Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Remembering DuArt Film Laboratories Chairman Irwin Young
Irwin Young, a foundational figure in the New York independent film world, died January 20, in Manhattan, at the age of 94. Chairman of DuArt Film Laboratories, his contributions across the field, which range from technical and business innovations to philanthropy to, simply, extending support to new and emerging filmmakers, are embedded within so many films that now define the American independent film movement. As distributor and director Ira Deutchman wrote at Indiewire, “If there were a Guinness Book of World Records entry for most ‘thank you’ credits at the end of films, I can’t imagine that anyone else could […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 4, 2022 -
SXSW Announces Its 2022 Film Program
SXSW announced today the 99 features and other works comprising its 2022 film program. Taking place as a live event in Austin, TX from March 11 – 20, the festival will live premiere all of its films, and filmmakers have the choice as well to screen in day-after 48-hour viewing windows online. (These viewing windows will be subject to capacity limits and will be geoblocked to the U.S.) From the press release: “The last two years have been complicated, and full of uncharted new waters for all of us. While there’s been innovation in building community in isolation and figuring […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 2, 2022 -
Nanny, The Exiles, Navalny Win Top Prizes at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival
Nikyatu Jusu’s horror drama Nanny and Ben Klein and Violet Columbus’s documentary The Exiles won yesterday the two top U.S. prizes at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Nanny took the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic while The Exiles was awarded the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary. About the former, juror Chelsea Barnard said, ““For this Grand Jury Prize we celebrate a movie that flooded us with its compassionate and horrifying portrayal of a mother being separated from her child. This film cannot be contained by any one genre —it’s visually stunning, masterfully acted, impeccably designed from sound to visual effects, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 29, 2022 -
Sundance First-Time Dramatic Competition Producers Discuss Career Paths and the Challenging Producing Landscape
“Producing is an identity,” said producer Karin Chien in her keynote speech at this year’s virtual Sundance Producers Brunch. She continued, “It is a tribe, it is an active community and is it is an artistic practice that encompasses more than can be communicated. A producer solves problems and creates problems, good problems. A producer questions why things are the way they are. We are independent producers because we subvert, and we complicate the status quo, with the intention of forwarding new thoughts, ideas voices and stories, our culture, our communities and our industry depend on us to do this.” […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2022 -
“When Building a Team Around Your Film, Don’t Forget to Build Your Own”: Nikkia Moulterie on Producing the Sundance Horror Drama, Nanny
The Sundance Dramatic Competition entry Nanny, a horror story about an immigrant domestic child-care worker in New York who’s saving to bring her own young son over from Senegal, is the first feature produced by New York-based Nikkia Moulterie. It’s her reunion with writer/director Nikyatu Jusu after producing the writer/director’s excellent 2019 short, Suicide by Sunlight, and it follows a decade-long career producing shorts, UPM’ing features and producing commercials and music videos. Below, Moulterie discusses the way she met and bonded with Jusu, the challenges of producing a feature during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the advice she’d give to new producers […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2022 -
“I Do Take Pride in the Fact that All of the Parties Feel Authentic and Accurate”: Jessica Switch on Producing the Sundance Comedy/Drama, Cha Cha Real Smooth
The big sale — to Apple for a reported $15 million — of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, Cha Cha Real Smooth is writer, director and lead actor Cooper Raiff’s follow-up to his 2020 debut, SHITHOUSE. Again essaying a twentysomething young man navigating the indeterminate period before real life and real romance takes hold, Cha Cha Real Smooth finds Raiff’s character, Andrew, working a dead-end fast-food job while working side gigs as a bar mitzvah party starter and babysitter. When he demonstrates a rapport with a 12-year-old autistic girl (Vanessa Burghardt), her mother, Domino (played by Dakota Johnson, also a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2022 -
Watch: Exclusive Clip from Christina Kallas’s Slamdance-Premiering Paris is in Harlem
Set in 2017, Christina Kallas‘s Slamdance-premiering latest feature, Paris Is In Harlem, takes place the night before New York’s infamous Cabaret Law was repealed. In a historic Harlem jazz bar, a shooting alters the lives of several strangers who have gathered for the final night of “no dancing.” The filmmaker has provided Filmmaker an exclusive clip, which you can watch above. XYZ Films is handling North American sales on the film.
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 28, 2022 -
Band of Outsiders: A Conversation between Reservoir Dogs Director Quentin Tarantino and In the Soup Director Alexandre Rockwell
The following conversation between directors Quentin Tarantino and Alexandre Rockwell was published in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 1993 issue, as these films hit commercial release. It is being reprinted today, as Reservoir Dogs celebrates the 30th anniversary of its premiere at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. Friendship, loyalty, and honor–all are classic film themes which, ironically, can sometimes be hard qualities to find in the world of filmmaking. For every film that beats the odds and manages to get made, independent or otherwise, there are a hundred shattered deals, broken promises, and crushed filmmakers left in the shadows. This year two filmmakers […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 24, 2022 -
“Being Overwhelmed Doesn’t Have to Lead to Cynicism”: Rachel Lears on Her Climate Change Sundance Doc, To The End
Cynicism is the dramatic foil in To the End, Rachel Lears’s Sundance Documentary Competition follow-up to her 2020 Sundance picture Knock Down the House. In that film she followed four women — political newcomers hailing from diverse walks of life, all motivated to action by the Trump presidency — as they mounted underdog campaigns to win House seats. That one of the women was New York candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave the film a rousingly satisfying ending, even as other women’s losses made clear the forces opposing progressive generational change. Employing a similar structure, To the End follows three young activists […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 23, 2022 -
Sundance Curators and Directors Speak, Along with 16 Films Not To Miss
“Making the shift to an online-only experience was a difficult decision, but it was the right one for the full community,” said new Sundance Executive Director Joana Vicente at the top of today’s opening press conference of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. While the contours of last year’s largely-virtual (excepting the Satellite Screen events around the country) event were visible last June and then explicitly stated in early December, 2020, this year’s necessary hard-pivot to a largely virtual edition (again, with the Satellite Screens) happened late, in early January, 2022. So, when, as the various programmers all announced themselves by […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2022
