The 2013 Gotham Independent Film Awards take place tonight. The show is live-streaming here, but to complement your viewing experience you can also read extensively about the nominated films tonight. Below is a full reading list of articles on the Filmmaker website on the movies in contention. Good luck to all involved, and good reading! 12 Years a Slave Screenwriter John Ridley Talks 12 Years a Slave The Act of Killing Caught on Film Errol Morris Let’s Loose on The Act of Killing Controversy Joshua Oppenheimer on How Limitations Shaped The Act of Killing The Act of Killing Takes Top Prize at CPH:DOX Afternoon Delight Sundance Responses: Afternoon […]
Opening today at Cinema Village in New York is Ben Kalina’s Shored Up, a documentary tackling the issue of rising tides and coastal development. From the film’s website: Our beaches and coastline are a national treasure, a shared resource, a beacon of sanity in a world of constant change…and they’re disappearing in front of us. Shored Up is a documentary that asks tough questions about our coastal communities and our relationship to the land. What will a rising sea do to our homes, our businesses, and the survival of our communities? Can we afford to pile enough sand on our […]
The new Made in NY Media Center by IFP has announced a round of classes and presentations for December and is offering Filmmaker subscribers a discount for the two involving transmedia. On December 7, one of today’s great cinematographers, Declan Quinn, will present a five-hour master class in the shooting of Mike Figgis’s Leaving Las Vegas. “In this Master Class, Quinn will deconstruct Leaving Las Vegas, scene-by- scene, while discussing his process, choices, obstacles, challenges – what worked and what didn’t,” reads the promo copy. Presented in partnership with Local 600, the day begins at 10:00 AM with a screening […]
“Let’s go back to the time when there was VHS,” says Gael García Bernal at the RIDM (Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal or the Montreal International Documentary Festival). “In those days to see a documentary in Mexico your friend would buy a movie in New York or Amsterdam or wherever [and] they would come up to you and say, ‘If you want to see this…’” Inevitably, a documentary fell into the young García Bernal’s hands. “I don’t remember which one it was, but I remember feeling there was something beyond an investigation, that it had a bigger scope, a […]
On the festival circuit, technicians generally get the short shrift. They work long, hard hours for weeks on end, often for less money than they ought to get rewarded with, towards a film that will ultimately have someone else’s name above the title or next to the “a film by” credit on the poster. Sure, they might get a shout out from a director while standing on stage at the closing night awards ceremony to go along with their fee, but glory is usually reserved for others. Not so at the CamerImage International Film Festival of the Art of Cinematography […]
This afternoon, Film Independent announced their nominees for the 2014 Independent Spirit Awards in Los Angeles, California. Designed as an opportunity to recognize the niche films that are muscled out of the circuit by Hollywood headliners, the show has in recent years become increasingly Academy friendly. Though 12 Years a Slave unsurprisingly leads the pack with seven nominations, it’s nice to see a handful of wild cards getting their due. A couple of notable deviations: the ISA’s first award for Best Editing — perhaps my favorite category, with essential nominations for Upstream Color and Museum Hours — and six, instead […]
In partnership with Filmmaker, Cinema Eye Honors announces the nominees for this year’s Heterodox Award, its fourth annual recognition of a narrative film that successfully and imaginatively weaves documentary strategies, content, and/or modes of production into its fabric. The five nominees are Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess; Randy Moore’s Escape From Tomorrow; James Franco and Travis Mathews’ Interior. Leather Bar.; Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds and Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux. These selected films are intended to demonstrate the formal possibilities of non-fiction filmmaking, in addition to probing the ever-tenuous boundary between reality and its embellished analogue. “The 2014 Cinema Eye Honors Heterodox nominees prove once again that […]
Benjamin Greené’s documentary Survival Prayer was voted Audience Favorite at the just concluded 8th Annual “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” Screening Series, which took place November 15-18 at The Museum of Modern Art. The series, presented by MoMA in partnership with Filmmaker Magazine and IFP, is a curated showcase of outstanding films from the film festival circuit that are currently not available in U.S. theatrical distribution. This was the first year that audience members attending the series were able to fill out ballots noting their response to each film. Survival Prayer, a meditative portrait of aspects […]
Marco Müller, in his second year at the helm of the Rome International Film Festival, abandoned his insistence on all films being world premieres, but not the ability to program average films. The main reason for the change of tact seems to be to allow higher profile American films to be programmed in competition. The beneficiaries this year were Dallas Buyers Club and Her which were rewarded for their Italian voyage with awards for their actors: Matthew McConaughey has been winning plaudits everywhere for his turn as a drug-peddling carrier of HIV, while one suspects that the competition jury had […]
Starting today, the Filmmaker “25 New Faces” screening series gets underway: Scott Blake (Surveyor), Anahita Ghazvinizadeh (Needle) and Mohammad Gorjestani (Refuge) are hitting the road, with myself in tow, with the first event taking place at the UW-Madison Cinematheque in Madison, WI. The road show, which is sponsored by Sony Creative Software and ARRI, will then progress to Cleveland, Iowa City, Kansas City, Columbia, MO and Nashville. If you’re in or around any of these places, please come to the event and say hi. As Scott wrote in his newsletter last week, this tour and the “Best Film Not Playing” screening series are our “ways of […]