In their latest short film, The Last Days of August, which depicts the slow-motion desolation of a Nebraska town economically denuded by online retail, prolific filmmakers Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck create a haunted visual poetry — a blend of formally arresting, incisively spare images and heightened sound design. The two filmmakers, who appeared on our 25 New Faces list in 2010, began as shorts filmmakers and in recent years have directed arresting character-based, documentary-tinged features (God Bless the Child, When She Runs, and, for Machoian solo, The Killing of Two Lovers and The Integrity of Joseph Chambers). But throughout their […]

Sean Baker’s debut feature was 2000’s Four Letter Words, but it was his second (following his work on TV’s Greg the Bunny), Take Out, directed with Shih-Ching Tsou, that is the most clear antecedent to the neorealist-inflected work he practices today. When I interviewed Baker in 2012 about his Starlet, we began with his origin story, which included this section on Take Out: I was a bit discouraged. I was seeing these filmmakers I’d gone to school with — Todd Phillips, Marc Forster — start to make waves. Their careers were taking off. I wanted to get back to my […]

Director and producer Eileen Yaghoobian followed the release of her 2008 documentary about underground poster design, Died Young, Stayed Pretty, with a number of surprising projects, including Exit the Labyrinth, a short film produced with the Guardian about Berlin’s Labyrinth, and Send Me Your Sexts, an online service that creates short films out of user-submitted erotic chats. She’s now made a short — “a sports action horror film” — that is as well a pitch for a feature. Check out the teaser above, and look for the short on the Skater Zombies YouTube channel on Halloween. Yaghoobian sent the following […]

Nominations for the 2022 Gotham Awards were announced this morning, with Todd Fields’s TÁR topping the list with five nominations, including Best Picture, Outstanding Lead Performance (Cate Blanchett) and two Outstanding Performer noms (Noémie Merlant and Nina Hoss). But perhaps the biggest surprise is in the composition of the Best Feature category, which omitted a number of presumed awards-season heavyweights in favor of a trio of excellent, smaller-budgeted, pure independent films acquired at festivals. Along with TÁR and the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once, Best Feature nominees are Charlotte Wells’s delicately allusive memory piece, Aftersun, an A24 acquisition out […]

Rachel Gordon, author of the recently published and recommended The Documentary Distribution Toolkit: How to Get Out, Get Seen, and Get an Audience and James Boyer, director of operations at distributor Collective Eye Films, join D-Word founder Doug Block for this useful conversation about documentary distribution and all of its related subjects. In the talk, Boyer talks about things like needed deliverables, how his company makes acquisitions and the role of festivals in launching films, and Gordon talks about the realities of self-distribution, grassroots marketing techniques, and identifying and interacting with educational instructors who may be able to place films […]

When Irwin Young, longtime chairman of DuArt Film Laboratories, died earlier this year at the age of 94, there was an outpouring of tributes, remembrances and praise for a businessman and technical innovator who was “foundational to the indie film movement,” as David Leitner wrote on our website. “Irwin not only simplified and streamlined postproduction, he stepped to the plate to help ‘impecunious’ (his word) indie filmmakers too many times to count, cutting deals, OK’ing delayed payments, sometimes even investing in the films themselves. As a consequence, iconic filmmakers working today—too many to list here—got a leg up when they […]

After much speculation over the release date of Antoine Fuqua’s Will Smith-starring Emancipation, Apple TV+ is making something of an awards season play and has dated the film for December 2 in theaters and December 9 on the streaming service. By point of comparison, last year’s Best Picture-winning Coda was released day-and-date in theaters and on the service. From the press release: Apple Original Films’ “Emancipation,” directed and executive produced by Antoine Fuqua (“Training Day,” “The Equalizer”) and starring and produced by Will Smith (“King Richard,” “The Pursuit of Happyness,” “Ali”), will premiere in theaters on December 2, 2022, and […]

With the opening night of the 60th New York Film Festival upon us, Filmmaker would like to recommend 14 titles to catch during the 17-day engagement, which runs from September 30 through October 16 in-person at Film at Lincoln Center. Over the course of our previous festival coverage from this year—including Sundance, Cannes, Venice and TIFF—many of these films have been featured on our site in critical dispatches and reviews. Below, we share links and excerpts from these director interviews and festival dispatches, highlighting Jerzy Skolimowski’s Eo, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up […]

Filmmaker is hosting four conversations next week at The Gotham’s Gotham Week Conference, all with filmmakers who have recent films we love and have covered extensively at Filmmaker. And, these talks are free to public. Three are in person at Brooklyn Navy Yards, and the fourth is on Zoom. RSVP by clicking on the links below. On Monday at 10:30 AM, I’ll be speaking with DEDZA founder Kate Gondwe, one of our 25 New Faces last year, about the distribution of Saul Williams’s and Anisia Uzeyman’s Neptune Frost, and particularly about the specialized techniques used to broaden the reach of this […]

In Spring of 1994, as Filmmaker began its third year of publication, we received a call: would we be interested in interviewing Jean-Luc Godard? Yes, we excitedly said, and when Hal Hartley agreed to be the interviewer, and the interview was a go, we made the film our cover. (In Filmmaker’s history, it’s sandwiched between Rose Troche’s Go Fish and Rick Linklater’s Before Sunrise.) Rereading the interview today, I’m struck — although I shouldn’t be! — by the prescience of Godard’s musings on the future histories of cinema, the ways that it will be mediated by technology and its changing […]