Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP, and Filmmaker‘s publisher) announced today that the 2020 edition of its long-running signature program, IFP Week, will be virtual. The program, which has drawn thousands of directors, producers, screenwriters, financiers and executives to panels, workshops and one-on-one meeting events in IFP’s Brooklyn home, will, this September 20 – 25, take place through digital platforms. The announcement today makes IFP one of the first film organizations to announce a virtual Fall event in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic. “Given the ever-changing landscape of today’s world we have decided to host IFP Week virtually this year to […]

Mark Jackson’s This Teacher — a Slamdance Closing Night film as well as the final U.S. Fiction winner at the now-shuttered Los Angeles Film Festival — is being released on DVD and digital formats June 9 by Breaking Glass, and the trailer has just dropped. Jackson (Without, War Story) is a 2011 Filmmaker 25 New Face who won the 2012 Audi Independent Spirit Award. Starring Cesar-winner Hafsia Herzi, the film’s a kind of existential cabin-in-the-woods thriller dealing with Islamophobia and American madness. The synopsis: This Teacher follows a French Muslim woman (Hafsia Herzi) as she travels to New York City […]

The Sundance Institute announced today the 22 projects from filmmakers all over the world that will receive funding from its Documentary Fund. Filmmakers from 19 countries with projects in all stages of production will receive unrestricted grant support totaling $525,000. “At Sundance Institute, we know that these unprecedented times demand creative and nimble support,” said Documentary Film Program interim Director, ​Kristin Feeley​, and Documentary Film Fund Director, Hajnal Molnar-Szakacs​ in a press release. “We’re fortunate to have a collaborative and strong network of partners that allow us to ensure material support for these filmmakers as they develop bold new work, […]

Lynn Shelton, who wrote and directed features including Hump Day, Your Sister’s Sister and Laggies, and who directed numerous television episodes, died yesterday in Los Angeles of a previously undiagnosed blood disorder. She was 54. Long associated with the Seattle independent film scene, Shelton began feature filmmaking in her mid-30s, after working in a variety of other artistic mediums. She told Filmmaker in 2012, “As far back as I can remember I always knew I wanted to be an artist. Finding myself smitten with nearly every creative medium in existence probably made the fact that I ended up deeply exploring […]

“Theater engages the whole organism,” says Biosphere 2 Director of Systems Engineering William Dempster. “Movement, through emotion — [it] gives you insight into yourself. Building a foundation from which we could go on and do other projects.” Accompanying Dempster’s voiceover early in Matt Wolf’s engrossing and unexpectedly stirring documentary, Spaceship Earth, is black-and-white footage from the first public activity of John Allen’s band of “Synergists”: a traveling theater production called The Theater of All Possibilities. The artistic value of the production is indeterminate; seen in brief clips, it falls somewhere on the continuum between The Living Theater and an Allan […]

Each Friday, Filmmaker sends out a free newsletter containing an original Editor’s Letter as well as news of film openings, events, etc. (the latter mostly streaming and online, these days). The Editor’s Letters usually aren’t posted online, but here’s last week’s, which deals with the uncertainty around obtaining production insurance in this pandemic environment. It’s been passed around quite a bit, so I’m posting it here for easier reference. If you’d like to receive the Filmmaker newsletter, you can subscribe for free here. — SM “It’s what we call ‘a hard market,’” said the insurance broker on the phone. I didn’t need […]

In a virtual town hall today organized by IATSE and SAG-AFTRA, Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) addressed questions from union members regarding federal government support for entertainment industry workers during the novel coronavirus shutdowns. SAG-AFTRA President Gabrielle Carteris and IATSE International President Matt Loeb led the hour-long conversation and touched on several topics of interest to Filmmaker readers. Unemployment benefits for gig workers. The first question asked came from a SAG member who complained that her state unemployment benefits were not calculated based on a combination of her previous year’s W2 salaried income and her 1099 independent contractor income. Schiff stated […]

Doc Society, Field of Vision and Sundance Institute have collaborated on a risk-assessment guide for non-fiction filmmakers considering shooting during the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic. The document, “Independent Filmmaking in the Time of Coronavirus,” co-signed by a number of other leading documentary organizations, differs from other such industry guides being circulated at the moment by its three-part structure. Before even getting to the third part — “Corona protocols: what’s the safest way to organize the shoot?” — the guide walks filmmakers through two other checklists. The first, “The Big Question: Should I be filming at all?”, surveys the […]

About the production philosophy behind Stray, her captivating and immersive documentary about stray dogs in Istanbul, director Elizabeth Lo says that her shooting decisions were “kind of left to the whims of a dog” (specifically, a mutt named Zeytin). Lo is perhaps being a bit modest here — there’s a tremendous amount of human skill, empathy, observational power and narrative shaping in her mesmerizing canine saga. But a giant strength of the film is its sense that it is indeed in sync with the rhythms of a dog, occupying an animal world while also being both smartly aware of and […]

Do any of us remember a time when the film industry was not in crisis? At the time of Wim Wenders’s 1982 documentary, Room 666, the on-screen directors who considered his prompt (“Is cinema becoming a dead language, an art which is already in the process of decline?”) grappled with the kinds of issues (film vs. TV, the rise of blockbusters, the struggles of art cinema) that would go on to preoccupy filmmakers and film critics for many years — up to and through the production of Jeff Reichert, Damon Smith and Eric Hynes’s 2018 Brooklyn-set reply to Wenders, Room […]