Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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“Might There Be a Desire to Cross Party Lines?”: Director Laura Dunn | Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry
During its development, production or eventual distribution, what specific challenge of communication did, or will your film, face? How did you deal with it, or how are you planning to deal with it? For the past several years, while I worked to raise money for this film, it seemed like most folks in the documentary film world, the gatekeepers as they are, were not particularly interested in a sympathetic, even loving portrait of white male tobacco farmers from the rural south. I found a few lone advocates, and for those people, I am very grateful as they encouraged me more […]
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Is Sundance Worth It for Film Crew Members? Veteran Festival Goers Offer their Advice
Over the next ten days, the Sundance Film Festival will screen 113 feature films, and tens of thousands of people descend on the small town of Park City, Utah. Included in those crowds are the crewmembers from all over the world that made those 113 movies possible. While directors with projects premiering at Sundance are flown out to Utah by distributors or financiers, many crewmembers who worked tirelessly and often for very little money wind up paying their own way to the festival in order to support their own films. It’s an expensive trip, and they may wind up without […]
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“A Nuanced Understanding of War”: Director Greg Barker | Legion of Brothers
During its development, production or eventual distribution, what specific challenge of communication did, or will your film, face? How did you deal with it, or how are you planning to deal with it? Green Berets refer to themselves as “The Quiet Professionals,” and see themselves as a breed apart from more boastful units of the Special Forces, like SEAL Team Six, with their lucrative book deals and pumped-up war stories. So the biggest challenge on this production was simply convincing these guys that now was the time to finally open and reveal themselves – and not as stereotypical super-human war […]
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The Sundance Question: What Specific Challenge of Communication Has Your Film Faced?
Each year Filmmaker asks all the incoming feature directors at Sundance one question. (To see past years’ questions and responses, click here.) This year, our question involves an issue cutting across all the political drama of the last year: communication. How do we really communicate to one another, to converse despite our differences? How do we step outside of our echo chambers so we’re not just trading slogans among our friends? On a filmmaking level, how do we make sure that problems of communication don’t cripple our visions or limit their reach? This year’s question: During its development, production or eventual distribution, what […]
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“It’s about Populism and the Reactions of Europeans toward Asylum Seekers”: Director Tonislav Hristov | The Good Postman
During its development, production or eventual distribution, what specific challenge of communication did, or will your film, face? How did you deal with it, or how are you planning to deal with it? The original challenge of communicating in the development of the film was making the financiers understand what I was actually doing. There was a lot of talk about “refugee films” which my film is not. It seems that people, financiers and producers do have a tendency to “label” projects, and this can be challenging in the financing phase of a film. At least sometimes it slows things […]
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Sundance: Are Trump Think Pieces Helpful?
I write this a few hours before I’ll be hopping on a plane and heading to quaint and quiet Park City, Utah, where I’ll be covering the 2017 Sundance Film Festival for Filmmaker Magazine and surviving on a diet of tuna sandwiches I buy from 7/11 in-between screenings while, it goes without saying, hating myself. I’m lucky to not have a specific beat or set of overt marching orders for what to cover during the festivals. Sweet freedom. I don’t plan to just review films, nor do I plan to spend too much energy covering the “business of the festival” […]
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“Character, as Always, Proved to Be King”: Directors Susan Froemke and John Hoffman | Rancher, Farmer, Fisherman
During its development, production or eventual distribution, what specific challenge of communication did, or will your film, face? How did you deal with it, or how are you planning to deal with it? The biggest challenge was working concurrently with an author who was profiling the same subjects but in a different medium. Print and film lend themselves to different ways of storytelling. The flood of information constantly coming at us from the author, with so much color, complexity, and detail, took time to sort through and evaluate in terms of what was best suited to film. We sometimes suffered […]
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“Mistakes Are What Make Life Interesting”: Director Helene Hegemann | Axolotl Roadkill
During its development, production or eventual distribution, what specific challenge of communication did, or will your film, face? How did you deal with it, or how are you planning to deal with it? Axolotl Overkill is about a 16-year old girl, but was never supposed to be the typical coming-of-age odyssey that shows a teenager who struggles with the world just to find her place in it in the end. We always felt like we needed to do something different and to really make it relatable to how a young person feels – instead of showing her from the outside and […]
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“How Can You Make an Elephant Communicate Different Emotions?”: Director Kristen Tan | Pop Aye
During its development, production or eventual distribution, what specific challenge of communication did, or will your film, face? How did you deal with it, or how are you planning to deal with it? How can you make an elephant communicate different emotions? This was a challenge I found myself saddled with during the production of Pop Aye. Obviously, there’s a tight balancing act involved here. I did not want the elephant to be cloyingly expressive or overtly cute — we’re not making a children’s film here. I wanted him to have the same kind of nuanced and naturalistic performance as […]
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“Film Has a Unique Ability to Transcend Barriers”: Director Amman Abbasi | Dayveon
During its development, production or eventual distribution, what specific challenge of communication did, or will your film, face? How did you deal with it, or how are you planning to deal with it? One of the great powers of cinema is its ability to create empathy and communicate with the world. How people live, what people dream of, what we all struggle with. Ultimately it’s all pretty similar and, in my opinion, film has a unique ability to transcend barriers of place, time and condition to allow us to understand we all are more alike than different. In my opinion, […]
