Authors — Scott Macaulay
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NINA MENKES, AZA JACOBS LAUNCH CINEMAD PODCAST SERIES
Our friend and contributor Mike Plante has just launched a podcast series at his Cinemad site. Below listen to conversations with directors Nina Menkes and Aza Jacobs. Here’s how he intros them: Called “Brilliant, one of the most provocative artists in film today” by The Los Angeles Times, Nina Menkes’s radical and pioneering work synthesizes inner dream-worlds with harsh, outer realities. Her seven films are a body of work Sight and Sound has called “Controversial, intense and visually stunning.” We talk about her films, the notion of the avant-garde tag, her teenage witch school, violence in cinema, freaky animals and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 22, 2011 -
25 New Faces of Independent Film – 2011
Welcome to the 14th edition of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 20, 2011 -
Rania Attieh & Daniel Garcia
“Like a lot of partner dynamics, a healthy amount of arguing begins most of our working situations,” write Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia from Karlovy Vary, where their evocative debut feature, Ok, Enough, Goodbye, is receiving its European premiere. “There is yelling and calling each other names. Then we settle down and begin actually working. Perhaps what makes our process work is the fact that we are completely unafraid to be brutally honest with each other about our opinions regarding each other’s ideas.” Attieh, born in Tripoli, Lebanon, and Garcia, from South Texas, met in Texas in an undergrad drawing […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Alison Klayman
Alison Klayman remembers the moment people knew she was really making a movie about Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. A Brown University graduate, Klayman had moved to Beijing with the intent of learning Mandarin and becoming a documentary filmmaker and journalist. “I bought my first camera there,” she remembers, “and was doing video for hire, trying to get into television.” In 2008 a friend asked her to make a short video to accompany a gallery show of Ai’s New York photography — shots of the artist and the downtown scene taken during his years living there in the 1980s. “My camera […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Rola Nashef
When Michigan-born writer-director Rola Nashef started thinking about her film, Detroit Unleaded, there wasn’t much of a film scene in the state, independent or studio. Now, after several years of tax incentives and high-profile productions, she laughs, “I go to restaurants and hear people talking about their scripts.” But Nashef was inspired by Detroit long before the state’s recent production boom. The city didn’t just provide her debut feature’s location, but also its subject matter — specifically, the tales that come out of its Arab-American community. “Living within an Arab immigrant family, dating within the Arab-American community, the restrictions Arab […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Sheldon Candis
The URL for Los Angeles-based filmmaker Sheldon Candis’s website is cinephileacademy.com, speaking to not only the USC grad’s artistic interests but also his fusion of film and life. As a child born in Baltimore, “I was one of those kids who loved movies,” he says, “and would watch them on my grandfather’s old VHS player.” Then, he’d spend time with one of his uncles, and those hours too, “even for a nine-year-old, felt like a movie.” Learning Uncle Vincent is the film arising from those childhood memories — spiked with a healthy amount of imagination. “‘It’s about a young child […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Brent Hoff
Before completing Dirty White Boy, his screenplay about the last days of rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard and his relationship with VH1 p.a.-turned-manager Jarred Weisfeld, Brent Hoff had 24 partially written scripts on his hard drive. “One of them was over 200 pages long,” he says. “I came up with lots of ideas, but I never completed them.” But when Hoff heard that producer Todd Hagopian had bought Weisfeld’s life rights along with those of ODB’s mother, he knew that he was the guy to write — and finish — that story. “I worked at VH1,” says Hoff, “and I met […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Gingger Shankar
“I became a film composer by accident,” admits Gingger Shankar, who was called in one day by a music supervisor to work on some cues for The Passion of the Christ. A vocalist and musician raised in Los Angeles and India, Shankar has performed on stage with everyone from Peter Gabriel and Frank Zappa to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Smashing Pumpkins. But contributing music that would accompany the cinematic image? “I was swimming in the deep end,” she says. Her work on John Debney’s The Passion of the Christ score impressed the folks at the Sundance Composers Lab, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Kirby Ferguson
It’s hard to create something original about the remix. Okay, that would seem to go without saying, but I’m not referring to the subject of the remix — I’m talking about the discourse surrounding it. From Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix to Brett Gaylor’s feature doc, RIP: A Remix Manifesto, the creative, social and political issues surrounding the rise of remix culture have been debated with brio. Paradoxically, then, the familiarity we have with the issue of remixing is precisely what makes Kirby Ferguson’s four-part Web series, Everything is a Remix, so compelling. Rather than push a copy-left agenda or hype […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Sophia Takal
Sophia Takal is engaged to filmmaker Lawrence Michael Lavine and their roommate is actress Kate Lyn Sheil. After the three worked on Lavine’s debut feature, Gabi on the Roof in July (Takal played the eponymous lead, and Sheil co-starred), Takal decided to make her own movie, which would explore the theme of jealousy. She cast rising star Sheil as an insecure bookstore clerk, Genevieve; Lavine as Sebastian, her intellectually patronizing boyfriend; and herself as Robin, the offbeat, emotionally hungry local girl the couple meet when they rent a country cabin where Sebastian will document for his blog the planting of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011
