[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 Midnight –Egyptian Theatre, Park City] With this film we were presented with the opportunity to document a very specific moment in time, both musically and culturally—LCD Soundsystem’s final show ever, at Madison Square Garden. The idea of shooting the concert appealed to us as not only fans of the band, but as filmmakers. We love the classic experiential concert films of the past, such as The Last Waltz, and Stop Making Sense, and for us, the idea of documenting an event like that was something we had a very specific vision for. But we were also […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 9:00 pm –Broadway Center Cinema 6, SLC] When we see something perfectly intact in nature, like a wonderful butterfly, with its incredible composition of shape and colors, in Italian we immediately say “look, it seems fake!” On the other hand, when we contemplate an object, skillfully crafted by human hands, like a butterfly put together through hours of patient work by a talented artisan, we say “wow, it looks real!” There is a strange area where the perfectly natural and the perfectly artificial collide. This point of contact needs to be investigated: I sense something […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 9:00 pm –Temple Theatre, Park City] Karin Hayes: As a young kid, I dreamed of being a theater actor (or a veterinarian). It wasn’t until I went to a screening of Robert M. Young’s film Triumph of the Spirit, that I knew I wanted to be able to tell incredibly powerful stories in this same way. I listened, engrossed, as Young, Willem Dafoe, Edward James Olmos and the story’s real-life main character, Salamo Arouch, spoke about the real events and the filmmaking process. By the rousing applause and Q&A afterwards, I could tell the entire […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22, 11:30 am –Library Center Theatre, Park City] Working in radio journalism in college and then as a reporter in China, I fell in love with the power of aural storytelling. I always hoped to make a documentary film because I thought it would add even more layers to an audience’s experience. As a director I know my choices and authorship necessarily shape the film, but my hope is that good documentary filmmaking can come as close as possible to letting viewers encounter a story directly and decide things for themselves. Ai Weiwei is a master […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 8:30 pm –Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] I believe that going to the cinema and watching a film, on the big screen, will always hold a special place in peoples hearts. Despite technological advances in terms of how films are consumed, the physical experience of the lights dimming as you are transported into another world will always be magical. This is why it will never die. My first memory of going to the cinema was when I was six years old. I grew up in Cairo, Egypt and every summer our local sports club would […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22, 2:30 pm –Library Center Theatre, Park City] When I was a kid I wanted to be a magician. I watched a VHS copy of David Copperfield walking through the Great Wall of China over and over and over again. I still don’t know how he did it. Filmmaking isn’t that much different. I mean – think of it this way: movies start out as ideas. In your brain. These get spilled onto paper. People then pretend to be the characters on that paper. Which is filmed through the lens of a camera. The contents of […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, January 21 9:00 pm –Egyptian Theatre, Park City] I come from a studio art background and consider myself an artist who made a film. I make music, murals and performances as well, so I hesitate to call myself a filmmaker. That said, I’ve been thinking lately that outside of the “burden of branding,” it doesn’t really matter what I call myself; my work will name me at the end of the day, and I’m interested to hear what that name will be after a few years of making work. So I guess if I am indeed named […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2012[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, January 21, 8:30 pm –Library Center Theater] I’ve always been suspicious of movies and visual media and my interest in film developed out of that suspicion. In the world that I knew as a child, in an era preceding the Internet, many of us were reared in part, at least in terms of our social behavior, by television. Much of what we understood of the adult world we learned through osmosis, through the colors and exoticism of television, through the play of bodies and the exchange of words and gestures in that very artificial space. We were […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2012[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, January 21, 12:15 pm –Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] I didn’t have an option, when I was 7 years old I felt “the calling”, I knew since then what I wanted to do with my life: become a filmmaker. Since then, it has been pretty much like being passionately in love with somebody, why do we fall in love with some particular person and not the next? It doesn’t really have a rational explanation -at least not for me- you are just in love. During the years, I have tried to give it a sense, so here […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2012[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, January 21, 11:30 pm –Library Center Theatre, Park City] My movie is closely based on a true event, though I actually stumbled upon the story years after it was a news item. (Is “Ripped from old headlines!” a saying?) To delve too much into the events might dampen some of the film’s enjoyment, but in brief, it involves some people who are essentially talked into holding a person against her will, naked, in the stockroom of a fast food restaurant for hours. I can’t say when I first discovered this story that I had a “Eureka!” moment, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2012