Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
-
“Gain the Trust of the Audience”: Cenk Uygur Talks Trump, News and the Internet at IFP Week
Cenk Uygur isn’t happy Trump got elected, but he is fine with stealing parts of his playbook. Not the bad moves — just the ones that are, arguably, good. As the main host and co-creator of The Young Turks, a progressive show which began on Sirius and now lives online, Uygur is after the same slice of the populist pie as the president he so despises. Cenk Uygur isn’t a household name, but perhaps he should be. He is, literally, internet-famous. The Young Turks gets 200 million views a month, meaning he has more fans than a Wolf Blitzer or a Joe Scarborough. […]
-
Who Gets to Tell Whose Story?: IFP Week Filmmakers and Funders Talk the Politics of Representation in 2017
When Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit came out this summer, some charged that it shouldn’t have been made by Kathryn Bigelow. Critics, including rogerebert.com’s Angelica Jade Bastien, felt that the story — about ten Black civilians (and two Caucasians) tortured and, in some cases, killed by racist white cops during the 1967 Detroit riots — should have been told by Black filmmakers. These commentators argued that Bigelow and her screenwriter Mark Boal, both white, not only lacked the perspective to get the events right; they also ran the risk of aestheticizing suffering and the destruction of Black bodies. This is not a new […]
-
IFP Week: Sean Baker and the Safdie Brothers on How To Film Inside Working Businesses
If you’re a filmmaker, it may seem like the city is your playground. It’s not. Everything costs money. Every public space you want to shoot in requires permits and insurance. It all requires planning, hard work, negotiations, or simply lots of pleading. One issue that’s cropped up in multiple talks during IFP Week has been this: What do you do when you want to shoot in a place of business? How do you get a bodega owner or a restauranteur or the owners of a giant mall in Flushing to let you run around with cast and crew, even though […]
-
Directors Josh and Benny Safdie and Cinematographer Sean Price Williams Talk Shooting Good Time in NYC on 35mm at IFP Week
Directors Josh and Benny Safdie and cinematographer Sean Price Williams go way back. Their latest collaboration, the crime thriller Good Time, is the trio’s fourth joint effort. They’re not only used to each other; they’ve also been through some real shit. The Safdies love to work rough and tumble, filming most of their movies — including Daddy Longlegs and Heaven Knows What, both shot by Williams – on the streets and apartments of New York, feeding off and bottling up the city’s uniquely chaotic energy. For Good Time, they even dragged a big name, Robert Pattinson, along for the ride. To get […]
-
“I Don’t Want To Kill a Medium”: Director Sean Baker Talks The Florida Project and iPhones at IFP Week
Sean Baker is amazed some people still think he’s a new filmmaker. That implies that he’s young. On the contrary. “I’m old,” Baker remarked during his talk at IFP Week 2017. (Or at least he’s 46.) Back in 2015, Tangerine put him on the map. And it was shot on an iPhone 5S, which made him seem like some millennial who’d never even heard of a Bolex. As it happens, Tangerine was his fifth film. The others weren’t obscure; Four Letter Words, Take Out, Prince of Broadway and Starlet were all acclaimed. (He also spent years as the co-creator of […]
-
“Create Something That Is Undeniable”: Director Dee Rees Talks Mudbound And Life After Pariah at IFP Week
The highpoint of Dee Rees’ IFP Week appearance was a complete surprise. There to discuss her latest feature, the Sundance fave Mudbound (hitting theaters and Netflix on Nov. 17) with Buzzfeed film critic Alison Willmore, the Pariah filmmaker waxed nostalgic over one of the films that most inspired her to take up the craft: Sugar Cane Alley, Euzhan Palcy’s 1983 César-winner about life in a small village in Martinique during the 1930s. Rees’ mother had it on VHS when she was a kid, and she would watch it over and over again. “That was before I understood what a director did,” […]
-
Panelists at TIFF Talk Distribution, Data Analytics, Documentary and New Audience-First Marketing
Diversity was a hotly debated topic within the “Dialogues: At the Table” panel. Gil Robertson, CEO of the African American Critics Association, probed the panelists to explain why people of diverse backgrounds are still struggling to get their films made. The outspoken, decisive Franklin Leonard, who runs online network The Black List, which connects writers and their scripts with agents, producers and financiers, shrugged his shoulders: “The numbers don’t lie. Look at the success of films such as Titanic and Avatar. [They] made it clear many years ago that women could sell films. And this year we have the success […]
-
“Find Your Tribe”: Moonlight Director Barry Jenkins and Producer Adele Romanski Give Advice at IFP Week
Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski know what IFP Week is like. They know what it’s like to pitch a passion project. They even know what it’s like when time — in Jenkin’s case, several years — elapses between features. When the writer/director and producer, respectively, of Moonlight swung by this year’s Filmmaker Talks day at IFP Week, it was a kind of victory lap. After all, their last film together took home three Oscars, including Best Picture, on top of a towering pile of other accolades. But they used their talk with moderator Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker‘s Editor-in-Chief, to remember when life was […]
-
“How Are You Going to Make a Video that’s 9,000 Pixels Long?”: The Mixed Media Art of Anne Spalter
Anne Spalter’s work not only reflects the world around her but also the world of the future she hopes to see. Wonder Why — the digital mixed media project currently taking over the Made in NY Media Center by IFP in Brooklyn, NY — is her most narrative work to date, mashing up everything from Wonder Woman’s Invisible Plane and Google Earth to campy star graphics and well-lit tunnels that she equates with hope. The result of putting these kaleidoscopic and powerful images into her unique visual blender creates an effect for the viewer akin to finding hidden letters of […]
-
Enabling What is to Come: IFP Previews its 2017 IFP Week
“Film” — what’s in a word? It’s still the first half of Filmmaker, even as our new logo design nods to the ways in which this term’s meaning is continually mutating and no longer fixed in celluloid. But, as Joana Vicente, Executive Director of IFP (Filmmaker’s publisher) and the Made in NY Media Center notes, it’s been dropped this year from the name of IFP’s signature event, which begins today through September 21 in Brooklyn. Over the last several years “Independent Film Week” has shortened to “IFP Film Week” to, now, simply, “IFP Week.” That’s because, as Vicente says, “the […]
