Authors — Filmmaker Staff
-
“CHINA HEIVYWEIGHTS” | director, Yung Chang
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22, 6:00 pm –Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] 1. Why are you a filmmaker? Why did you choose this profession? I love movies. Ever since I was a kid and my dad would set up his super-8 projector in the basement and rent black-and-white movies from the library, I have loved movies. Movies are visceral. They are cathartic. They are spiritual. I love the experience of going to watch movies in a dark theatre with a full audience. I love being emotionally moved, to be shaken alive, to feel a sense of the wider world and […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012 -
Safety Not Guaranteed | Director Colin Trevorrow
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 5:30 pm –Library Center Theatre, Park City] First of all, thanks for referring to me as an artist. It made me feel good. With Safety Not Guaranteed, Derek Connolly and I had the goals you might associate with art—to make something soulful, something that breaks rules, engages the heart. But beneath it all was a sincere want to entertain in a way that only movies can. There’s an element of showmanship in cinema that most other mediums don’t share. Yes, the characters in our film are honest and the emotions are true—good entertainment doesn’t have to […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012 -
“FINDING NORTH” | directors, Kristi Jacobson & Lori Silverbush
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, January 22 6:00 pm –Temple Theatre, Park City] Kristi Jacobson: 49 million people in the U.S.—one in four children—don’t know where their next meal is coming from. It’s a shocking statistic, but how do you turn a stat into a story? My answer is deceivingly simple: you make a movie. No art form can truly make us feel another person’s pain, or joy, or hunger. It’s our own emotions and imaginations that bring any art form to life. But film, in my experience, is the most powerful conduit between one person’s experience and an audience. As a […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 22, 2012 -
“SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS” | directors, Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace
[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 -
“CORPO CELESTE” | director, Alice Rohrwacher
[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 -
“WE’RE NOT BROKE” | directors, Karin Hayes & Victoria Bruce
[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 -
“AI WEIWEI: NEVER SORRY” | director, Alison Klayman
[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 -
“MY BROTHER THE DEVIL” | director, Sally El Hosaini
[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 -
“SAVE THE DATE” | co-writer-director, Michael Mohan
[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 -
“AN OVERSIMPLICATION OF HER BEAUTY” | writer-director, Terence Nance
[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
