I was technical director of the Independent Feature Film Market from 1986 to 1993, and a member of the Independent Feature Film Market Committee from 1989 to 1993. I attended all prior IFP markets too, starting with the first one, a sidebar to the New York Film Festival. Those early IFFMs were a DIY affair, as scrappy, often broke indie filmmakers maneuvered to squeeze every advantage out of this novel new showcase, navigating its opportunities and inventing new ones. Nothing like it had existed before on the American indie scene. Two memories in particular are dear to me. The first […]

DPs, not directors, are the rock stars at Camerimage, the film festival in Bydgoszcz, Poland, devoted to the foundational art of the motion picture camera. The world’s best cinematographers, if not working, flock there each autumn.The 25th edition, which wrapped several months ago in November 2017, proved no exception. The festival hub is a modernist opera house, perched above The Brda, the narrow river that bisects picturesque Bydgoszcz (once known as “Little Berlin”). Centrally located, Opera Nova hosts two theaters, including the festival’s main venue. A long, ground-floor lobby and second-floor hallway, curved thanks to the building’s cylindrical shape, house […]

With Rachel Morrison the first woman cinematographer nominated for a Best Cinematography Academy Award, we’re running today online from our current print issue David Leitner’s interview with her about shooting her nominated film, Dee Rees’s Mudbound. When Dee Rees’s Mudbound premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, the director was returning to the fest six years after her feature debut, Pariah, launched there. The same year also marked DP Rachel Morrison’s first feature to be included in the festival, Zal Batmanglij’s Sound of My Voice, and she returned the following year with Ryan Coogler’s Fruitvale Station; Mudbound is her eighth […]

As my seventh annual camera round-up for Filmmaker goes to press and online, NAB 2017 has just wrapped, and one major take-away is clear: the march towards full-on realism — visual sensations so real that images appear palpable — is in its infancy. [Author’s note: this deep dive into camera tech was written for the Spring 2017 issue of Filmmaker. Despite arriving online at a later date, it remains timely and informative. Stay tuned for my Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2018 in Filmmaker, coming soon!] Call it hyper, call it immersive, call it virtual, the fact is that display […]

In the course of 85 years, the “Showplace of the Nation,” Radio City Music Hall, has hosted countless spectaculars, but few I suspect as geriatric as Wednesday night’s revue of strutting septuagenarians revisiting their classic hits from the AM radio era — Barry Manilow, Dionne Warwick, the late Maurice White (in the person of what’s left of Earth, Wind, and Fire), Carly Simon and Aretha Franklin. A few youngsters performed too, including Jennifer Hudson and Kenny G. You certainly wouldn’t mistake this for SXSW. Call it North by Northeast. (With a tip of the bowler to Hitch.) That would explain […]

On Friday, January 27, as I attended the second half of Sundance, Trump signed an executive order barring Syrian refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States. “We’re not willing to be wrong on this subject,” said White House chief of staff Reince Priebus on Face the Nation two days later. “President Trump is not willing to take chances on this subject.” The following Monday, The New York Times reported that senior White House officials “were proud of taking actions that they said would help protect Americans against threats from potential terrorists.” This year at Sundance […]

Malcolm Forbes, of all people, once memorably said, “You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.” I’d like to extend that principle: You can easily judge the character of a nation by how it treats the indigenous people from whom it took its territory. I’m from Chattanooga, near the Chickamauga battlefield, just east of the Ocoee and Hiwassee rivers, in the southeast corner of Tennessee. I grew up on an Appalachian mountain, dated a girl in nearby Ooltewah. I now live in Manhattan. All indigenous names. Where are […]

Slamdance remains the little festival that could, a throwback to analog film festivals of the early 1980s, with their cinema-obsessed audiences and packed makeshift screening rooms. A halcyon age of innocence, before the onslaught of marketing, branding, corporate sponsorship, publicists, producer reps, agents, and social media. At Slamdance there’s still no red carpet and no one checks your bags or makes you open your coat for inspection before entering every screening. Nonetheless every year Slamdance, with its tiny slate, upstages Sundance with one or two films that soar. This year’s not-to-be-missed Slamdance film is Stefan Avalos’s Strad Style. Strad Style has […]