Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Echoes
What is a sound if only you can hear it? And if you heard such a sound, would you think it came from outside, somehow bypassing everyone else as it enters your brain? Or would you think it emanated from within, never escaping your own field of perception and thus becoming your own private mystery—or, as Memoria director Apichatpong Weerasethakul writes, your own “sonic companion?” The Cannes-premiering Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton and now in release from NEON, originated from the director’s musings about his own auditory disturbances, a series of enormous bangs that erupted in his sleep and would put […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2022 -
The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales and Phoenix Rising Added to 2022 Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Institute announced today two new premiere films that have been added to the 2022 Sundance Film Festival lineup. Selected for the Special Screenings section are The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales, directed by Abigail E. Disney and Kathleen Hughes, and Phoenix Rising, directed by Amy Berg. “We’re so pleased to welcome these two dynamic films into our program,” said Kim Yutani, the Festival’s Director of Programming. “These bold, compelling, provocative documentaries tell indelible stories each from a searing first person perspective that we know will spark critical dialogue.” About the two newly announced titles, from the press release: SPECIAL […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 12, 2022 -
Watch: David Ehrlich’s 25 Best Films of 2021
Indiewire critic David Ehrlich is back with what is always the most beautifully realized and most pleasurable to take in “best films of the year” list — his annual video countdown of the year’s best cinema. As always, much of the joy comes from Ehrlich’s unexpected editorial rhythms, ingenious match cuts and savvy music choices, drawn from the year’s films, which here range from the Sparks’s Annette score to Louis Armstrong. Last year, in order to justify the huge amount of time it takes Ehrlich to make these videos, he decided to urge viewers to support a charity chosen by […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 10, 2022 -
Color Congress, a National Collective, Launches, Announces Funding and Support for POC-Led and Supporting Documentary Organizations
Color Congress, a national collective of majority people of color (POC) and POC-led organizations aimed at centering and strengthening nonfiction storytelling by, for and about people of color in the US, has launched in advance of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Founded by documentary impact and field-building strategists Sahar Driver and Sonya Childress, the collective will invite POC-led doc-serving organizations to apply for unrestricted two-year funding from a $1.35 million fund, and later in the year, they’ll be invited to join the Congress and direct over $1 million in grants aimed at addressing field challenges. Of the selection criteria for the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 10, 2022 -
Sundance Cancels the In-Person Portion of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival Due to Omricon Surge
Sundance announced today that the in-person portion of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival has been cancelled. As in 2021, the festival will occur this year online, in a virtual edition on Sundance’s bespoke platform. When Sundance announced the return of its live edition back in August, 2021, Festival Director Tabitha Jackson announced a vaccination requirement, and, in recent days, Sundance reupped its protocols, requiring boosters for some attendees as well as offering on-site boosters in addition to the testing already planned. But Jackson also wrote, “Health and safety is paramount… We will continue to assess other elements of health and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 5, 2022 -
Trailer Watch: Michel Franco’s Sundown
Michel Franco’s Sundown is unsettling tale of existential drift, one that upends the way in which the concept of family is often thematized in narrative films. It’s now given a suitably eerie trailer by its distributor, Bleecker Street. The story involves a brother (Tim Roth) and sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) vacationing at a Mexican resort when sad news arrives from abroad. The sister leaves, the brother stays, and the film’s mysteries concern the brother’s inscrutable motivations. Spasms of violence are expected in any film by the New Order director; those are hinted at by the trailer’s concluding sequence of flash cuts […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 4, 2022 -
Newsletter of the Year: Why Screenwriters Should Read George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life
Each Friday I write an original Filmmaker newsletter, which is free to all. Always original and not archived on the site, they consist of various musings, thoughts, link recommendations and sometimes even early versions of pieces that appear later here. And while yesterday’s “Top Ten New Posts of 2021” was determined using Google Analytics, I’ve chosen today’s “Top Newsletter of 2021” purely empirically. Forget Mailchimp open rates, this newsletter about George Saunders’s book on writing and Russian literature, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life, is […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 30, 2021 -
Filmmaker‘s Top Ten New Posts of 2021
If you’re not a daily visitor to Filmmaker, reading this piece, our annual “top ten,” will be a process of discovery as you can scan through the articles that received our highest traffic in 2021. But, increasingly, compiling this article is a discovery process for us as many of its entries are simply not ones we would have guessed. There are articles that kick up conversation across Twitter, or that I receive emails and calls about, and then there are quiet traffic-getters that only surface when the Google Analytics button is hit. The top post here is no surprise, as […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 29, 2021 -
Watch: Plant Life, Adinah Dancyger’s Parquet Courts Music Video
An ambitious series of 11 music videos accompanied the new Parquet Courts album, Sympathy for Life, and as the band’s Sean Yeaton writes here in an email, the band has opened up the viewing possibilities behind the original live distribution: In the spirit of miracles, I thought I’d bring up a recent one in PC history, where we somehow incredibly (with the help of so many of our talented friends and colleagues) produced 11 new music videos–one for every song on Sympathy For Life. Until now the only way to see them was a live stream event that I successfully managed […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2021 -
Trailer Watch: Robert Eggers’s The Northman
The spectacular first trailer for the anticipated third feature of Robert Eggers, The Northman, just dropped. About a Viking prince avenging his father’s murder, the film reunites the director with Anya Taylor-Joy, the star of his debut, The Witch, and Willem Dafoe, the star of his sophomore film, The Lighthouse. (And that’s in addition to Alexander Skarsgard, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, Ethan Hawke and Bjork). In a Filmmaker interview on the film’s production, DP Jarin Blaschke promised that the film will be “accurate as hell”: Well, at least as accurate as 1,000 years ago can be. I don’t want to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 20, 2021
