Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Camden International Film Festival Announces Points North Fellowship Call for Entries
The Camden International Film Festival is now accepting submissions for its Points North Fellowship, which provides grants bringing five teams of documentary filmmakers to September’s Points North Documentary Forum and trains them in the art of the pitch. The Fellowship takes place before, during and even after the festival. Before the festival, filmmakers receive a day of intensive training and mentorship, sponsored by the Main Media Workshops. Then, filmmakers go on to pitch their projects to an array of international funders, broadcasters, distributors and producers — all before a live audience. Past panelists include representatives from the BBC, HBO, A&E […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 14, 2015 -
Watch for 24 Hours: Die Wilderin vom Montafon and Sabbatical from the Eastern Oregon Film Festival
As the Eastern Oregon Film Festival runs this weekend in Le Grande, Oregon, the festival and filmmaker bring you another day of 24-hour online premieres. Below are Evamarie Shaller’s short, Die Wilder vom Montanon, and Brendan Colvin’s feature Sabbatical, starring Robert Longstreet as “a middle-aged Kierkegaard scholar.” Both are embedded below and are free to view for the next 24 hours only. Die Wilderin vom Montafon from Evamaria Schaller on Vimeo. DIE WILDERIN VOM MONTAFON (dir. Evamaria Shaller) Technical Info 2014 / Austria / 21min / Experimental Short Synopsis The Austrian mountains. Legend of itself. Powerful and wild. Dangerous and […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 9, 2015 -
Watch for 24 Hours: In Search of the Miraculous and Friendship from the Eastern Oregon Film Festival
As part of this weekend’s Eastern Oregon Film Festival, Filmmaker is partnering with the fest to stream four online selections. Today, for an exclusive 24-hour window, you can view Sam Kuhn’s short film, In Search of the Miraculous and Nathaniel Bennett’s short feature, Friendship. Program notes for both are below, and check back tomorrow at 9:00 AM EST for Evamaria Shaller’s Die Wilder von Montafon and Brandon Colvin’s Sabbatical. In Search of the Miraculous from Lion Attack on Vimeo. In Search of the Miraculous (dir. Sam Kuhn) Technical Info 2014 / USA / 15min / Experimental Short Synopsis A seventeen-year-old […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 8, 2015 -
Anagram Creators May Abdalla and Amy Rose on Door into the Dark
The best work I saw at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival wasn’t a film at all. It was, instead, a lovely piece of conceptual counterprogramming in Tribeca’s Storyscapes section, Door into the Dark. An immersive theater piece by May Abdalla and Amy Rose of the U.K.-based company Anagram, Door into the Dark wasn’t positioned by curator Ingrid Kopp against the films in the festival. Rather, by including Door into the Dark within a program largely dominated by Oculus Rift VR work, Kopp used Door in the Dark‘s simply generated yet expansive mindscapes as a way of setting a high bar […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 4, 2015 -
I Want to Take You Higher: Josh and Ben Safdie on Heaven Knows What
New York these days: There’s a chain store on every corner, Times Square is a paved-over pedestrian mall with $6 hot dogs and, if you want voyeuristic thrills, you peer into the bedrooms of the luxury condos flush against the beautifully manicured, elevated High Line that’s transformed the West Side. No one wants to reflexively cling to a misplaced nostalgia, but given the blanding of the city’s physical landscape it’s not hard to imagine that the number of urgently jaw-dropping stories in the Naked City is decreasing daily. Fortunately, for those of us who associate New York with subcultural energies, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2015 -
Parting Shot
There’s a great tradition of acclaimed French actresses crossing over into larger budget Hollywood films, both good and bad: Isabelle Huppert in Heaven’s Gate; Catherine Deneuve in Hustle; Audrey Tautou in The Da Vinci Code. And while there’s a tradition too of French actresses appearing in American independent films — Huppert again in Hartley’s Amateur and, more recently, Adèle Exarchopoulos in, briefly, Matt Porterfield’s I Used to Be Darker — French stars appearing in such uninhibited, ultra-low budget comedies as Patrick Brice’s The Overnight, a Sundance premiere headed to theaters via The Orchard this June, are a far rarer occurrence. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2015 -
Editor’s Letter
If you’re a regular Filmmaker reader, you know that we’re obsessed about how the world of film is changing. But sometimes whatever is new and upcoming on the horizon has actually already arrived. Have you noticed? All those things that we chatter about here in our line items and articles and in these Editor’s Letters, well, they are almost old news. That is, if you’re not up on the new landscape, you’re not in the game. Compile a list of funders and distributors these days, and you’ll include alongside all the usual suspects Netflix and Amazon, who are now not […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2015 -
I’ll Come Running: Alfonso Gomez-Rejon and Jesse Andrews on Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
Those are people who died, died! They were all my friends, and they died! — Jim Carroll Do you remember your first experience with death? Most likely it was a grandparent passing. Or maybe a parent? Or, quite possibly, someone you knew at school, whether or not that person was a close friend. I remember mine — the younger brother of an elementary school classmate. He’d always prank on his older brother in the line to get into school each day, sneaking up on him from behind and then grabbing his lunch bag. A tug of war would ensue, the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 28, 2015 -
Kickstarter: An Exclusive Clip from Laundry Day
Director Randy Mack is quoted in my “How to Find a Producer” article, discussing the production scene in his hometown, New Orleans. Now, he’s on Kickstarter raising funds for the completion of his dark comedy, Laundry Day. Set over the course of 24 hours in a New Orleans bar, the film is, says Mack, a something cross between Magnolia and Barfly. In an email, he writes, “Laundry Day is a feature-length dark comedy about a bar fight in a 24-hour bar/laundromat/night club between a musician, a gutter punk, a drug dealer, and a bartender. The nonlinear story explores the incident […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 27, 2015 -
Gregory Bayne and Christian Lybrook on their Tribeca N.O.W. Series, Zero Point
Screening in the Tribeca Film Festival’s Tribeca N.O.W. section (as in, “new online work”) is Gregory Bayne and Christian Lybrook’s Zero Point, a 45-minute independently-produced pilot for what the two Idaho-based creators hope will be full-on television series. Director, producer and screenwriter Bayne is well known to Filmmaker readers by virtue of his various documentaries (Jens Pulver Driven, Bloodsworth) and opinion pieces, and he’s been at the DIY distribution forefront long before it was in vogue. So, perhaps its appropriate, then, that he and producer and screenwriter Lybrook are now early adopters of a new indie model: rather than make […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 25, 2015
