, the print magazine, and Scott […]
by David Leitner on Jan 23, 2026 -
Notable Tech Trends in 2025
Telluride is not on my annual festival calendar—too distant, too costly—and rarely I’m at Toronto, only with a film. So as a New Yorker, my personal fall awards season kicks off with the New York Film Festival. Like Telluride, it’s a non-competitive festival that showcases and celebrates the best of each year’s new crop, and it has the advantage of relying less on premieres and more on outstanding films gleaned from earlier festivals like Berlin, Cannes, and Sundance. As such, it’s a pretty good sampler of the latest trends coursing through the art and practice of cinematic expression. This year […]
by David Leitner on Dec 31, 2025 -
Production Gear: A Primer on How Tariffs Inflate Costs and Erode Choice, and Why Costs Will Never Come Back Down
L.A. film and TV production, recovering in the long wake of the global pandemic, has been beset by strikes, streaming wars, a generational turn from legacy media, and now AI anxiety. Resulting historic lows in production have meant that industry freelancers are widely out of work. It’s a safe bet that the last thing the industry wants is another round of whiplash. Enter broad tariffs. A blast from the past, last signed into law by Herbert Hoover in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. I think we know how that turned out. The current American President, seizing questionable executive powers […]
by David Leitner on Sep 10, 2025 -
In Memoriam, An Interview with the Late Documentary Filmmaker Joel DeMott and her partner, Jeff Kreines
In my recent Filmmaker conversation with Julia Loktev about the making of her monumental documentary, My Undesirable Friends, I cited the work of the late documentary filmmaker Joel DeMott, because I believe there is a straight line between DeMott’s approach in the late 1970s to shooting vérité documentary using shoulder-mounted 16mm cameras and Loktev’s latter-day methods using iPhones. DeMott, who died in June, has been eulogized in obits in Documentary and The New York Times, so no need to recap her venturesome life and career here. Instead, my way of paying homage to the contributions of DeMott and her partner […]
by David Leitner on Aug 20, 2025 -
In Conversation with Julia Loktev About the Nuts and Bolts of Making Part 1 (5 1/2 hours) of her Monumental Vérité Documentary, My Undesirable Friends — Frederick Wiseman Weighs In, Too
Watching the world premiere of My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow last September in the Main Slate of the 62nd New York Film Festival, I knew I was experiencing a milestone in vérité documentary filmmaking. Not because My Undesirable Friends was filmed using an iPhone per se. Filming with iPhones is a commonplace now, from this summer’s Danny Boyle hit, 28 Years Later, to Aardman’s latest Wallace & Gromit animation. Last April’s NAB show delivered booths full of iPhone cages, gimbals, adapters, and power banks. Apple’s popular “Shot on iPhone” campaign has been running since 2015. […]
by David Leitner on Aug 7, 2025 -
Notable Tech in 2024
Innovation in cameras, lenses, lighting, batteries, and more pressed onward in 2024, despite production doldrums and pain points across the industry. These advances arrive at a time when all the world walks around with a capable 4K video camera in their pockets, when a youngest generation pivots to vertical videos from social media. While the future of the film business as we knew it may seem cloudy, the steadily rising quality and capability of low-cost gear does continue to lift all boats. Below are brief notes on some of the tech standouts of 2024. Let’s hope that ginned-up xenophobia—manufactured panics […]
by David Leitner on Dec 31, 2024 -
Robert M. Young, 1924-2024: A True Giant of American Independent Filmmaking
Robert M. “Bob” Young, often described in the film era of the 1980s as the godfather of American independent filmmaking, has died. His son Andy, himself an award-winning filmmaker, announced Young’s death on February 7th in a Facebook post: “He was a rebel in the industry, who made the films he dreamed of and lived the life he wanted, whether it was trekking through the Congo, swimming with sharks, or plumbing the depths of the human experience. He was 99 years old, and while the final years were sometimes tough for a guy who lived to do it all, he […]
by David Leitner on Feb 10, 2024 -
2023 in Review: 5 Quick Tech Takeaways from September’s New York Film Festival
Those of us who live in New York are treated each fall to a Whitman’s Sampler of world cinema, a curated selection of highlights from some of the year’s most prestigious international festivals. It’s hardly a large sample size, given the annual output of theatrical films worldwide, but it’s a weathervane nonetheless. Which way were the winds blowing this year? Take what I say below with a grain of salt. I saw 27 feature films at NYFF 61, out of the 44 selections programmed in the Main Slate and Spotlight sections. A modest sample within a modest sample, in other […]
by David Leitner on Dec 31, 2023
