Filmmaker Videos
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Trailer Watch: Zach Clark’s The Becomers
At Filmmaker we’ve long been a fan of Zach Clark, director of such witty and genre (and genre-adjacent) work as Little Sister, Vacation! and White Reindeer. He always brings real style and subversive smarts to his pictures, which often apply ingenious tonal twists to familiar situations and set-ups. For his latest, The Becomers, Clark fuses an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type tale with a classic rom-com set up. Reviewing the film out of Fantasia, Erik Luers wrote: In depicting two shape-shifting entities who arrive separately on Earth searching for their misplaced mate, Clark’s film provides his Midwest cast the opportunity […]
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Watch: Rick Alverson’s Video for Alan Sparhawk’s Can U Hear
With White Rose, My God, a new album from Alan Sparhawk — his first since the passing of Mimi Parker, his partner in the band Low — scheduled to appear in September, the singer/songwriter has released its first single with a music video directed by independent filmmaker Rick Alverson (The Mountain). Alverson has pixellated Sparhawk’s face as the musician has digitally manipulated his voice in this eerie clip. Check it out above.
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Trailer Watch: Christina Kallas’s Paris is in Harlem
As I wrote when sharing an exclusive clip from the feature upon its festival premiere, Christina Kallas‘s Paris is in Harlem “takes place the night before New York’s infamous Cabaret Law was repealed. In a historic Harlem jazz bar, a shooting alters the lives of several strangers who have gathered for the final night of ‘no dancing.’” With the film premiering on digital platforms July 4, check out the new trailer above. Comments Kallas, ““As a European filmmaker making films in America, I’m somewhat obsessed with guns ending up in the wrong hands. In Paris is in Harlem, I am […]
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Watch: Lynne Sachs’s Short Barbara Hammer Film, A Month of Single Frames
From our colleagues at Psyche comes a beautiful short film by Lynne Sachs that is a decades-long collaboration with the late pioneering feminist filmmaker Barbara Hammer. From the Psyche writeup: In 1998, the pioneering US feminist artist Barbara Hammer (1939-2019) spent a month at an artist residency in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Feeling “compelled to do absolutely nothing” while living in a dune shack without running water or electricity, Hammer documented her solitude with a journal, a tape recorder and a 16mm film camera. For decades, these materials remained in her personal archive, until, as Hammer was nearing the end of […]
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Trailer Watch: Lance Oppenheim’s HBO Documentary Series, Ren Faire
Lance Oppenheim, a 2019 25 New Face who is something of a non-fiction poet laureate of contemporary loneliness, oddball institutional rituals, and the ways in which fantasy and reality commingle in American life, premieres his latest documentary series, Ren Faire, tonight on HBO. Produced by Elara Pictures, with executive producers including Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie and Ronnie Bronstein, the three-part series tells a Succession-like drama involving an aging “king,” George Coulam, in the midst of deciding which of his employees will take over his sprawling and lucrative Texas-based Renaissance theme park. The series follows Oppenheim’s excellent Spermworld, for which the […]
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Trailer Watch: Sarah Friedland’s Movement Exercises Trilogy
Sarah Friedland made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list last year as her she finished her Movement Exercises trilogy of short films and was completing production on her debut feature, Familiar Touch. Now, as Familiar Touch finishes post, Video Data Bank is streaming Movement Exercises for free on its website until June 11. From my 25 New Face profile: Realized from 2017 to 2022, Friedland’s Movement Exercises Trilogy consists of three short films exploring the ways in which movement contextualized within specific settings encodes personal, social and political meanings. The first of the trilogy, Home Exercises, depicts older adults navigating the […]
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Watch: An Exclusive Clip from Alison O’Daniel’s Independent Lens Premiere, The Tuba Thieves
Artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel appeared on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2019 as her feature The Tuba Thieves, screening next week on Independent Lens, moved from stop-and-start production — she had been shooting the film in “bits and pieces” since 2013 — to a finishing sprint. Inspired by a news story about a rash of tuba thefts from Los Angeles marching bands, the film is an impressive and wholly original expansion of O’Daniel’s overall project. As I wrote in the 25 New Face piece, “Sound — as subject matter, metaphor, and structuralist organizing principle — is at the […]
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Trailer Watch: 25 New Face Filmmaker John Rosman’s New Life
Newly released is the first trailer for the thriller, New Life, the directing debut of Emmy-award-winning journalist John Rosman. Rosman was one of Filmmaker‘s 2023 25 New Faces, selected on the basis of this film, which Erik Luers described thusly: “A tale of two women—one being chased, the other a fixer doing the chasing—New Life is a pandemic-era horror film that rewards its audience with gory twists and a surprisingly heartfelt center.” One of the film’s two lead characters faces ALS, a subject Rosman covered for PBS while a journalist. Of the journey of his Fantasia-premiering film’s characters, Rosman said, “One […]
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Watch: Devan Scott’s Video Essay, “Why Are Movies So Dark?”
Accompanying his debut article in Filmmaker’s print edition, “Did You See (and Hear) That?),” Devan Scott posts today a video essay, “Why Are Movies So Dark?”, that provides visual backup for his points. “Contemporary visuals are commonly diagnosed as dark,’ ‘underexposed’ or ‘underlit’. In actuality, they describe an array of phenomena, many of them widely misunderstood,” he writes. “The most common charge, dim,’ is often used interchangeably with ‘underlit.’ Tools are frequently blamed; ‘the digital look’ is as much an accusation of modern equipment as an assessment of its apparent effects.” Watch Scott’s new video above.
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Trailer Watch: Small Town Universe, Director Katie Dellamaggiore’s Astronomy Documentary
In advance of its premiere April 7 at the Cleveland International Film Festival (and, the next day, North America’s solar eclipse), the filmmakers have shared a trailer for Katie Dellamaggiore’s documentary, Small Town Universe. The documentary explores Green Bank, West Virginia, home to the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope. While the telescope explores the universe for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, the town’s residents communicate in more traditional ways; in order for the telescope to function, wi-fi and cell phones are banned in the town. “Within the telescope’s orbit, Green Bank residents experience defining moments of life and loss and […]
