Authors — Scott Macaulay
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BAMcinemaFest Announces 2022 Program
BAMcinemaFest, which is returning with an in-person event June 23 – 30 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, announced today the complete 2022 edition slate. The film opens with Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis Lee’s Aftershock, a documentary about the the ways in which the US maternal health system fails Black women and families, and it closes with Ramin Bahrani’s Sundance premiere, 2nd Chance, a portrait of Richard Davis, who invented the modern bulletproof vest while being something of an independent filmmaker and fabulist. Among the restorations are Ayoka Chenzira’s 1993 first feature film, the coming-of-age dramatic comedy Alma’s Rainbow, about […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 5, 2022 -
“Eat to Remember”: Audrey Ewell on Her Fiction Series, The Black Seed
In filmmaker Audrey Ewell’s The Black Seed, a woman wakes up in an anonymous corporate-style apartment with no memory of how she got there. Examining her body, it feels somewhat alien to her, as if she’s still suffering the effects of some night-before dissociative drug. Looking out the window, the city below looks peaceful, serene, but also completely depopulated. Where is she? Who is she? The only clue is a note taped to the refrigerator: “THE WORLD ENDED. IT’S NOT SAFE. EAT TO REMEMBER.” With that launches Ewell’s inventive and surprising “fiction series,” which blends a kind of existentialist mystery […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 3, 2022 -
Watch: Jim Jarmusch’s Video for Cat Power, “A Pair of Brown Eyes”
Jim Jarmusch has directed a new video for Cat Power’s excellent new album, Covers, a clip for the Pogues-penned “A Pair of Brown Eyes.” “As someone who deeply loves Cat Power’s music, getting to collaborate with Chan on this video was like a dream come true,” said Jarmusch in a press release. “She’s so inspiring to me, of course as an artist, but she’s also just such an extraordinary person.” Check it out above.
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 20, 2022 -
Truly Micro: Pete Ohs and Tzvi Friedman on Their Ultra-Low-Budget Features, Jethica and Man
While most producers these days are worried about the latest CPI number—that’s the Cinematic Price Index—one group of filmmakers is, somewhat paradoxically, not: those working on the lower end of the microbudget, or “no-budget,” continuum, producing finished features for the very low five figures. For them, production is retrofitted from whatever money can be raised, and if the price of gas goes up, well, the shoot just has to make do with less in another area. Among such filmmakers, there’s perhaps no one whose model is as stripped-down as Pete Ohs, who recently premiered his latest work, the well-received Jethica, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 14, 2022 -
Editor’s Letter
A year ago in this space, I noted that by the time most people received their issue a COVID-19 vaccine would be available, and that film production was beginning to surge back after the shutdowns, “but when it comes to our film business and culture, there will be no single lightswitch moment.” Now, in this spring ’22 edition of Filmmaker, I’m seeing evidence confirming that prediction, as many of the articles here grapple not with COVID-19, per se, but the types of changes that have occurred alongside the pandemic that are either directly or tangentially caused by it. In his […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 14, 2022 -
Event Horizon: Gaspar Noe on His Devastating End-of-Life Drama, Vortex
In 2012, after months in Buenos Aires helping care for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, Gaspar Noé traveled to Cannes and saw Michael Haneke’s Amour, about a husband dealing with his wife’s stroke. “Oh my god, I cried watching that movie,” he says. “Even if that movie had nothing to do with my personal life, it was about someone who needs to die, and at that time we were considering how my mother could die peacefully.” After the festival, Noé returned to Argentina; his mother died a few weeks later. When the Palme d’Or–winning, and quite brutal, Amour went on to international […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 14, 2022 -
Bigger Budgets: Inflation and Crew Shortages Slam Independent Film
Crew bases depleted as streamer production gobbles up film and television labor, COVID safety departments continuing to add costs, and then there’s the price of gas—as U.S. production roars back following the 2020 shutdowns, producers in the independent sector are facing new budgetary challenges. In the face of rising costs and labor shortages, budgets for projects on ice since 2019 require revision, and the sticker shock is significant. Whether or not these increases are, to use economic parlance, transitory or persistent, they are right now making life more challenging for independent producers. To put it bluntly: Independent features are getting […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 14, 2022 -
“Understanding This Feeling, How this Strange and Foreign Land Meant So Much to Me”: Cedric Cheung-Lau on The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me
Screening tomorrow night at New York’s BAM Rose Cinema is one of the real and under-screened discoveries of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival, The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me, the transfixing debut feature from Cedric Cheung-Lau, who has worked for a decade in the New York independent film scene gaffing such features as Patti Cake$, Christine and Monsters and Men. Embracing slow cinema and tacking away from the dialogue-driven penchant of much U.S. independent film, The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me is as much about landscape as story, about the possible meanings delivered through the pauses […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 4, 2022 -
Watch Now: Short Films from the Filmfort Film Festival
Filmmaker is happy to partner with the Filmfort Film Festival, part of the Treefort Music Fest, by exclusively hosting selections from their online showcase. These films will stream exclusively here on the site through Saturday. This year five films travel from the caves of Italy to interior mindscapes to places in between. You can watch all the films embedded below, and check out the rest of the lineup at Filmfort. Cyllinder Day dir. Milly Cohen 2021, USA, 3 mins As the whole town rejoices around a maypole to celebrate the arrival of spring, this tradition holds a dark underlying secret. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 24, 2022 -
“There Has Been a Deliberate Rebranding of the Alt-Right Women To Have the Veneer of Smart, Sophisticated Instagram Influencers”: Director Beth de Araújo and DP Greta Zozula on Soft & Quiet
One of the most chilling moments in Beth de Araújo’s masterful and outraged Soft & Quiet occurs early on, before the film’s sickeningly violent chain of events formally begins. After shooting side eye at her school’s immigrant female custodian, blonde thirtysomething elementary school teacher Emily (Stefanie Estes) coaches a young boy to go back inside the lunchroom and tell the woman off — to tell her that she must wait to do her job until the school is totally empty. Emily is not just using the child to disrespect the custodian, she’s instilling in the boy the sort of racial […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 23, 2022
