Filmmaker Videos
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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 […]
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Watch: Falz the Bad Guy’s Childish Gambino Riff, This is Nigeria
Back in 2002, Filmmaker covered Nigeria’s “Nollywood” film scene, which producer Jeremy Nathan wrote, could be compared to the American no-budget movement of the ’80s and ’90s with its inventive, low-cost non-industry production models. Nollywood would go on to receive much international press over the years, with articles describing the interplay between Hollywood hits and the Nigerian variants they would inspire. The latest noteworthy example is actually not a movie or TV show but a music video. Nigerian rapper Falz the Bad Guy, a former lawyer, has released a riff on Childish Gambino’s This is America, in which the song […]
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Watch: Charlie Lyne’s Pizzagate Meditation Personal Truth
We’re pleased to be hosting the online launch of Charlie Lyne’s new short Personal Truth, which premiered last year at IDFA. The Field of Vision short builds on the digressive, zig-zag first-person narrative style of Lyne’s earlier short Copycat, this time looking into Pizzagate, the conspiracy theory involving John Podesta running a child sex ring out of a DC pizza parlor. Whether he likes it or not, Lyne sees a bit of himself in Maddison Welch, the man who shot up Comet Ping Pong in an attempt to liberate the kidnapped children he was sure were being held there. Before he was cos-playing […]
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Trailer Watch: Kyle Henry’s Rogers Park
A slightly belated posting here to recognize 25 New Face filmmaker Kyle Henry’s latest feature, the Chicago-set relationship drama Rogers Park, which is extended at Cinema Village through this coming Thursday, May 10. After theatrical openings in New York and L.A., the film has cemented a rare 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Glenn Kenny writing in the New York Times, “The superb actors, given opportunities to go for broke, make each one count, and make the movie worth watching.” Henry has been in the independent trenches for nearly two decades, with features including the superb psychological drama Room and […]
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Watch: Laura Moss’s Fry Day
New York-based director and production designer Laura Moss landed on Filmmaker’s 25 New Face list this past year on the strength of Fry Day, her entirely exemplary short film about a teenage girl selling Polaroid photos on the eve of serial killer Ted Bundy’s execution. With this macabre event as a backdrop, Moss goes on to create, as I wrote in the profile, “a nail-bitingly tense, mournfully sad coming-of-age adventure.” I went on to write: That Fry Day uses the disquieting atmospherics and moral turbulence of the serial killer genre without indulging in gratuitous physical violence is a testament to […]
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“Take Me Back to That Day, If You Could”: Errol Morris’s Wrenching Distracted Driving Shorts
Errol Morris brings the full force of his filmmaking to a pair of PSAs he’s made as part of AT&T’s “It Can Wait” campaign, which raises awareness about distracted driving. Those who’ve seen his recent work, especially his Netflix six-part film, Wormwood, will recognize a number of stylistic devices here, including multi-angle talking heads material, unusual photo crops, and, of course, Morris’s pertinently shouted off-screen questions. But the films, particularly the devastating “Forrest’s Story,” go further than the usual PSA, exploring, in addition to Morris’s usual epistemological inquiry, the different forms of grief and the enduring mysteries of loss. The […]
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Watch: Zodiac‘s Commitment to Historical Accuracy
David Fincher is notoriously detail-oriented, but this video from the Film Radar account argues that Zodiac goes above and beyond in this respect. To make the point, this video examines two of the murders recreated in the film, juxtaposing the filmed version with testimony of survivors, emergency line recordings and other archival/interview materials. Warning: contains both spoilers and stabbings.’
