Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: Ari Folman’s The Congress
Ari Folman’s excellent animated doc Waltz with Bashir was a hit at Cannes five years ago, and the Israeli director’s back on the Croisette this year with The Congress. The first trailer just hit and it looks like as bold and inventive a film as one would expect from Folman, a mixture of Body Mind Change Labs and Charlie Kaufman, but with animation in there too. I’m very interested to learn more once it premieres.
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David Foster Wallace’s This is Water Turns Viral Video
The L.A.-based production house The Glossary created this homage to writer David Foster Wallace, condensing and illustrating his celebrated Kenyon College commencement speech into nine or so minutes — and scoring over two million YouTube views in the process. Comprised of director Matthew Freidell and producers Allison Freidell and Jeremy Dunning, producer, The Glossary self-funded this video without obtaining rights to Wallace’s audio. In an interview with Ad Week, the trio describe the video as “a passion project” and say that “sometimes it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” And while the video was prompted by Matthew’s love of […]
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Sun Don’t Shine Director Amy Seimetz on the Casey Anthony Trial
Sun Don’t Shine, Amy Seimetz’s sun-blasted neo-noir opening today in New York at Cinema Village, stars Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley as a couple, Crystal and Leo, on the run in steamy, sweaty Florida. Leo loves Crystal, and he’s not going to let the body in the trunk of their car get between them. Shot strikingly with a rough-hewn style by Jay Keitel and anchored by two powerful performances, the film owes as much to Barbara Loden’s seminal Wanda as it does to noir classics like They Live By Night. Sun Don’t Shine is acutely aware of the ways […]
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The Making of The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Courtesy of our friends at IFC Films, Filmmaker has posted a short documentary about The Reluctant Fundamentalist on our YouTube page. The film, which opens tomorrow in NYC and LA, tells the story of Changez (Riz Ahmed), a Pakistani man whose life in America was inexorably altered by 9/11. At the time of the World Trade Center attacks, Changez was a fresh Princeton grad seeking his fortune on Wall Street and, with his American girlfriend Erica (Kate Hudson) at his side, the American Dream seemed imminent. But following the attacks, a cultural divide opens between the couple and Changez’s life turns for […]
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Breaking the Fourth Wall Supercut
I couldn’t make it through House of Cards for one reason: Kevin Spacey’s asides to me, the viewer. Yes, I know it’s from Richard III. But I still found the device insufferable. But it’s hardly something that’s never been done before. There’s plenty of good instances of breaking the fourth wall in films, and many of them — as well as some not-so-good examples — are included in filmmaker Leigh Singer’s supercut, posted above. Writes Singer: A compilation of scenes and moments from films that all “break the fourth wall” – that is, acknowledge (usually directly to the camera, and […]
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Now Online: Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer’s Insane Adventures of Christopher Bosh in the Multiverse!
The product of the brilliantly inventive and mischievous minds of 2012 “25 New Faces” Lucas Leyva and Jillian Mayer, the animated intergalactic basketball fantasia Adventures of Christopher Bosh in the Multiverse! premiered last December at the Borscht Film Festival. The movie played at the Miami event run by Leyva and Mayer despite the pair having received letters from the NBA and Miami Heat player Bosh — played in the film by another 2012 “New Face,” Terence Nance — demanding the film be suppressed due to “an infringement of [Bosh’s] publicity rights, privacy rights, and common law trademark rights.” Now, wonderfully, the film […]
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Trailer Watch: Jono Oliver’s Home: ___
Last year Jono Oliver’s Home:___ was one of our recommended projects on our curated Kickstarter page and now it’s finished and beginning to premiere on the festival circuit. At Shadow and Act, Tambay Obenson weighs in with thoughts following a screening: I attended a screening of the film at the DGA theater here in New York over the weekend, going in with really no idea of what to expect (which is rare for me), because I hadn’t seen anything of the film before then, with Gbenga, Morton, McDaniel and Whitlock being the actors in this ensemble cast whose previous work […]
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Trailer Watch: Shane Meadows’ The Stone Roses: Made of Stone
Though I’m a huge Stone Roses fan and a big admirer of Shane Meadows, for some reason I was not aware that, to celebrate the band’s return after a 20-year absence, the director of This is England had been commissioned to make a documentary about Ian Brown and co. This is the first trailer for the film, which looks like it will be both a look back at the group’s history and an intimate chronicling of its surprising resurrection. The Stone Roses: Made of Stone is out in the UK in June, but as far as I’m aware there are […]
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Vimeo Scopes out the Gear at NAB
Our friends at Vimeo passed on this short piece by Olivia Speranza shot at NAB. In just three-and-a-half minutes, she scopes out several interesting pieces of gear: The first big takeaway from this year was 4K’s continuing spread into cameras and display devices. If you haven’t heard yet, 4K is the next level in image resolution. As our hunger for pixels knows no limits, we’re seeing more cameras that can shoot at this higher image size that boasts four times the pixels of the 1080HD format. As you can imagine, 4K televisions are now being manufactured, but they remain both […]
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Antonio Campos and the Case of the Conscious Camera (A Mystery)
In a moment where American independent cinema seems to be primarily focused with character and regional setting, Antonio Campos stands in stark contrast with his peers. Concerned with intricate problems posed by framing, camera movement and editing, Campos used a formal investigation into the medium to guide him through his debut feature, Afterschool, which is a kind of materialist examination of how reality is affected by the digital representation thereof. With his latest film, Simon Killer, Campos is less concerned with a topical milieu than he is with the mental state of the troubled eponymous individual; in the process of […]
