Authors — Sarah Salovaara
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Trailer Watch: J.C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year
J.C. Chandor is a filmmaker who looks to be carving a rather eclectic oeuvre. The near dialogue-less All is Lost was made in direct contrast to the motormouthed Wall Street floors of Margin Call, and his latest, A Most Violent Year, sees Chandor wading into genre waters. Starring Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain, the film, which is due from A24 in December, tracks a year in the life of an immigrant couple in crime-addled 1981 New York. Your first look is above.
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 18, 2014 -
Watch: 17 TIFF Shorts Available on Vimeo
The distribution rollout for short form work remains a tenuous enterprise, at best. Aside from throwing it up on Vimeo or YouTube, and hoping it catches the eye of a curated site like Short of the Week, many filmmakers end up sitting on their shorts for months after their festival premiere. Vimeo is shaking up that paradigm by offering 17 shorts from the Toronto International Film Festival’s Short Cuts program — which the streaming site sponsors — online through September 19. These include the Jury Prize winning A Single Body, which offers insight into an earnest male friendship; the Shane Carruth-starring everything & everything & everything; the sci-fi Entangled, from […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 17, 2014 -
POV Launches Interactive Shorts Including Empire:Cradle
POV, America’s longest running television showcase for non-fiction films, is wading into interactive waters. Yesterday, the doc powerhouse launched an online, short-form transmedia section, with six projects, four of which were created by Hackathon alumni, and three of which will be premiering at NYFF’s Convergence sidebar in the ensuing weeks. The works are driven by timelines, geography, and photography, but my hands down favorite, Empire:Cradle, is fueled by a transcendent moral code. One in a series of four shorts that probes the ramifications of Dutch colonialism, Cradle is shot on location at Amsterdam’s Schipol Airport. Pairing clusters of bystanders who watch the takeoffs and […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 16, 2014 -
Euro-Pudding and Look Books: Takeaways from Day One at IFP’s Filmmaker Conference
After sitting through the majority of the New Narratives presentations on day one of the Filmmaker Conference at IFP Film Week, my brain is almost too awash with content to compile anything but a listicle. From conversations with cinematographers like Reed Morano and producers like Mynette Louie to an Obvious Child case study and Kevin B. Lee’s mini-keynote, here is a handful of the major takeaways I gleaned from yesterday’s Conference. 1. For co-productions, don’t assume hiring local crew is the cheapest option. Arriving to the Icelandic set of Land Ho!, producers Mynette Louie and Sara Murphy realized they were sharing ground with a slightly larger production: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 15, 2014 -
The “Internet Slowdown” and Net Neutrality Update
Wednesday afternoon, I clicked on a Vimeo link and was greeted by an airtight pop-up. In order to pass on to the video, I had to enter my cell phone number and zip code. I complied, and not a second later, I received a call briefing me on talking points of the FCC’s revision to the Open Internet Order — which would allow broadband providers to charge sites for guaranteed service — and was then connected to senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Wednesday, September 10, marked the technical end to the public comment period of the FCC’s detrimental potential amendments to the net neutrality act. To mobilize […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 12, 2014 -
Trailer Watch: Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman
With The Homesman, Tommy Lee Jones follows his directorial debut, the 2005 neo-western The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, with a feminist riff on the same genre. Jones stars alongside Hilary Swank as a drifter who is recruited to smuggle three hysterical women from Nebraska to Iowa. Premiering to mixed reviews at Cannes, the film nonetheless exhibits an interesting inversion of the machismo outlaw, and the helpless damsels in distress, who intimate a threatening aura of their own. Roadside Attractions opens The Homesman on November 14.
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 11, 2014 -
First Footage from the 4K Panasonic VariCam 35
It feels a bit cruel to share such attractive footage from the brand new 4K Panasonic camera, the VariCam 35, when it will undoubtedly fetch up to a nearly unattainable price. Whilst reviewing the specs back in March, Michael Murie noted that Panasonic gave a ballpark figure of “over $10,000 and under $1,000,000,” so there’s still hope that it lands near the former and not the latter. In any event, here’s your first look at some of the camera’s capabilities per its Super 35 sensor. For a further breakdown of the VariCam’s features, check out an interview with Panasonic’s Senior Product Manager […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 10, 2014 -
“Giving Access Back to the People”: Fandor CEO Ted Hope on FIX and the Festival Alliance
Back in July, Fandor announced the implementation of two new initiatives, FIX and the Fandor|Festival Alliance. The former aggregates the work of over a hundred participating filmmakers, fostering audience interaction, while the latter assists festivals with technological services and highlights their programming. When I spoke to Fandor CEO Ted Hope last week, in what I deemed a belated inquiry, he appropriately countered that there is no such thing in the digital era. “Nothing is grounded as this is how it is, it’s constantly being iterated. What we launched with is not where our goal is,” he said of FIX. In our […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 9, 2014 -
Watch: The Visual Poetry of Stanley Kubrick
“This is my rifle, there are many like it, but this one is mine,” could easily be amended to “this is my Stanley Kubrick tribute…” for the world wide web of Vimeo. Nevertheless, here is a nice addition to the catalogue from Marc Müller which pairs Kubrick’s characteristic classical pieces (“The Blue Danube,” “Symphony #9,” etc.) with his use of tracking shots, combat, close-ups, one-point perspectives and on. If not bone-to-space station caliber, there are still some nice cuts to be had.
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 5, 2014 -
Previewing IFP’s Filmmaker Conference Series
Affiliation bias aside, it’s a bit tricky to offer a succinct preview of IFP’s Filmmaker Conference during the upcoming Film Week, as all five days of programming are chock-full of essentials. The annual event runs at Lincoln Center from September 14 – 18, with panels, keynotes, pitches, case studies and roundtables from every corner of the industry. Find more than a few highlights below, and be sure to view the full schedule of offerings here. September 14: New Narratives As a filmmaker, it’s almost impossible not to take a festival rejection letter personally, but programmers weigh more than just preference, they also […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Sep 4, 2014
