CONVERSION. This article is part of Filmmaker‘s Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. Conversion, the ambitious second short film by Nanobah Becker, clocks in at only nine minutes, and is described simply tantalizingly as: “Christian missionaries make a catastrophic visit to a Navajo family.” Becker’s first short, Flat, has screened in festivals internationally, and she is a recipient of a 2005 Sundance Institute Ford Fellowship and a 2006 Media Arts Fellowship for her feature screenplay, Full. Conversion will play in Shorts Program V at Sundance. Can you say a little bit about your background? Where you’re from? Age? Education? Film experience prior […]

BOMB. This article is part of Filmmaker’s Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. It isn’t easy to glean a sense of Ian Olds’ identity from his films — they’re too diverse, too global. From Occupation: Dreamland (short-listed for an Academy Award), a breathtaking documentary that avoids simple political interpretation by opting to tell the story of the Iraq War from the perspective of the entire city of Fallujah — including both native Iraqis and U.S. troops — to Bomb, his most recent film, which explores teenage heartache against the backdrop of a decrepit bombing range and junkie malaise, Olds seems to be […]

BITCH. This article is part of Filmmaker’s Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. Bitch, the kinetic, black-and-white, Harold Lloyd-meets-Jello Biafra love story, is one of the most visually sophisticated and stylized films to emerge from that Sundance short film-factory, Columbia University’s MFA Film Program (eight shorts screening at the festival this year!). The film’s director, Lilah Vanderburgh, is obsessed with skater culture, punk-rock, underground comics, and displays the hip film literacy of another director with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture. (Is it taboo to compare a young director to Tarantino? Who cares — in this case, it’s deserved). This film will […]

Major transitional years occur only occasionally in the festival world. It is, in part, continuity of venue and curatorial staff that makes these institutions tick; their very consistency allows filmmakers and film professionals to make informed choices about how films might be received at their premieres. In this context, the 50th Berlinale was a traumatic and difficult event. Ten years ago, when the Wall fell, rumors had already begun that the Festival would be moved from its hideous, if comforting, decades-old home in Breitscheitzplatz to new digs in the just-liberated wasteland of Potsdamer Platz, the former center of all things […]

Gen Art gets a lot of flack for being a “party” festival. Each film shown at the New York City-based event is explicitly marketed with a party attached, usually in some fashionable SoHo night spot. Those who believe in the sanctity of the cinema deplore this cross-breeding of evening activities. Many film professionals who attend the parties claim they don’t know anyone there, and that this somehow makes the Festival lightweight. This is all bosh. Festivals have been founded on far more suspicious foundations than this, and in fact one big one – that I happen to work for called […]

Trade magazine writers have jokingly claimed for years that they preprint their Berlin roundup articles with the header “Industry Disappointed At Berlin.” This year was no exception; see Variety especially. Stacked up against this continuous din of bad news is a genuine enthusiasm for the Berlinale among American independent filmmakers, curators and critics. So what’s going on? Are the suits trying to spoil the party? The trades attack the Festival on three fronts – the biz, the stars and the films – and it is often vulnerable in each. I have never attended a Berlinale when it has failed in […]

A decade-long honeymoon is over for the Sundance Film Festival. After a dizzying climb to the top echelon of world film festivals, the event came under withering criticism this year. Post-mortem articles cloaked in outrage appeared around the world. Most critics rightly scorned sub-standard screening facilities, but others took aim at this year’s film crop and the changing essence of the Festival itself. The Sundance Institute, created in 1981, and the Film Festival, in 1985, were designed to “enhance the artistic vitality of American film.” This mission statement often meant supporting films in the Cassavetes’ tradition, films made with minimal […]

The strapless celebutante, doused in an atom­ic shower of paparazzi flash, scales a palatial stairway with her impossible heels and perfect smile. At the summit, she joins her seventh husband, a vaunted master of European cine­ma sporting an ill-fitting tuxedo. He is fondly recalling an afternoon extolling the virtues of a since-denounced Communist film bureaucrat to an enraptured Van Nuys-based creator of erotic thrillers, himself bankrupted by the two watery cappuccinos just purchased from a surly waiter who undoubtedly will have better seats than any of them for tonight’s film. All four have great tans. An, hypocrisy, cash and glamour; […]

This article is part of Filmmaker’s Sundance 2007 Special Coverage. GRACELAND. Anocha Suwichakornpong, known by her friends as Mai, is at home on a film set. Case in point: while most filmmakers would kill to watch their film screen in front of a Sundance audience, Mai is on the other side of the world, shooting her next short film, Days and Days and Days and Days. But then, can you blame her? Graceland, Suwichakornpong’s film about an Elvis impersonator who travels from Bangkok into the countryside with a mysterious stranger, boasts much of the top talent in Thailand, including editor […]