Authors — Scott Macaulay
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BRITDOC Launches the World’s First Documentary Cookbook on Kickstarter
With awards like the Cinema Eye Honors’ Unforgettables Award, documentary organizations are beginning to draw attention not just to the filmmakers behind documentary cameras but the subjects in front. Still, BRITDOC’s latest is utterly original: the world’s first documentary cookbook. Currently fundraising on Kickstarter, the project is a digital download illustrated by Ben Lamb containing savory recipes from documentary subjects all over the world, from Chicago’s Ameena Matthews (from Steve James’ The Interrupters) to Burma’s Joshua Min Htut (Burma VJ) to an as-yet-unrevealed “certain American living somewhere in Russia.” Six of the doc chefs have already been announced, with all […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 29, 2015 -
Trailer Watch: Todd Haynes’ Carol, Final Trailer
What an exquisite final trailer for Todd Haynes’ Patricia Highsmith adaption, Carol! Haynes’s film, a story of forbidden love set in a 1950s’ New York, is pure cinema, every moment carefully calibrated and achingly expressed. Carol is Filmmaker‘s Fall, 2015 cover story — an interview of Haynes conducted by Kim Morgan — and the Weinstein Company has just released this last trailer, posted above.
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 20, 2015 -
Short Film Premiere: Francesca Coppola’s Jonny Come Lately
“What can be said of a connection that seems to border on captivity? Where does the line between violence & intimacy exist?” That’s how Francesca Coppola introduces her sophomore short film, Jonny Come Lately, further described as focusing on “a fragile, complicated, volatile union between two lovers.” The film features Deragh Campbell, Kentucker Audley and Evan Louison, it was shot on 16mm, and it premieres online today via Filmmaker and courtesy of 1985. Last year, Coppola wrote about her film on the occasion of its Kickstarter launch. Here, she describes what the film means to her and, hopefully, for you: […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 20, 2015 -
Lena Olin-Starring A Critically Endangered Species Wraps Production
Oscar and Golden Globe-nominee Lena Olin (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Enemies, A Love Story) has wrapped production of A Critically Endangered Species, an independent drama directed by award-winning poet T. Zachary Cotler and novelist/producer Magdalena Zyzak. The film was produced by Mike Ryan of Greyshack Films and Morgan Jon Fox, a director and producer who placed in the 2009 edition of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces. Olin stars as a famous novelist who, after deciding to commit suicide, calls on young male writers to submit their work to her so that she can name one her literary executor. Starring alongside […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 16, 2015 -
IFP Announces 10 Web Series Projects for Inaugural Screen Forward Labs
IFP, Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today ten projects for its inaugural Screen Forward Labs, which are dedicated to serialized, story-driven web content. Encompassing a series of intensive workshops modeled after the organization’s Narrative and Documentary Labs, the Screen Forward Labs provide mentorship and year-round support for those looking to develop, market and finance their original online work. The Screen Forward Labs are led by Amy Dotson, IFP Head of Programming, and Holly Kang, IFP Screen Forward Labs Producer. Commented Joana Vicente, Executive Director of IFP and the Made in New York Media Center, “We are excited to introduce the first […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 9, 2015 -
Look Into the Cut: Jessica Brillhart on Editing VR
From classical Hollywood continuity editing to Eisensteinian montage, from the quick jump cuts of the French New Wave to the even more accelerated and spatially destabilized editing of the Hollywood blockbuster, filmmakers from the dawn of cinema have had to embrace, even if only on a subconscious level, some theory of editing. What, then, of today’s nascent medium of Virtual Reality (VR)? Some are calling VR the next phase of cinema, but many VR works are more akin to video games, where cuts are hidden within approaching horizon lines. Or where, inelegantly, an edit is simply a transition from one […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 28, 2015 -
Editor’s Letter
It’s fall, and time for new things, so let’s get right into it. I like this issue. I know, I like every issue, but this issue has an especially good vibe to it. We’ll see what you think. In some ways it’s classic Filmmaker, and, as we do every fall, there’s a special focus on postproduction. But there are new contributors throughout, and we’ve shaken up the way we’ve covered certain topics. For example, in the fall we usually do some sort of NLE roundup, cataloguing the new features in the workstation space. But — the perils of publishing a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 28, 2015 -
Parting Shot: Chantal Akerman
In early October, the film world lost a great, challenging voice when director Chantal Akerman passed away at 65. Forty years earlier the young Belgian had altered the course of film history with her second feature, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai de Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, a three-hour, 20-minute portrait of a middle-aged, widowed mother and sometime prostitute. Dielman’s daily chores are captured with a fixed camera in near real time, offering both a historical critique of domestic routine — “women’s work” — as well as the representational strategies of mainstream cinema. But Jeanne Dielman was only one of Akerman’s remarkable films. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 28, 2015 -
Come to the Sound of My Voice: Laurie Anderson Talks Heart of a Dog
I remember when you started hearing that voice everywhere. Melodious, precisely phrased yet awkward in its pauses, the electronic approximation of the human voice, whether sampled, altered, or pitch-shifted, and triggered by the pound sign, or, now, simply a “Hey, Siri,” has lured human dialogue into an uncanny valley of meaning since the 1970s. And, after Kraftwerk, certainly, but long before AutoTune, 808s & Heartbreak and the Gregory Brothers there was Laurie Anderson, whose vocoderized voice forced us to try and make sense of it all. Anderson, a performance artist and composer whose early work included a piece where she played […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 28, 2015 -
Scoped Out
When filmmaker Laura Poitras joined journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill to form the online news site The Intercept, it didn’t seem a certainty that she’d bring film to the site’s reporting on domestic spying, national security and foreign policy issues. After all, even before her Academy Award for documentary CITIZENFOUR, Poitras had shared a Pulitzer Prize and George Polk award for print reporting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post. And, after the awards, Poitras continued covering these stories in print and online — not just for The Intercept, a site owned by […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 28, 2015
