Filmmaker Videos
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Watch: Erin Sanger’s Short Film, Mutt
Erin Sanger’s excellent SXSW-premiering short, Mutt, is online, and it’s this week’s Short of the Week. The site’s Jason Sondhi gets at what’s great about this film in his write-up, particularly citing its original way of exploring what can often seem like familiar territory — the family addiction drama: The more times I watch Mutt, the more I’m convinced that it is one of the best short film scripts I’ve ever encountered. Even as I first formulated this impression however I remember finding it odd—the dialogue in the film isn’t especially sparkling, nor is the plot overly intricate. There are […]
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Watch: Seduced by Jesus
A few months ago we shared Anthony Simon’s Pure Flix and Chill, a found footage biography of the Christian movie company’s founder David A.R. White in his own unreliable words. Now we’re pleased to share Simon’s latest Christian found footage work, which is very funny and unsettlingly indelible. Writes Simon, this is “A re-edit of the straight-to-video Christian series The Perfect Stranger, written, directed by and starring Jefferson Moore. In each original episode, Moore seeks out a vulnerable stranger and proceeds to convince them he’s Jesus. Seduced by Jesus functions as a pick-up-artist parody, fueled by the creepy conceit of the […]
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Trailer Watch: Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk
What a beautiful trailer! Filmmaker‘s #1 most anticipated movie of the year — Barry Jenkins’s follow-up to his his Oscar-winning Moonlight — has just dropped its first, a few weeks before the picture’s Venice premiere. The intimacy, the focus on faces, the dance of eyelines, the lovely burnished period mise en scene — I love this trailer’s whole style and vibe. Check out above the first images from Jenkins’s adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk.
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Trailer Watch: Ricky D’Ambrose’s Notes On An Appearance
We’re pleased to host the online launch of the trailer for Ricky D’Ambrose’s first feature film, Notes On An Appearance. D’Ambrose was one of our 25 New Faces of Film last year; writing about his film—a tersely evocative look at a young man’s sudden disappearance, and its effect (or lack thereof) on his friends—at this year’s New Directors/New Films, I noted that “consistently clipped editing keeps the tone fluid: humor is in the cuts, and the film is never needlessly dour, deliberately refusing to dutifully find its way to a neatly summarizable Statement About The Zeitgeist.” The film begins a theatrical […]
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Watch: Previously Unseen Behind-The-Scenes The Shining Footage, Including a Kubrick Interview
In the last few days, previously unbroadcast raw footage of a visit to the post-production facilities of The Shining has popped up online. It totals 84 minutes, although the YouTube uploader has helpfully provided a full chapter breakdown. For a tour of the studio sound stages, skip to 12:16; for a tour of Kubrick’s equipment room, skip to 27″20, and for a telephone interview with Kubrick (where he offers an interpretation of the ending of 2001!), skip to 45:24. Hat-tip to MUBI for the catch.
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Music Video Watch: “I-95,” by Jamie Block, Directed by Onur Tukel
New York independent filmmaker Onur Tukel, whose work we have covered quite a bit at Filmmaker, has directed a music video of a song by the anti-folk singer Jamie Block. It’s a small-scale city symphony that speaks to our compulsion to distract ourselves when in the most public of spaces. Block’s new record comes out tomorrow, and, as a preview, the folks at sonaBLAST! Records have sent it along with this press statement: Jamie Block is a New York City based singer-songwriter who is known for his ramshackle, genre bending music. In the 1990’s, he busked, skylarked, and chain smoked […]
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Trailer Watch: Panos Cosmatos’s Mandy
For once the words “visionary director” on a trailer are not a misnomer. From Panos Cosmatos, who made our 25 New Faces list back in 2011, comes the first trailer for his ’80s-set revenge drama Mandy, starring Nicolas Cage and Andrea Riseborough. I can’t overemphasize how much I love this film. There are scenes in it that are beautifully, meaningfully lodged in my memory. Just watch now.
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Why I Spent Months Making An Archival Documentary about The Slenderman
When I was thirteen years old I spent a good deal of my free time posting on an online message board dedicated to Wes Craven’s Scream film series. I was a nerdy, creative kid stuck in suburbia, and I’d stay up late on my parents’ basement desktop computer writing long, elaborate, I’m-sure-illegible fan fiction stories to post on the message board. This was a subculture on the forum: users would regularly post their own fictional horror stories (some inspired by the Scream movies, some original). The stories would often feature the characters from Scream mixed with new characters inspired by […]
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Watch (?): Donald Trump’s “Action-Movie Style Trailer,” Shown to Kim Jong-un, Ostensibly For Diplomatic Purposes
I have written before about the remarkably shoddy aesthetics of the videos put out by Team Trump, and I’m not the only one to have noticed: last year, over at The Outline, Tolulope Edionwe wrote a sharp post about “the iMovie president.” The whole post is worth reading, but this assessment rings particularly true: “This has become a pattern for Trump: poorly-edited digital content in which serious and significant subjects are given bad color treatments, low resolution, and carelessly incorrect accoutrements.” In the Ernest Goes to Pyongyang reality which we are on course to enter shortly, our lawfully elected president (or whatever) […]
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Wearing a Sandwich Board to Promote Your Movie: Tips from Bernard and Huey Director Dan Mirvish
There are two types of filmmakers: those who will stand on a street corner wearing a sandwich board to promote their movies, and those who will not. Dan Mirvish is fearlessly in the former category, as evidenced by this video, which finds the Bernard and Huey writer, director and Slamdance co-founder outside the Laemmle Monica hustling passersby to come and see his movie this weekend (and also be passersby in a video about promoting via a sandwich board). Writes Mirvish in an email about promoting via sandwich board: It has some historical context: 22 years ago, I wore a similar […]
