Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: David Ehrlich’s “The 25 Best Films of 2020” Video Countdown
Always a smartly edited exercise in graphic matches, David Ehrlich’s annual countdown of the year’s best films is here to connect the dots from Ema (#25) to Time (#1) in 15 minutes.
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IFP Rebrands Itself Gotham Film & Media Institute
Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP, Filmmaker‘s publisher), announced today that it is renaming itself The Gotham Film & Media Institute, or, simply, “The Gotham.” From the IFP’s email to members: For over forty years, IFP has worked to advance the groundbreaking, enduring, challenging culture of independent film. In that time, we’ve grown from a grassroots marketplace into a year-round organization with an annual conference, awards, labs, a membership community and a mandate to support storytellers across a wider range of media. Along the way, we’ve also outgrown our brand. So to better support our mission—and an expanding role in the film […]
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Sponsored Video: Shooting Texas 6 on Canon Cinema EOS Cameras and Lenses
Follow the Strawn Greyhounds, a high school six-man football team under the direction of coach Dewaine Lee, as they attempt a three-peat for the 6-Man Football State Championship. Learn how cinematographer Jared Christopher captured this small town’s story with Canon Cinema Cameras and Lenses.
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Watch: Gaspar Noe’s Summer of ’21 for Saint Laurent
We’re still waiting here in the States to see Gaspar Noe’s previous collaboration with Saint Laurent, Lux Æterna, which premiered in Cannes in 2019, but the fashion house has just dropped a new short by the French director that’s well worth a late-night watch. Starring Charlotte Rampling and a group of models — Anok Yai, Antonia Przedpelski, Assa Baradji, Aylah Mae Peterson, Clara Deshayes, Grace Hartzel, Kim Schell, Mica Arganaraz, Miriam Sanchez, Sora Choi, and Stefania Cristian — the film begins a model’s frenzied run through crimson-lit woods at night (a not to Suspiria, perhaps, as well as Last House on […]
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Clip Premiere: Thomas Balmès Sing Me a Song
Releasing tomorrow, January 1, 2021, on digital platforms is Thomas Balmès’s Sing Me a Song, which finds the French documentarian returning to the town of Laya in Bhutan, the scene of his excellent 2014 documentary Happiness, to learn how one of its subjects, an eight-year-old monk named Peyangki who’s now a teenager, is dealing with the late arrival to his monastery of the internet and social media. Needless to say, the combination of adolescence and technology has created profound changes in Peyangki’s life — changes that provide insight into the ways in which these forms of communication have changed all […]
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Trailer Watch: Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland
The first trailer for Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, which has been scoring critic’s nods all season (it just place first in Indiewire’s critic’s poll), just dropped. Wrote Steve Dollar out of the New York Film Festival, “McDormand’s performance, which maps as much brooding interiority as it surveys Fran’s uncertain road ahead, is the unvarnished, flinty thing Oscar nominations are made of, and the mutual intensity of focus that she shares with Zhao locks in on the most minor of details. It’s a story of ‘how’ as much as ‘why,’ and the way scenes build up out of the smallest moments, glances, […]
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Trailer Watch: Eli Daughdrill’s Faith
Eli Daughdrill, who posted here in 2017 during the crowdfunding campaign for his new feature, Faith, now sees that film finished, in release, and with a new trailer. It’s a picture about faith and religion that, as Lindsey Dunn writes at 1 of My Stories, avoids the tropes of faith-based storytelling and “offers representation of a Christian in crisis in a way that feels authentic, refreshing, and uncomfortable.” Check out the trailer above and find the film on-demand through Vertical Entertainment at iTunes, Amazon Video and more.
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Trailer Watch: Lance Oppenheim’s Some Kind of Heaven
Opening in theaters and on demand January 15, 2021 from Magnolia Pictures is the debut feature from documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim, Some Kind of Heaven. Featured in Filmmaker‘s 2019 25 New Faces, Oppenheim makes documentaries that are as attuned to their subjects’ interior lives — their fears, dreams, insecurities and aspirations — as to their physical surroundings. “How fantasy informs the way people live their lives, the camera has to do the same,” he told me when I interviewed him. “The only way to get into these people’s lives and their stories is to accurately depict the headspace they are […]
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How Virtual Sets are Replacing the Green Screen
In my 25 New Face profile of Victoria Rivera, I quoted the writer/director on how, for her upcoming ocean-set feature Malpelo, she and her producer are exploring using the virtual background technology recently employed by The Mandalorian. The benefits of this technique are explained nicely in this Vox video, in which Charmaine Chan, a compositor who has worked for ILM, shows how virtual backgrounds improve upon traditional green screens in various ways, including lighting and camera movement.
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Watch: A Masked and Distanced Kronos Quartet Playing the Requiem for a Dream Theme
The pandemic has upended many film anniversary tribute plans, as well as inspired others. To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Darren Aronofsky’s iconic Hubert Selby adaptation, Requiem for a Dream, its soundtrack players, the Kronos Quartet, perform composer Clint Mansell’s now iconic theme. Of course, they’re appropriately distanced and masked. Listen here to a lovely version of a track that’s graced countless indie film mood reels in the two decades since its composition. Lionsgate has released a new 4K Blu-ray edition of the film you can read about here.
