Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Behind-the-Scenes Clip Showing Tribeca Premiere Life Rendered‘s Use of Unreal Engine
Premiering at Tribeca, Emma Needell’s short film Life Rendered tells the story of a closeted gay Colorado man who lives on a ranch, where he takes care of his aging cowboy father while seeking romance in the virtual world. Set in the near future, the short draws inspiration from the director’s own childhood. “I explored the depths of the internet long before I ever saw a major city,” Needell says. “When I turned seven, my parents built a solar-powered cattle ranch in Colorado. The county was as rural as it gets, where everyone participated in the rodeo on Saturday and […]
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Trailer Watch: Tzvi Friedman’s Man
In my print issue article (now online) on two ultra-low-budget filmmakers, I described Tzvi Friedman’s Man as an “an eerily austere New York-set serial killer drama with a (possible) science-fiction twist and impressive formal control.” As the film finishes post-production and begins submitting to festivals, Friedman, who is making his feature debut with Man, has sent Filmmaker an early teaser from the film that aptly showcases its depiction of dread-filled urban anomie and assured tone. As I write in my piece, “The film was inspired when Friedman was locked out of a Brooklyn apartment where he was sleeping and wound […]
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Watch: Jim Jarmusch’s Video for Cat Power, “A Pair of Brown Eyes”
Jim Jarmusch has directed a new video for Cat Power’s excellent new album, Covers, a clip for the Pogues-penned “A Pair of Brown Eyes.” “As someone who deeply loves Cat Power’s music, getting to collaborate with Chan on this video was like a dream come true,” said Jarmusch in a press release. “She’s so inspiring to me, of course as an artist, but she’s also just such an extraordinary person.” Check it out above.
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Trailer Watch: Gaspar Noe’s Vortex
As I’m editing my print-edition interview with Gaspar Noe about his new feature, Vortex (to my mind, at this moment, his best film), this new trailer from Utopia is a nice refresher. From the Francoise Hardy soundtrack to the Edgar Allen Poe-quoting tagline to the consoling gesture rendered uncanny by Noe’s split screen, this trailer captures the film’s melancholy heartbreak and unsentimental philosophy. The film is an astringent yet not uncompassionate look at the final days of two aging leftists, a married couple played by director Dario Argento (portraying a film critic, which Argento once was) and actress Francoise Lebrun […]
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Watch: MoMI’s Trailer for the 2022 First Look Festival
With the 2022 edition of Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look festival beginning on Wednesday, the series has just dropped a trailer — a brisk 1-minute+ showing the range of this year’s selections. The First Look schedule now includes a number of recently announced additions, including a screening of Jenny Perlin’s documentary Bunker followed by a discussion with the film’s producer, the well-known critic A.S. Hamrah; Deniz Tortum and Kathryn Hamilton’s single-channel video installation Our Ark (now viewable in the gallery); and Charlie Shackleton’s single-viewer VR experience As Mine Exactly. Also, there are a number of films in the program from […]
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Watch: Jamie Stuart’s Tale of Cat Love and Loss, The Love Battery
Jamie Stuart’s cat SK, who accompanied him through a chunk of adulthood spanning New York to LA, passed away recently. Stuart’s new short, The Love Battery is an account of that passing, a tribute as well as introduction to his next pet chapter. From Stuart’s program notes: Cats. Love and loss. I made this as a crew of one over the past two months. Initially, I’d planned it as a tribute to my recently deceased cat SK — but then the story took a turn… This is NOT a documentary. It is a dramatic reenactment — that includes real live […]
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Watch: DuArt: History of Independent Film
With the recent passing of DuArt Film Laboratories Chairman Irwin Young, we’re posting this video kindly flagged to us by David Leitner, whose one of those on-screen detailing the history of DuArt — everything from its role as a technical innovator to the support it gave to the New York independent community. A panel discussion hosted by the Post New York Alliance in December, 2021, the video features in addition to Leitner former DuArt employees Dominic Rom (Goldcrest), Tim Spitzer (Jigsaw Productions), Bob Mastronardi (Kodak) and Jane Tolmachyov (Goldcrest). A bonus is a short video at the end about Young […]
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Watch: Exclusive Clip from Christina Kallas’s Slamdance-Premiering Paris is in Harlem
Set in 2017, Christina Kallas‘s Slamdance-premiering latest feature, 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.” The filmmaker has provided Filmmaker an exclusive clip, which you can watch above. XYZ Films is handling North American sales on the film.
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Trailer Watch: Slamdance-Premiering Coming-of-Age Horror Picture, Honeycomb
“Lord of the Flies meets The Breakfast Club” is how 21-year-old director Avalon Fast’s Honeycomb is described. The logline: “Five small-town girls abandon their mundane lives and move into an abandoned cabin. Growing increasingly isolated, their world becomes filled with imagined rituals and rules but the events of one summer night threaten to abruptly end their age of innocence forever.” With K.J.Relth Miller of Slamdance calling the film “a lo-fi achievement that perfectly encapsulates the Slamdance spirit,” the film will premiere at the virtual festival January 27. Check out the film’s first teaser above.
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Trailer Watch: Ricky D’Ambrose’s The Cathedral
Following its premiere at last year’s Venice Film Festival, The Cathedral, the sophomore feature by Ricky D’Ambrose (a 25 New Face of Film in 2017), makes its US premiere at this year’s Sundance. We’re pleased to share the first trailer for the film, an assured, highly compressed yet emotionally impactful portrait of a young man’s upbringing from early ‘80s childhood to late ‘10s college. D’Ambrose’s coming-of-age story boasts David Lowery as an executive producer. The film’s Sundance page is here, and D’Ambrose’s essay about acting as his own graphic designer is here.
