12 O’Clock Boys Oscilloscope Laboratories — Aug. 5 Lotfy Nathan’s debut documentary gets up close and unsentimental with preteen Pug, whose only dream is to join the title crew of Baltimore’s weekend motorbike and four-wheeler riders. It’s a physically dangerous spectacle and a law-baiting traffic hazard for the city, but in Nathan’s NFL Films-style super-slow-mo it’s also a majestic procession and one-day release from systemic economic inequity and urban racial division. 12 O’Clock Boys sets four years of Pug’s life against the danger and thrill of his stunting idols’ most questionably liberating processions. — Vadim Rizov Under the Skin Lions […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 17, 2014Cannes Film Festival 2014 by Aaron Hillis Ken Loach. Olivier Assayas. Atom Egoyan. The Dardenne Brothers. The world’s most prestigious film festival may have asked the first-ever female Palme d’Or winner (Jane Campion, for 1993’s The Piano) to head up the jury, but Cannes’ main competition was disappointingly chock-full of the usual suspects, i.e., older, white male auteurs on a return visit. At least this year’s top honor went to Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose three-hour-plus drama Winter Sleep will be released stateside in time for awards season. The characteristically Chekhovian, uncharacteristically talky epic stars Haluk Bilginer as a […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 17, 2014The following is a sponsored editorial post from LG. For video and sound editors, getting enough screen space to get work done efficiently has long been a problem. Even with two 16:9 monitors running off one CPU, there’s still bezel barriers to contend with, and your working space quickly grows cramped, slowing down workflow as you struggle to make all your programs fit. Now there’s a solution: the LG 34UM95, an ultra-wide 21:9 monitor with 3440×1440 Quad HD resolution. Sound mixers can now see all their tracks in a wide, uninterrupted linear sequence, with the high resolution eliminating time wasted […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jun 4, 2014IFP ANNOUNCES DOCUMENTARY LINE-UP FOR ITS ANNUAL INDEPENDENT FILMMAKER LABS 2014 Marks the 10th Anniversary of Yearlong Mentorship Program Brooklyn, NY (May 12, 2014) – The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) announced today the ten documentaries selected for the 2014 Independent Filmmaker Labs, IFP’s annual yearlong fellowship for first-time feature directors. The creative teams of the selected films, chosen from a national pool of 200+ submissions, are currently attending the first week’s sessions – The Time Warner Foundation Completion Labs – taking place May 12-16 in New York City. The Narrative Lab selections will be announced in June. The Independent Filmmaker Labs are […]
by Filmmaker Staff on May 12, 2014Sundance By Scott Macaulay “Can’t we just try to have a good time?” The plea so often heard when going on a family trip — or an evening out with a couple you don’t like so much, or when indulging your partner on a trip back home — is terrible advice for a journalist attending a film festival, especially Sundance. You see, as long as your tickets are in order, you can quite easily have a good time at the Park City festival. By “good time,” I’m speaking in film festival terms, which means “see good movies.” The destination for […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2014Caveh Zahedi In One Fell Swoop By Peter Rinaldi DVD is not dead. It’s the new vinyl. Unconvinced? Perhaps a six DVD set of an important and influential American director’s films, most of which have never been released on video, will change your mind. Factory 25’s “Digging My Own Grave: The Films of Caveh Zahedi” might be the most comprehensive collection of an independent filmmaker’s work available in one set: five feature films, over two dozen shorts, a feature-length series of video letters, and a plethora of extras, all housed in a handsome 100-plus page hardcover book … oh, not […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 20141. Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace A former associate editor at n+1 whose politicized beat has included everything from localized Occupy movements to contemporary classical music, Nikil Saval turns his attention to office life in his first book. From the origins of corporate discontent in Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” through Frederick “Speedy” Taylor’s turn-of-the-century efficiency innovations up to (inevitably) “The Office,” Saval takes on the white-collar workplace from a variety of angles: the changing workspaces themselves, the demographic makeup of the people within them and their pop culture representations. 2. Kimono Kimono scrapes selected information from websites directly, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2014Attention, our audience’s and our own — it’s a valued commodity these days. We struggle to command our audience’s attention, for them to discover our work and then, once they’ve discovered it, to actually focus on it. Meanwhile, we struggle to focus our own attention, to fight our society’s weapons of mass distraction so we can not just see our work to completion but fully discover the meanings within it. What role does attention play in your work? Can you discuss an instance where you thought about some aspect of attention when it came to your film? I can barely […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2014Attention, our audience’s and our own — it’s a valued commodity these days. We struggle to command our audience’s attention, for them to discover our work and then, once they’ve discovered it, to actually focus on it. Meanwhile, we struggle to focus our own attention, to fight our society’s weapons of mass distraction so we can not just see our work to completion but fully discover the meanings within it. What role does attention play in your work? Can you discuss an instance where you thought about some aspect of attention when it came to your film? I’m sorry but […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2014Attention, our audience’s and our own — it’s a valued commodity these days. We struggle to command our audience’s attention, for them to discover our work and then, once they’ve discovered it, to actually focus on it. Meanwhile, we struggle to focus our own attention, to fight our society’s weapons of mass distraction so we can not just see our work to completion but fully discover the meanings within it. What role does attention play in your work? Can you discuss an instance where you thought about some aspect of attention when it came to your film? Bringing attention to […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2014