Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Memoria Officially Begins U.S. Never-Ending Tour April 1
After a week in which there was some social media sniping over NEON’s seemingly stalled “never-ending tour” of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria, my personal #1 movie of 2022, the distributor has announced that distribution is not stalled at all. The previously announced tour, in which the film will travel from city to city, formally begins with New York’s IFC Center on April 1 and L.A.’s NuArt on April 8. Multiple cities now open each week, and the website includes dates stretching through October. From the press release: Director, Apichatpong Weerasethakul remarked on the plan, “For Memoria, cinema experience is crucial or maybe the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 10, 2022 -
NEON To Produce Jazmin Jones’s Seeking Mavis Beacon
NEON announced today that they will produce the documentary Seeking Mavis Beacon by director Jazmin Jones, one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2021. The eponymous Beacon, initially personified by a Haitian woman, Renée L’Espérance, was the face of the popular Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing software game. L’Espérance subsequently vanished, and the film, according to the press release, “will investigate the disappearance and reimagine the legacy of a missing Black woman who helped define the digital age.” Comments Jones, “NEON has been a perfect home for this project. They understood our positionality as Black femmes and share our interest in disrupting traditional documentary […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 24, 2022 -
Watch: Jamie Stuart’s Tale of Cat Love and Loss, The Love Battery
Jamie Stuart’s cat SK, who accompanied him through a chunk of adulthood spanning New York to LA, passed away recently. Stuart’s new short, The Love Battery is an account of that passing, a tribute as well as introduction to his next pet chapter. From Stuart’s program notes: Cats. Love and loss. I made this as a crew of one over the past two months. Initially, I’d planned it as a tribute to my recently deceased cat SK — but then the story took a turn… This is NOT a documentary. It is a dramatic reenactment — that includes real live […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 16, 2022 -
“I Believe that School Defines Who We Become as Adults”: Director Laura Wandel on Her Astonishing School Bullying Drama, Playground
Opening today at New York’s Film Forum before, next week, rolling out to additional theaters across the country, is Laura Wandel’s Playground, an astonishingly immersive and nuanced drama that plunges the viewer into the complex childhood dynamics of school bullying. It’s Wandel’s debut following well-received shorts, and the film’s seeming simplicity belies a pre-production that had to be handled with incredible sensitivity. (As we discuss below, Wandel worked extensively with her young lead, using devices such as finger puppets to walk her through the emotional arc of her character as well make clear to her the “make believe” element of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 11, 2022 -
Fundraiser: Restoring the Work of Pink Narcissus Director James Bidgood
James Bidgood, the initially anonymous director of underground classic Pink Narcissus, died January 31 at the age of 88, and his estate’s executor, Kelly McKaig, is organizing a fundraiser to go towards both a memorial service as well as the collection and preservation of his various work. From the GoFundMe page: As an artist, Jim’s dreamy, candy-colored world of beautiful boys—so far from the hard-muscled, butch fantasies of Tom of Finland—was a revelation. While much of his work, like his landmark film Pink Narcissus, was created over 50 years ago, Jim remains an inspiration. Jim’s influence can be seen in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 9, 2022 -
Watch: DuArt: History of Independent Film
With the recent passing of DuArt Film Laboratories Chairman Irwin Young, we’re posting this video kindly flagged to us by David Leitner, whose one of those on-screen detailing the history of DuArt — everything from its role as a technical innovator to the support it gave to the New York independent community. A panel discussion hosted by the Post New York Alliance in December, 2021, the video features in addition to Leitner former DuArt employees Dominic Rom (Goldcrest), Tim Spitzer (Jigsaw Productions), Bob Mastronardi (Kodak) and Jane Tolmachyov (Goldcrest). A bonus is a short video at the end about Young […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 4, 2022 -
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
