Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Slamdance Announces 2018 Beyond Films and Narrative + Doc Shorts Competitions
Slamdance’s Beyond category — for emerging filmmakers working beyond their first features — was announced yesterday along with its two shorts competitions, with five world premieres gracing the first category. The 2018 Slamdance Film Festival runs January 19-25 in Park City, Utah. Check out the announcement below. BEYOND PROGRAM Back at the Staircase (USA) World Premiere Director: Drew Britton Five distinctive people, each with a flimsy coping strategy, find themselves stuck together after an accident. Cast: Jennifer Lafleur, Stephen Plunkett, Leonora Pitts, Mickey O’Hagan, Logan Lark, Heather LaVine Funny Story (USA) World Premiere Director: Michael Gallagher After years of being […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 7, 2017 -
Sundance Announces 2018 Tech and VR-Focused New Frontier Section
Sundance’s technology-focused New Frontier section spreads out to three venues this year as its lineup incorporates film, live performance, VR and mixed reality, and even AI. Of the latter, in Frankenstein AI: A Monster Made by Many, audiences “interact with” artificial intelligence to create a shared narrative, and in TendAR AI mixes with biometrics and facial recognition to humorously ponder the social issues surrounding this new tech. Regarding the venues and the program, from the press release: The New Frontier Exhibition at Kimball Art Center will host immersive dance and cutting edge VR & MR works as well as works […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 6, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here
The U.S. trailer for Lynne Ramsay’s contemporary neo-noir, You Were Never Really Here, which won the Best Screenplay and Best Actor (for Ramsay and Joaquin Phoenix, respectively) at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, has just dropped. An adaptation of a Jonathan Ames story, it stars Phoenix as a modern-day gumshoe tracking down a kidnapped kid. Amazon releases in early ’18.
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 6, 2017 -
Watch: Walter Murch Talks Music, The Conversation and “Nodal Editing”
Starting off with a discussion of classic Hollywood vs. Soviet editing styles (continuity editing vs. Soviet montage’s dialectic approach), famous editor and sound designer Walter Murch goes on to discuss a third way that he dubs “nodal editing.” Drawing examples from The Conversation, the first film he sound edited, to The Godfather to his work in documentary, Murch offers an incisive, history-laden master class in editing theory at this year’s Sheffield Doc Fest.
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 4, 2017 -
Watch: David Ehrlich’s 25 Best Films of 2017 Supercut
Critic David Ehrlich’s 25 Best Films of 2017 supercut, dropped today, is an expected pleasure. Through the luxuriousness of its 12-and-a-half minutes, it produces, as it always does, the affect of, “Hey, this was a decent year for movies!” There a quite a few personal favorites on his list — Personal Shopper, Phantom Shopper, Good Time, A Ghost Story, to name a few — as well as a spirited soundtrack flecked with a number of ’70s and ’80s pop hits and disco anthems. Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” is the bold opener, and particularly amazing needle drops include Chaka Kahn’s “I’m […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 4, 2017 -
Slamdance Announces its 2018 Narrative and Documentary Competition Lineup
Sixteen premieres — including 10 world premieres — are part of the 2017 Slamdance Film Festival, whose Narrative and Documentary Competition films were announced today. A punk rock romance, surrogacy drama, documentary about the Polaroid age and a non-fiction tale of a woman who withdraws from the fashion world to become a hermit are just four of the films to be presented January 19 – 25, 2018, in Park City, Utah. Notably, Slamdance submissions are selected from blind submissions by festival alumni and “are programmed democratically.” In addition to the films, Slamdance also announced a new prize. From the press […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 28, 2017 -
Call Me By Your Name, Strong Island, Get Out Top 2017 IFP Gotham Awards
Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name and Yance Ford’s Strong Island topped the 2017 IFP Gotham Awards, winning Best Feature and Best Documentary last night at a ceremony held at downtown New York’s Cipriani. And Jordan Peele’s Get Out made a very strong showing, winning the Audience Award, the Bingham Ray Breakthrough Director Award and the Best Screenplay. The Gotham Awards, presented by Filmmaker‘s parent organization, IFP, is the first awards show of the Oscar season, and in the past it’s been a harbinger of future success for its awarded films. (Previous Gotham Best Pictures include the last three […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 28, 2017 -
Trailer Watch: Jason Kohl’s New Money, Starring Louisa Krause
I’m a fan of Jason Kohl’s SXSW-premiering short film, The Slaughter, which he wrote about here for Filmmaker. And I also took note of his thoughtful filmmaking how-to, Film School: A Practical Guide to an Impractical Decision. Today, Kohl’s debut feature, New Money, is having its world premiere at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Starring the great Louisa Krause (King Kelly, The Girlfriend Experience, The Flick), it’s described as a “sharp-witted true crime drama” inspired by a story Kohl heard about two stepchildren, worried about their inheritance, who kidnapped their stepdad to insure that they’d get their cut of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 27, 2017 -
In Partnership with Westridge Foundation, SFFILM Announces New Grant Program for Narrative Filmmakers
There’s long been an imbalance between grants available to fiction filmmakers as opposed to documentarians, and today SFFILM, the Bay Area-based nonprofit, has announced in partnership with the Westridge Foundation new biannual grants and other resources for narrative filmmakers based across the U.S. Four to five grants of $20,000 – $25,000 will be given each spring and fall, and applications are now open for the first cycle, which runs through February, 2018. From the press release: The SFFILM / Westridge program is designed specifically to support the screenwriting and development phases of narrative feature projects whose stories focus on the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 16, 2017 -
Exclusive Clip: Chanelle Aponte Pearson and Rae Leone Allen’s 195 Lewis
195 Lewis, a web series directed by Chanelle Aponte Pearson and created by Rae Leone Allen, premieres tomorrow night at 8:00 PM at the show’s website. Last year, when the series was in production, we interviewed Pearson, and she discussed her own motivation for joining the project: At the time of joining the project as director, I used to watch The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl and The Couple, so I largely understood the format to work best for comedies with episodes ranging from two to five minutes. Despite knowing this, I still entered the writing process not focusing on […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 15, 2017
