Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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Bringing Web Series Butch and Nellie Take the Rap Game to Independent Film Week
It’s 9:20 pm on Friday, September 16th. I’m on the tarmac of Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport, just two Z-Quill and one red-eye flight away from my first IFP Film Week. My luggage occupies the last available overhead space. Inside are two stacks of business cards for myself and my producer Lindsey Villarreal, a raincoat (I’d heard it rains outside of L.A.), and a gay pride cape (costume for a homo-hip-hop performance on Wednesday night). Before I know it, it’s take-off time for me and my short-form episodic series Butch & Nellie Take the Rap Game. I first became involved with […]
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Feeling Empathetic through Virtual Reality at IFP Film Week
One focus of this year’s IFP Film Week is on the future of cinema in the form of Virtual Reality. A little background for those new to it: There are currently two ways of creating immersive worlds. The first wave and most common is spherical video, where you strap a bunch of cameras all together in an outward-facing circle. This approach has the familiarity of using cameras, but the viewer can’t physically move through the space — they’re akin to a locked-off tripod with a 360 swivel head, planted in one spot as characters and the world moves around them. […]
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The Faces of Comedy: Platforms That Look for (and Bring) the Funny
On Monday September 19th, IFP will host a panel entitled “The Face of Comedy: Platforms That Look for (and Bring) the Funny.” Moderated by comedian and filmmaker Todd Bieber, the panel has a refreshingly diverse array of speakers including executives Marc Lieberman and Winnie Kemp, and the comedic duo behind the Gotham-winning web series Shugs & Fats, Nadia P. Manzoor and Radhika Vaz. In broad terms, the panel will be about the intersection of comedy and digital platforms, from the perspectives of both the content creators and the executives who curate them. Bieber has known Lieberman for close to ten […]
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New Innovators in Distribution: Talking Trends and Hybrid Models at IFP Film Week
Film has been a dying industry for as long as I’ve been making, selling and distributing them. That’s what they say. And there’s certainly evidence that sales agents and distributors are having to re-think how they do business. The recent news that respected arthouse distributor Fortissimo Films had filed for bankruptcy left many saddened, but it seems that news of this nature is increasingly frequent. One of yesterday’s first panels at IFP Film Week, “New Innovators: Distribution,” moderated by Filmmaker Contributing Editor Brandon Harris, brought together industry members who are working innovatively in film, TV, and online distribution to discuss […]
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Remembering My First IFP Film Week Experience
This will be my second time participating in IFP Film Week. Last year, I attended with my first film, Hooligan Sparrow, which was in post-production and later premiered at Sundance in January. Before IFP Film Week Last year, I knew nothing about the film industry (and I’m still learning now). Many of the people and companies I met with were unfamiliar to me. Immediately after receiving my meeting schedule, I spent half a day researching who was who, what they did, and what films they worked on. Most of this information was available through simple Google searches. I wrote down […]
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Stop Making Sense: Talking Music Videos at IFP Film Week
At today’s IFP Film Week panel, “Musical Approach to Visual Storytelling,” filmmakers Zia Anger, Celia Rowlson-Hall, Ashley Connor and David Svedosh will discuss their varying approaches to the medium of music videos; collaborations with the likes of Jenny Lewis, Angel Olsen, Mitski, MGMT, and Elliott Moss; and the benefits of working in a pipeline that’s a bit more streamlined than feature filmmaking. Prior to the discussion, the four shared a few thoughts on the experimental tendencies of the medium, its release strategies and much more. As a filmmaker, music videos can afford the opportunity to experiment with images and sound […]
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Fashionable Outsiders: A Conversation with Refinery 29’s Amy Emmerich and Comedian and Author, Jacqueline Novak
On Sunday, September 18th, IFP Film Week will host a discussion between Refinery29’s Chief Content Officer, Amy Emmerich, and stand-up comedian and author Jacqueline Novak, who recently released her non-fiction memoir, How to Weep in Public: Feeble Offerings on Depression from One Who Knows. Novak’s corresponding video series on mental health was developed and produced with Refinery29, and is just one example of how the popular lifestyle media site has turned its focus toward video content with full force. Their video production unit, R29 Originals, has released so far over a dozen original content series. The site aims to “debut […]
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The Female Gaze, Anyone? Isabel Sandoval on her IFP Film Week Project, Lingua Franca
Me and You and Everyone We Know. Pariah. Obvious Child. Lingua Franca. The first three titles? Music to my ears. That last one? Sounds like Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 to me, mostly because it’s my third feature screenplay (and English-language debut). It’s also been selected for No Borders at IFP Film Week, where those amazing films got their start. As a NYC-based Filipina filmmaker, I can’t be in better company this week. My debut feature, Senorita, a pulpy political noir that’s a love child of Fassbinder’s Lola and late-’90s Almodovar, had its world premiere in competition at Locarno. It has […]
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IFP Film Week: Lance Weiler on His Emergent Creative Process
In 1983, Lance Weiler’s van burst into flames during a family vacation. Eleven months later his house burnt to the ground. His latest project, “Where There’s Smoke,” mixes theater, film, gaming, and emergent technology story in an attempt to uncover the truth about those two incidents. On Sunday, September 18 as part of the IFP Film Week’s Screen Forward Conference, Weiler will discuss the creative process behind the immersive storytelling project and present hands-on opportunities for participants to experiment. Weiler has been the creative force behind some of the most innovative projects in the new immersive storytelling space. An alumni of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, Weiler is […]
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Twelve Programs and Events To Anticipate at IFP Film Week and Screen Forward Conference
In writing last year about IFP’s Film Week and Screen Forward Conference, I dubbed it the long-running event’s “most refined articulation yet,” a streamlined affair that, with “deceptive modesty,” did all the things IFP Film Week has historically done to support filmmakers and their projects with programming specific to today’s multi-platform world. Realizing that I sound like Apple designer Jony Ive in the sentence above, I guess I should then liken last year’s edition of IFP Film Week to the “most singular, most evolved” (per Ive) new iPhone 7, an event where the chassis remained the same but new tech […]
