Indie maestro Abel Ferrara launched his latest film project in Cannes this week with his first ever foray into Kickstarter. Siberia, a new film with Willem Dafoe, explores the language of dreams, using the subconscious as a form of language. “There’s nothing more horrific than your own dreams and nightmares,” Ferrara promised the crowd of assembled journalists gathered on the top of the Silencio club in Cannes. “I’m going back to that kind of filmmaking, to my horror film roots.” He’s hoping to raise half a million dollars to begin financing for the new film. “This is Willem being Willem,” […]
“The Where of Storytelling: Creating the Location Based Experience” is a class series conceived by the Made in NY Media Center by IFP exploring site-specific storytelling – from interactive film to experiential design for commercial clients, location adds a new level of experience to media projects. The program consists of a Case Study and overview of locative storytelling featuring interactive filmmaker Lance Weiler and Jake Barton, founder of award-winning museum experience designers Local Projects (June 9); a Writing Workshop: draft a location-based story & refine your project through inspiring design exercises and peer critiques (June 13, 14 & 27); and a Beacon Tech Workshop: install a location-specific experience & work with developers to learn to […]
Quick, try to describe Irreversible and Enter the Void writer-director Gaspar Noé without relying on the words “controversial,” “provocateur,” “bad boy” (or, more Gallically put, “enfant terrible“) or “transgressive.” Noé’s latest potential scandal-maker, Love — hotly anticipated after smutty publicity materials teased it as a 3D art-house porno, complete with semen-sticky title treatment — was surprisingly softer and less shocking than anyone expected from last night’s midnight premiere. It’s also callow, shallow and numbingly insipid, despite its explicit mélange of blowjobs, threesomes and orgies. (Seriously, how does one make hardcore fucking more vanilla than Fifty Shades of Grey?) In a two-hour-plus scrapbook of flashbacks and time jumps forward, a […]
IFP has announced a partnership with Film London to bring two UK-based producers to Independent Film Week to partake in the No-Borders International Co-Production Market. Each year during Film Week, 35 producers with projects that have at least 20% funding in place participate in the No-Borders section to network with buyers, sales agents and financiers, in order to get their films off the ground. No-Borders has previously partnered with the likes of the Berlinale, Venice Biennale, and TorinoFilmLab, to allow international producers to partake in the US-based market. This is Film London’s first US partnership designed to benefit and foster UK producers. […]
“A good movie is like a blast to the head,” growled Dusty Decker — musician, actor, purveyor of the Albino Bumblebee (goat’s milk, Jack Daniels, honey) and something of a local legend in the valley of La Grande, Oregon. His off the cuff commentary, though in jest, nonetheless proved a perfect transition from bb gun toting and hatchet throwing to a roundtable discussion on independent film beneath the towering trees of his backyard. We were all there for the sixth annual Eastern Oregon Film Festival, and the conversation began with the occasion. Just as any old chum can go out and shoot a film […]
Todd Haynes reteams with Cate Blanchett, after 2007’s I’m Not There, for his latest Palme d’Or contender Carol. Based on Patricia Highsmith’s semi-autobiographical novel The Price of Salt, Rooney Mara plays shopgirl Therese, who falls in love with the older, married Carol (Blanchett) in the ’50s. The two embark on a road trip, which culminates in Carol’s husband blackmailing her with the liaison to prevent her from having custody over their daughter. Edward Lachman’s cinematography is rich in period detail. And two masters at their craft bring the challenging characters to life, ending the film in a final wordless scene […]
Italian director Matteo Garrone is no stranger to Cannes. He picked up the Grand Prix twice for his previous films Gomorrah (2008), exploring the Camorra mafia, and Reality (2012), about society’s obsession with reality TV. With his third film in competition, Garrone has once again completely switched gears, debuting his first period piece and his first film shot in English, Tale of Tales. Based on the fairytales of Giambattista Basile, the film has been the buzz of Cannes with its rich storytelling, outstanding performances, and lush cinematography. Going back to the raw and oftentimes brutal storytelling of early fairytales (Basile’s […]
Could it be, six features deep at the most exalted film festival in the world, that this writer’s favorite film isn’t some scrappy Critics’ Week indie or an ennui-driven Eastern European drama of profound sociopolitical relevance — but rather, the $150-million studio juggernaut Mad Max: Fury Road? Nothing new needs to be said about the most inventive, thrilling, lyrical action flick in ages (considering it’s now opened worldwide) except that it’s radically more feminist than Emmanuelle Bercot’s Standing Tall. Cannes’ first opening night selection to be directed by a woman in nearly three decades, Bercot’s juvenile justice-system drama — a clumsy, histrionic […]
From April 23-May 3, Hot Docs, North America’s largest documentary film festival spread its wings across the theaters of Toronto. Against that backdrop, the 16th Annual Hot Docs Forum and Conference Market featured another opportunity to glimpse the inner workings of documentary film funding and pitching. With 19 scheduled pitches (and one project picked out of a Mountie’s hat), I was once again given the chance to take the pulse of the documentary marketplace. Below are several thoughts culled from the front row at those pitch proceedings. 1. Get Your Trailer in Order So you’ve been chosen to be one […]
The latest in Tony Zhou’s Every Frame a Painting series centers on a filmmaker who is relatively unscrutinized in the realm of the video essay: Lynne Ramsay. Though Ramsay’s films turn on watershed moments in the lives of her characters, she often chooses to relate their emotional impact through a string of details, rather than a single overblown reaction. Such a notion is the subject of Zhou’s essay, “The Poetry of Details,” wherein he dissects Ramsay’s use of framing and repetition.