Festivals & Events
Festivals & Events
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“My First Feature Film was Shot in Seven Days”: Glassland | Director Gerard Barrett
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? Fear is an interesting word. I wouldn’t say I had to overcome any fear in the whole process of bringing Glassland to life, but I guess what I had to overcome was going into a “traditional” production – the unknown to me. Pilgrim Hill, my first feature film, was shot in seven days with a three-person crew and one actor. It was intense, intimate and all consuming. I wrote, […]
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“I Have a Fear of Long Hours”: Hellions | Director Bruce McDonald
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? I have a fear of Long Hours. The crew gets angry, bored, sick and tired. They don’t see any friends, lovers, families, or pets. People feel ground down and taken advantage of. The set becomes isolated from life. And the film suffers for it. To overcome this on Hellions we did all we could to prevent Long Hours from occurring. We prepped like motherfuckers. Sharpened the script. Pushed for […]
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“The Film Just Won’t Be Good Enough”: Brooklyn | Director John Crowley
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? At first the familiar gnawing fear that the film just won’t be good enough. But nothing ever is, so I negotiated my way past that one. But then arose a far more specific concern in this instance – that the finished film would not do justice to the experiences of the countless thousands of emigrants that crossed the Atlantic to find a new life in the US. Brooklyn is […]
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“I Worked Diligently and Kept At It”: Cronies | Producer/Editor/Writer/Director Michael J. Larnell
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? The biggest fear I had to conquer while making this project was the decision to take on many roles for the film. I am the producer, editor, writer and director for Cronies. The most difficult part was the pre-production jobs of producer and director. There were many items needed to be completed for both producer and director, but most of the time went to the producer role. There were […]
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“My Confidence was in the Dumps”: Bob and the Trees | Writer/Director Diego Ongaro
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? My biggest fear happened with the writing of the script. It came down to lacking confidence. It was very hard to come up with a good story that has enough life in it — real life in it — but also a strong narrative. With my wife and co-writer, Courtney Maum, we kept going back and forth. She’s a novelist so she was pushing for a more scripted story, […]
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“I Might Actually Be Documenting Larry’s Passing”: Larry Kramer in Love & Anger | Producer/Director Jean Carlomusto
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? The biggest fear I had while making the film was that I might actually be documenting Larry’s passing. Just as we started the final push on the documentary, Larry became critically ill and ended up in intensive care. The grave nature of his illness brought back terrible memories of witnessing my friends die of AIDS in the 1980’s and 90’s. Also, my father had recently died. Being part of […]
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Sundance 2015: Results, Entertainment and The Witch
He may not be your bag, but it’s tough to deny that Andrew Bujalski is one of the most distinctive American independent filmmakers working today. So distinctive that even when he sets his sights on the pseudo-pedestrian genre of the romantic comedy, he finds a way to completely reconfigure the shape of its central love triangle. In Results, Trevor (Guy Pearce) is an Australian in Austin who owns the Power 4 Life fitness studio, living and breathing his own advertising mantras about self-improvement. The recently divorced, suddenly rich Danny (Kevin Corrigan, brilliant) is new in town and eager to buy […]
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Sundance 2015: Unexpected and H.
There are two worthwhile concepts that skirt the heavily sketched plot of Kris Swanberg’s Unexpected: working motherhood and the white savior. Unfortunately, both are dropped just as soon as they are addressed in this saccharine tale of an unlikely, intergenerational friendship between two pregnant women. Sam Abbott, who has the great fortune of being played by the appealing Cobie Smulders, is a science teacher at an inner city Chicago high school that’s set to close at the end of the semester. Unexpectedly pregnant (requisite peeing, WebMD scenes and all), Sam marries her boyfriend John (Anders Holm) at City Hall to the chagrin of her overbearing — […]
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Sundance 2015, Dispatch 4: Experimenter, Station to Station and Listen to Me Marlon
It’s been far too long since Michael Almereyda’s last feature, 2009’s dreamy diary film Paradise; his 2015 return with not one but two features (the Ethan Hawke-starring Cymbeline adaptation Anarchy is set for release later this year) is overdue and very welcome. Experimenter, a pared-down biopic of social psychologist Stanley Milgram, ostensibly exists to hit the career highlights, but it’s far from standard issue. As in his career (the writer said with all the authority conferred by a quickly read Wiki), the film begins with, and is dominated by, Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments. The “teacher” sits on one side of a […]
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Rotterdam at 44, Volume #2: Yanks in Holland, Suicidal Poets & the limits of J-Horror
The program of American narratives assembled in Rotterdam by Ralph McKay and Inge De Leeuw includes a smattering of world premieres and, for the first time in a while, no films making their international debuts after bows at Sundance. (The latter likely due to the first-time collision of dates between the two festivals.) There is a consistency to the loose narratives in a lot of the work. We get by turns somber and cluttered ensemble pieces with light running times, generously adorned with micro-indie actors whose faces will be familiar to the ever-shrinking flotilla of scenesters who follow such films, […]
