Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Trailer Watch: Alexandre Nahon’s Burning Shadow
French-born, LA-living filmmaker Alexandre Nahon premieres his directorial debut, Burning Shadow, tonight at the Miami Beach Cinematheque as part of its Art Basel screening series. The film, which has been described as having a Lynch or Cronenbergian vibe, is a take on one of my favorite storylines — the doppelganger tale, this time set in a City of Angels neo-noir universe. Filmmaker readers will recognize Nahon from his roles in Julie Delpy’s 2 Days films. Following the premiere, there will be the opening at the same venue of Nahon’s 3D 35mm photo show, “I Will Take You Out of Here,” […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 8, 2018 -
Magic Leap, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Eminem and Traveling While Black: Sundance Announces 2019 New Frontier Slate
The Sundance Film Festival’s always-revelatory New Frontier section announced its 2019 lineup today. Dedicated to work sitting at the “dynamic crossroads of film, art and technology,” New Frontier typically explores various forms of new media, including VR, AR, mixed reality and work implementing artificial intelligence. Amongst the highlights are the first time, I believe, that the Magic Leap technology has appeared in a Sundance selection, here in a work co-created by the Royal Shakespeare Company; Eminem taking you on a nighttime Detroit ride in VR; the VR component of Roger Ross Williams’s multi-format Traveling While Black project; painter turned VR […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 5, 2018 -
Watch: The Beginning and the End: Legendary Filmmakers’ First and Last Shots
From Troiscoleurs (Nicolas Longinotti) comes this sublime supercut based around a beautifully elegiac premise: what would be the effect of looking at the first shot of a director’s feature filmography alongside their last? What message is spoken, what story is told, either deliberately or by chance, by a split screen that crosses decades? While many of these filmmakers — who include Hitchcock, Renoir, Fassbinder and Ozu — may not have expected their final film to have been their last, some of these final shots contain more than an intimation of mortality. (The Tarkovsky first-last combination here is particularly striking.) From […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 4, 2018 -
Watch: Alexa Lim Haas’s Award-Winning Animated Short, Agua Viva
New York-based animator Alexa Lim Haas made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2017 while her lovely short Agua Viva was still in post. With the film appearing on Vimeo this week, where it received a Staff Pick, now both we and all of you can experience it in its fully-inked glory. Agua Viva, which depicts the inner life of an immigrant Chinese nail salon worker in Miami, premiered at Sundance and Rotterdam this year and won jury prizes at SXSW and Dallas. It received quite a bit of support, including the Borscht Corp’s #NoBroZone Grant, the Time Warner 1st […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 4, 2018 -
Sundance Announces 2019 Festival Shorts, Indie Episodic and Special Events
Almost 10,000 shorts — 9,443, to be exact, broken down into 4,720 from the U.S. and 4,723 from the rest of the world — were submitted to the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, yielding today’s announced program of 73 works from 33 countries. (For those doing the math, that’s an acceptance rate of just over three quarters of one percent.) According to the festival, “53% were directed or created by one or more women, 51% were directed or created by one or more filmmaker of color, and 26% by one or more people who identify as LGBTQIA. Twelve were supported by […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 3, 2018 -
Watch: David Ehrlich’s Best Movies of 2018 Supercut
Indiewire Senior Film Critic David Ehrlich’s “best movies of the year” supercut is always an amazing watch, a video in which individual cuts, sequences, and music intros generate dopamine hits as you silently, or while singing along, endorse and possibly decry some of the individual selections. This year’s edition, at 13 minutes-plus, is no exception. I was happy to see here a number of personal favorites here alongside Ehrlich recommendations that I haven’t seen yet (Paddington 2!) as well an opening section that draws from the trippy ending of Alex Garland’s underrated Annihilation.
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 3, 2018 -
Lucrecia Martel’s First Doc Chocobar, A Collaboration Between Sundance and London’s ICA, Among New Sundance Documentary Film Program Grants
Among the 33 non-fiction works comprising the recently announced Sundance Institute Documentary Fund and Stories of Change Grantees is a particularly noteworthy project that’s both the debut documentary by a major international auteur as well as a first-time collaboration between the Sundance Institute and the U.K.’s Institute for Contemporary Art. Chocobar (working title), currently in development, is the first non-fiction film from Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, whose Zama is bound to top many U.S. critic ten-best lists later this year. It tells the story of murdered photographer and land rights activist Javier Chocobar, slain while fighting the removal of his […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 26, 2018 -
Watch: David Lynch’s Music Video, Ant Head
We are something of David Lynch completists here at Filmmaker, hence this posting of Ant Head, a music video (of sorts) combining two tracks — “Frank 2000” and “Woodcutters From Fiery Ships” — from Thought Gang, the just-released collaboration between Lynch and his longtime composer, Angelo Badalamenti. Lynch describes the work as “…a short video featuring my friends the ants along with cheese, etc.” As the press release notes, the material from this album hails from the early ’90s but has made its way into almost all of Lynch’s subsequent productions, including Twin Peaks: The Return. From the press release: […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 14, 2018 -
“‘We’re Seeing Fire Behavior We’ve Never Seen Before'”: Five Questions for Wildland Director Alex Jablonski
A world premiere at this year’s Camden International Film Festival, Khalil Hudson and Alex Jablonski’s Wildland (formerly titled Young Men and Fire) is a movie for this moment. As wildfires race with wearying regularity through our nation’s wooded areas, and as climate change exacerbates the triggering factors for these fires, Khalil Hudson and Alex Jablonski take us to the frontlines of the current battle. Following one particular squad over two years, the two directors, who previously collaborated on Hudson’s Low & Clear, manage to tell a story that’s both expansive in subject matter while being intimate in focus, finding in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 29, 2018 -
Sundance Announces 2018 Art of Nonfiction Fellows and Grantees
The Sundance Institute today announced the four filmmakers and six grantees who comprise the 2018 Art of Nonfiction program. Launched in 2018, Art of Nonfiction is the Institutes’s program “working at the vanguard of inventive artistic practice in story, craft and form.” This year’s Art of Nonfiction Fellows are Deborah Stratman, Natalia Almada, Sam Green and Sky Hopinka. Grantees are Jem Cohen, Kevin Jerome Everson, Kevin B. Lee and Chloé Galibert-Laîné, LaToya Ruby Frazier and Leilah Weinraub. “This year’s cohort reflects our continuing desire to explore the space in between,” said Tabitha Jackson, Director of the Documentary Film Program, in […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 23, 2018
