Authors — Scott Macaulay
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“How Do You Talk About It as a Murder When You Think It’s an Accident?” Citizen Sleuth Director Chris Kasick on His SXSW-Premiering Mile Marker 181 Doc
In the nine years since Serial, the “true crime podcaster” has become, variously, a career goal, sociological type and, in TV shows like Only Murders in the Building, object of satire. In Citizen Sleuth, world premiering in SXSW’s Documentary Spotlight section, debuting director Chris Kasick considers his voluble, no-filter subject—Emily Nestor of the Mile Marker 181 podcast—from all of these angles while also producing a work that is something of a moral reckoning for the popular audio genre. In 2011, Jaleayah Davis, a 20-year old Ohio woman, died in a horrible drunk-driving accident, her head severed from her body. Or […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 12, 2023 -
“I Like the Idea of Comedy in an Uninhabitable Place”: Director Calvin Lee Reeder on His SXSW-Premiering TV Pilot, Harbor Island
“Like an Abel Ferrara Jr., [Calvin Lee] Reeder meshes thought and design with genre storylines, like a Euro-filmmaker making ’70s drive-in films,” wrote Mike Plante in his 2007 25 New Face profile of the Portland, Ore.-born filmmaker. Sixteen-years later, the alt-horror auteur is still moving between the border spaces of various horror and science-fiction sub-genres, with his newest work — the SXSW-premiering independent TV pilot Harbor Island — being one of the most existentially offbeat yet. The festival’s program book provides the narrative gist but not the work’s extremely odd affect, which is something like watching Rupert Pupkin act in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 12, 2023 -
“Second by Second, She is Trying to Game Out What to Say Next…”: Writer/Director Tina Satter on Her Sydney Sweeney-Starring Berlin Premiere, Reality
Tina Satter’s Reality opens with a high-angle shot of its eponymous heroine, Reality Winner, her blonde head poking up amongst a stretch of cubicle dividers in a Georgia NSA facility. It’s 2017 and above her on the walls are an array of television monitors, chyrons blaring, all tuned to the latest news about James Comey’s Congressional testimony regarding Russian election interference. The channel is Fox, and you don’t have to be at any particular place on the political spectrum to view this work environment as already an abusive one. Winner works translating Farsi to English, a task that requires sensitivity, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 20, 2023 -
GoFundMe Launches to Support Tarnation Director Jonathan Caouette’s Medical Expenses
Jonathan Caouette, the director whose breakthrough experimental personal doc Tarnation (2004) has proved both tremendously influential but never really matched in terms of formal inventiveness and emotional intensity, is facing significant health challenges, and friends and supporters have launched a GoFundMe to help. Marie Therese Guirgis, Stephen Winter, Brian Kates, John Cameron Mitchell, and Gus Van Sant are behind the fundraiser, which is currently just over midway to its $60,000 goal. Treatment is occurring abroad, and funds raised will go towards “crucial surgeries and medical care, his outstanding medical bills, and his living expenses while he undergoes this long and delicate process […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 11, 2023 -
Good Vibes (and Free Drinks): New Strains Directors Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan on Their Trip to the International Film Festival Rotterdam
Along with their baby and an AI-generated poster, filmmakers Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan recently brought their debut feature, New Strains, to the International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it won a Special Jury prize. The film is about a couple who travel to New York just prior to the start of a worldwide pandemic and, holed up in a relative’s apartment, descend “into a toxic pattern of spite, jealousy and miserable co-dependence, wrote Vadim Rizov in our 25 New Face profile of the filmmakers. “Wryly funny and cuttingly satirical, New Strains has the rare distinction of being a pandemic film that actually […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 9, 2023 -
Noah Cowan, Former TIFF Festival Director, Curator, Critic and Distributor, Dies at 55
Noah Cowan — a curator, critic, festival director and distributor — died yesterday in Los Angeles. He was 55, and the cause was Glioblastoma multiforme. Over his more than 30-year career, Cowan brought his passion and erudition to a number of organizations and endeavors, beginning with the Toronto International Film Festival, where he began as an intern in 1981. After graduating with a philosophy degree at University of Toronto, Cowan in 1989 became a programmer at TIFF, curating films for the Midnight Madness and, later, the Vanguard sections. He would go on to program major national cinema retrospectives on India […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 26, 2023 -
Sundance Begins Charging Filmmakers for Pre-Screening Tech Checks
Among the changes Sundance filmmakers are encountering this year at the festival’s first in-person edition since 2020 is one playing out behind the scenes and before theater doors open. For the first time, Sundance is charging filmmakers for guaranteed tech checks before their screenings. Tech checks involve screening a DCP or print in a theater to check sound, picture, subtitling and other aspects of projection and audio before it is screened for an audience. The new policy was revealed in emails sent to film teams requesting tech checks and involves Sundance assigning “dedicated staff to facilitate.” Thirty-minute spot checks taking […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 25, 2023 -
Made with DALL-E-2: Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw on the Poster for Their Rotterdam-Premiering New Strains
For their Rotterdam-premiering feature New Strains‘s poster, Prashanth Kamalakanthan and Artemis Shaw knew they didn’t want to use an actual image from their pandemic production, which was shot on Hi-8. And they wanted an image that in addition to being beautiful would formally resonate with the film itself, a story of visiting young lovers (played by the filmmakers) stuck in New York when a travel ban hits at the start of a pandemic. “We were thinking about that sense of being frozen in time,” Shaw says. “In March, 2020, everyone was obsessed with the news, but we were all stuck […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2023 -
23 Films We’re Anticipating at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival is always the American independent scene’s bellwether. The festival’s curatorial decisions vault a select group of films — this year, 99 features out of 4,061 submitted — to the top tier of pictures receiving attention from distributors, critics, curators from other festivals and, through copious media coverage, audiences. And while longtime festival veterans — I’ve been attending since 1993 — are accustomed to the usual first-half rhythms (“the festival seems slow”; “the documentaries are stronger”; “did you hear Company X bought film Y for $Z million dollars!”), Sundance’s return to in-person combined with its first true hybrid […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 19, 2023 -
Filmmaker‘s 20 Most Read Posts of 2022
As 2022 comes to a close, Filmmaker returns with our annual recap of the year’s most read posts. As I click through Google Analytics, this piece always becomes something of a revelation, a mixture of the predictable (our 25 New Faces list); the news-triggered (an old profile resurfacing on the director’s recent success, for example, or, more sadly, their passing); evergreen articles on filmmaking itself; and pieces for which strong content, aided by SEO and provocative headlines, meshed to attract an abnormally large slew of first-time readers. As in the past, the list is divided into two: the 10 most […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 27, 2022
