Authors — Scott Macaulay
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“Let’s Talk about Glitch Feminism, and What is a Cyber Doula?”: Jazmin Jones on Her Expansive Sundance-Premiering Doc, Seeking Mavis Beacon
Originally published January 20, 2024, timed to the film’s premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, this interview with Seeking Mavis Beacon director Jazmin Jones is now reposted in conjunction with the film’s theatrical release from NEON. — Editor Exuberantly maximalist in approach, Jazmin Jones’s blast of a debut feature, Seeking Mavis Beacon, is a rapid-fire blend of neo-noir road movie, desktop essay film and meta critique of the “searching for” documentary subgenre. The picture follows Jones and cyber doula friend Olivia McKayla Ross — self-described “e-girl detectives” — on their years-long journey to locate Renee L’Espérance, the Haitian-born model […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 31, 2024 -
Movies with Sand Under Your Feet: Previewing The Seventh Annual Rockaway Film Festival
“It’s interesting, more filmmakers this year are asking for laurels,” says Sam Fleischner when we spoke just a few days before the opening of the seventh annual Rockaway Film Festival. Fleischner’s the festival’s co-founder and artistic director, Courtney Muller is co-founder and program director, and the two, along with their small team, have grown the festival to the point where the schedule boasts more premieres, U.S. and world, than ever and, with that growth, directors wanting to add the Rockaway selection to their posters and websites. “We never wanted to make a laurel,” admits Fleischner. “So it was like, alright, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 16, 2024 -
TikTok, Building a Slate, and the Life of an Independent Producer: It Ends With Us Producer Alex Saks
If you’re a TikTok-using film producer, then the feed of Alex Saks has undoubtedly been delivered straight to your phone by that platform’s ruthless and unerring algorithm. Over the past year-and-a-half, and across nearly 200 clips, Saks, a former ICM financing agent and more recently a producer of such films as The Florida Project, Thoroughbreds, and Sometimes I Think About Dying, has been dispensing on the platform pithy, direct pieces of advice on topics such as securing book rights, defining the role of the line producer, imposter syndrome and the state of the industry. There’s the occasional stitch or commentary […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 9, 2024 -
Trailer Watch: David Gutnik’s Ukraine War Doc, Rule of Two Walls
David Gutnik’s Rule of Two Walls — the title referring to the recommended method of sheltering during a bombing raid — receives its theatrical premiere August 16 at New York’s DCTV Firehouse Cinema before rolling out to selected cities via Monument Releasing. The doc, which depicts the work of Ukrainian artists making defiant work during the current war in Ukraine, is executive produced by Liev Schreiber and is the director’s foll0w-up to his fiction debut, Materna, which, like Rule of Two Walls, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. In an interview with Lauren Wissot timed to that festival premiere, Gutnik […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 8, 2024 -
The Gotham Announces 2024 Project Market Slate
The Gotham, Filmmaker‘s publisher, announced today the projects and creators accepted into the 2024 Gotham Week Project Market, which takes place in Brooklyn and Manhattan September 30 – October 4. A long-running program of The Gotham, the Project Market introduces projects in development seeking financing or distribution to industry partners, including producers, sales agents and distributors. It returns this year following last year’s break due to the ongoing Writers Guild strikes with 112 projects spanning feature films, documentary and television. Among the projects are Buffalo Stone, which Lily Gladstone co-wrote and produced, with co-writer-directors Daniel Glick and Ivy Macdonald and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 7, 2024 -
New Films by RaMell Ross, Julia Loktev, Brady Corbet Among 2024 New York Film Festival Lineup
Film at Lincoln Center announced today the Main Slate lineup of the 62nd New York Film Festival. Among the lineup are the latest from David Cronenberg (The Shrouds), Paul Schrader (Oh Canada) and Mike Leigh (Hard Truths) are world premieres by younger American auteurs, including Julia Loktev, who will debut the 332-minute, five-part My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow, about the young female independent journalists at Russia’s TV Rain during the first week of the invasion of Ukraine. Robinson Devor (Police Beat, Zoo) world premieres his documentary Suburban Fury, about would-be presidential assassin Sara Jane Moore. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 6, 2024 -
U.S. in Progress 2024 Submissions Now Open for American Independents Seeking Finishing Funds
U.S. in Progress is now through September 8 accepting submissions from American independent filmmakers with pictures in post-production seeking finishing funds. Accepted filmmakers and projects will attend the in-person event at Wroclaw, Poland’s American Film Festival from November 7 – 9, where they will present the rough cuts of their narrative projects to European buyers and Polish post-production companies providing over $100,000 in post services. Recent and upcoming projects that are alumni of U.S. in Progress include the Venice-bound Familiar Touch, directed by 2023 25 New Face Sarah Friedland; the recently released Summer Solstice, by writer/director Noah Schamus; India Donaldson’s […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 5, 2024 -
Jessica Oreck Kickstarts a Traveling Museum
Back in 2021, filmmaker Jessica Oreck (Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo), who appeared on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2009, launched her Office of Collecting and Design, which she describes as “part wonderland, part library, and part nostalgia machine, devoted to the diminutive, the misplaced, the unusual, and the forgotten.” A truly unusual endeavor, the Las Vegas-based tiny museum is exhibition space, animation studio and prop house — in short, a physical extension of the enthusiasms that have powered Oreck’s filmmaking. From my print issue profile of the project: A cinematic sensibility permeates the whole endeavor, not just in the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 29, 2024 -
Trailer Watch: Zach Clark’s The Becomers
At Filmmaker we’ve long been a fan of Zach Clark, director of such witty and genre (and genre-adjacent) work as Little Sister, Vacation! and White Reindeer. He always brings real style and subversive smarts to his pictures, which often apply ingenious tonal twists to familiar situations and set-ups. For his latest, The Becomers, Clark fuses an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type tale with a classic rom-com set up. Reviewing the film out of Fantasia, Erik Luers wrote: In depicting two shape-shifting entities who arrive separately on Earth searching for their misplaced mate, Clark’s film provides his Midwest cast the opportunity […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 23, 2024 -
Ten Takeaways from Hundreds of Beavers‘ Success
Each Friday I send out a free email newsletter with an original Editor’s Letter along with viewing recommendations and festival deadlines. The Editor’s Letter is usually not reposted here on this site. As a way of encouraging sign-ups — you can join for free here — I’m posting here a slightly edited version of last week’s edition, in which I draw some production and distribution conclusions from the success of the Mike Cheslik’s independent hit Hundreds of Beavers, drawing info from linked interviews, now unpaywalled, from our current print edition. — Editor Because I edit Filmmaker and am supposed to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 23, 2024
