Authors — Scott Macaulay
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Watch Now for 48 Hours: Short Films from Eastern Oregon Film Festival
For the third year Filmmaker is happy to exclusively host online selections from the currently underway Eastern Oregon Film Festival. These films will stream exclusively here on the site until Sunday morning at 9:00 AM. This year, we’re hosting a work of philosophical science fiction by Blake Salzman, a new drama from festival veteran Frank Mosley, and an inspiring London-set work from Tal Amiran. You can watch all the films embedded below, and check out the rest of the lineup at Eastern Oregon Film Festival. Midwife (dir. Blake Salzman, 2017) Synopsis: In a bleak future where women are dying rapidly, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2017 -
With Four Nominations, Get Out Tops IFP Gotham Awards Announcement
Jordan Peele’s zeitgeist-y horror film Get Out topped the IFP Gotham Awards nominations this morning, scoring nods for Best Picture, Breakthrough Director, Best Screenplay and Best Actor. Other multiple nominees include Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time, Craig Gillespie’s I, Tonya, : kogonada’s Columbus, Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name, and Dee Rees’s Mudbound, which scored a nomination for actress Mary J. Blige as well as a special ensemble acting jury award. A total of 34 films are cited in today’s release. Said IFP Executive Director Joana Vicente in a press release, “This year offered […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 19, 2017 -
Director Lana Wilson Talks Gaining Trust, Valuing Life and Her Wise, Empathetic Suicide Prevention Doc, The Departure
One of the major discoveries of the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, Lana Wilson’s The Departure is a beautiful, wise and deeply empathetic immersion into one fascinating character’s unique approach to suicide prevention. Ittetsu Nemoto is a former punk rocker turned Buddhist priest who, in quietly wrenching group sessions, counsels the suicidal while facing down his own demons. Working in a small, remote temple in Japan, he constructs spare, philosophical rituals for his patients and then, separately, bonds with them in more personal, emotionally intimate ways. Following Nemoto both within his practice and outside of it, The Departure initially grabs hold […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 13, 2017 -
Watch: Gillian Wallace Horvat’s “Raunchy Feminist Comedy,” Whiskey Fist
As her short Whiskey Fist has made its away across the festival circuit, director Gillian Wallace Horvat has penned a couple of essays for Filmmaker amplifying and riffing off of her shorts’ themes. Specifically, she takes aim at the rise of branded content masquerading as short films, critiquing filmmakers who surrender their “authenticity” by imagining that brand sponsorship isn’t affecting their art. Her SXSW-premiering Whiskey Fist, which Horvat says was provocatively submitted to a whiskey company’s branded film content contest (containing a scene in which a man is anally penetrated by a whiskey bottle, it lost, needless to say), is […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 2, 2017 -
Win Tickets to Hear Steven Soderbergh and Sam Esmail at this Weekend’s Future of Storytelling Festival
A conversation with Steven Soderbergh and a screening of the season three premiere of Mr. Robot followed by a talk with creator Sam Esmail are just two highlights of the Future of Storytelling Festival, to be held this weekend, October 6 – 8, at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center in Staten Island, New York. In a discussion moderated by Elvis Mitchell, Soderbergh will talk about his overall career as well as Mosaic, the new interactive project he’s making with HBO. In addition to Esmail, there are comedy performances, music events, and panels on truth in the age of digital journalism […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 2, 2017 -
Interactive Storytelling in Eko Studio’s The Garage Sale
From the folks at Eko Studio, director J.M. Logan (The Disunited States of America) and writer Molly Hagan comes a new interactive film for the web, The Garage Sale. It’s about three couples who descend on a suburban garage sale with different aspirations and behaviorsl the film, viewable through a web browser, allows viewers to live-switch through their different stories. “The viewer is able to navigate between stories to get a different perspective, learn new information, and follow which of the couples they are most curious about,” says the press release. “While their choices will not impact the final outcome […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 30, 2017 -
Ten Films and a Retrospective to Catch at the 55th New York Film Festival
Filmmaker‘s usual “films we’re anticipating” preview — opinions gleaned from early buzz or just pure enthusiasm — doesn’t work for the New York Film Festival. Always a collection of the best films from the prior months’ festival circuit, with a few world premieres thrown in, this year finds the latter — outside of the opening (Rick Linklater’s Last Flag Flying, reviewed here) and closing nights — in shorter supply. (The pluses and minuses of the festival’s curatorial approach receive a solid debate over at Indiewire morning.) That means we’ve seen a large swatch of this year’s selection, and the below […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 28, 2017 -
Butler/Eno’s Thom Pain, Lynn Sachs’s Tip of My Tongue, Abel Ferrara Tribute and More: Indie Memphis Announces its 2017 Festival
On the eve of its 20th anniversary, the Indie Memphis Film Festival, presented by Duncan-Williams, has announced its 2017 selection, which spans world premieres, a recut indie gem and a special salute to Abel Ferrara. Oliver Butler and Will Eno’s adaptation of Eno’s Pulitzer Prize finalist, Thom Pain, kicks off Opening Night. Starring Rainn Wilson, it’s a film version of Eno’s monologue filmed at the Los Angeles’s Geffen Playhouse. Lynne Sachs’s Tip of My Tongue, which collects the reflections of a group of the filmmaker’s contemporaries on the occasion of her 50th birthday, is the closing night film. As for […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 27, 2017 -
Kimberly Peirce, Natasha Lyonne, Lena Dunham and More Talk Therapy with Alex Karpovsky and Teddy Blanks
Disclosure: I’ve never done therapy, although it has certainly been suggested over the years. Any recent therapy-curiosity was tempered by watching a couple of episodes of the Naomi Watts/Netflix series Gypsy, which made seeing a therapist seem like being the unwitting subject of a Sophie Calle art piece. Offering a point-of-view both more optimistic and realistic is, timed to National Therapy Day, a set of six new shorts from directors Alex Karpovsky and Teddy Blanks in which five women and one man discuss their various experiences in therapy. Director Kimberly Peirce talks about an experience in couples therapy, author Susan […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 25, 2017 -
A DIY Feature with a Crew of One: Jamie Stuart Trailers A Motion Selfie
Filmmaker readers have long known the work of Jamie Stuart, whose inventive, deadpan dissections of film festival customs and rituals as well as elegantly lensed interviews graced our (web) pages for years. If you haven’t seen his byline around here much recently, there’s a good reason for that: he’s been making a feature. And now you can see some of it. A Motion Selfie is Stuart’s long-form debut, and he wrote, directed, starred, shot, scored, edited, color corrected…. well, you get the idea. Yes, A Motion Selfie is as DIY as you can get, with Stuart literally being his own […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 25, 2017
