The following interview with director Jim McKay was published during last year’s BAMcinemafest and is being rerun today as his feature En el Séptimo Día is in release from Cinema Guild. The film can currently be seen at the IFC Center in New York and the Laemmle Music Hall in L.A. Many other cities are scheduled over the next two months, including, on Friday, the Roxie in San Francisco. Jim McKay, whose early, mid ’90s/early-aughts features (Girls Town, Our Song, Everyday People and Angel) were empathetic and involving New York dramas suffused with a love of neighborhood and feeling for […]

There are two types of filmmakers: those who will stand on a street corner wearing a sandwich board to promote their movies, and those who will not. Dan Mirvish is fearlessly in the former category, as evidenced by this video, which finds the Bernard and Huey writer, director and Slamdance co-founder outside the Laemmle Monica hustling passersby to come and see his movie this weekend (and also be passersby in a video about promoting via a sandwich board). Writes Mirvish in an email about promoting via sandwich board: It has some historical context: 22 years ago, I wore a similar […]

The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, has announced the 12 serialized projects comprising its 2018 Screen Forward Labs. Now in its fourth year, the Screen Forward Labs were created to support the increasingly large number of early-career creators making web, series or app-based work. Notably, says IFP Executive Director Joana Vicente in the press release, 73% of this year’s projects are from female creators, and 50% are led by all-female teams. For the first time this year, fiction and non-fiction projects co-exist in the same program, and genres and themes include post-apocalyptic science fiction, a personal drama involving […]

Back in 2002, Filmmaker covered Nigeria’s “Nollywood” film scene, which producer Jeremy Nathan wrote, could be compared to the American no-budget movement of the ’80s and ’90s with its inventive, low-cost non-industry production models. Nollywood would go on to receive much international press over the years, with articles describing the interplay between Hollywood hits and the Nigerian variants they would inspire. The latest noteworthy example is actually not a movie or TV show but a music video. Nigerian rapper Falz the Bad Guy, a former lawyer, has released a riff on Childish Gambino’s This is America, in which the song […]

I was talking with some French producers recently, and they were seriously looking forward to this year’s Cannes Film Festival. And they were miffed by some of the preview articles that have been posted, including Todd McCarthy’s piece questioning the firepower of this year’s line-up. For years people have been wanting the Festival to be more adventurous, they told me, and now, when they are, Cannes is being criticized for not having the new films of the familiar auteurs who have appeared in the main selection so many, many times. I heard similar comments from a Latin American producer, who […]