Filmmaker Videos
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Guinevere Turner and Rose Troche Interview Jenni Olson about Writing, Archival and the Sundance-bound The Royal Road
At this past summer’s Frameline festival, where their Go Fish received its 20th Anniversary Screening, actress and writer Guinevere Turner and director Rose Troche interview filmmaker Jenni Olson about her Sundance-bound documentary, The Royal Road. Topics include Olson’s influences (including Chantal Akerman, James and Sadie Benning), archival documentary practice, urban landscapes and shooting on 16mm film. Check it out above.
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A Best Cinematography of 2014 Supercut
Here’s an elegant and understated supercut from Jacob T. Swinney, scored with a meditative cue by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Alongside some of the big Hollywood titles — Interstellar, Godzilla — are a number of indies and foreign films like Blue Ruin, Ida and White Bird in a Blizzard. Check it out.
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Watch: Sean Price Williams’ Frantic Fran’s Jewish Stuff
Last week, Robert Greene posted a “virtually unseen” mid-length documentary, shot and edited by Sean Price Williams in 1998, entitled Frantic Fran’s Jewish Stuff. Three years before the cinematographer’s first official credit, and nine years before his quasi-breakthrough with Frownland, the 16mm film presages the close-ups and striking compositions that earned Williams some of the best notices of his career with this year’s Listen Up Philip. And it’s pretty entertaining, as well.
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Short Film: Bernardo Britto’s Yearbook
Last week, Scott posted Dustin Guy Defa’s Person to Person, one of the first short films to be featured on The New Yorker‘s new shorts catalogue. Another 25 New Face, Bernardo Britto, has now joined the site with his Sundance Jury Prize-winning Yearbook. The animated film imagines a man who has been tasked with cataloguing the world’s history before an alien-sent missile destroys earth. It’s poignant, funny and quietly heartbreaking in equal measure.
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Watch: “Getting Stoned with Caveh,” with Guest Alex Karpovsky
You may recall that a decade ago, the ever-independent-minded Caveh Zahedi (A Little Stiff, I Am a Sex Addict) tried to launch a series, “Tripping with Caveh,” in which he and a guest would take hallucinogens and enjoy themselves. That didn’t pan out, for reasons Zahedi explains in this essay, so now he’s launched a lower-stakes version. You can get stoned with Caveh or not, and in this first installment Girls regular/Red Flag director Alex Karpovsky chooses to indulge. Not without a little prodding: “OK, so I’m gonna start getting stoned,” Zahedi says up top. “Maybe I’ll just wait a […]
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Borscht Short Film: Sea Devil, Directed by Dean C. Marcial and Brett Potter
As Borscht 9 — Miami’s delirious cinematic fete comprising afternoons spent in the middle of the ocean, machete fencing and bike rides to the multiverse — hits its midpoint, Borscht Corporation releases to Filmmaker one of its recent short films, Sea Devil. Sea Devil, directed by by Dean C. Marcial and Brett Potter of Calavera Films, was screened in work-in-progress form at Borscht 8 and now it’s having its online premiere here on the site. Winner of the Bronze Audience Award at Fantasia 2014, Sea Devil is the story of a fisherman smuggling Cuban immigrants into Miami, a mysterious stranger […]
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Trailer Watch: Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
Here’s the first trailer for the Zellner Brothers’ wonderfully idiosyncratic Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter. The one minute snippet goes a little out of its way to not reveal the narrative catalyst, conjuring a vague aura of suspense, though the film itself is far from your average adventure drama. Breaking your heart with a nearly silent performance, Rinko Kikuchi stars as the titular character who fleas her banal Tokyo confines in search of snowbound, stateside treasure. Amplify will release the film on March 13.
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Short Film: I Love You So Much by Leah Shore
“To try to write love is to confront the muck of language; that region of hysteria where language is both too much and too little, excessive (by the limitless expansion of the ego, by emotive submersion) and impoverished (by the codes on which love diminishes and levels it).” Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse. The muck of romantic language — spoken, inscribed on the body and splattered, along with images, on the screen — is the subject of Leah Shore’s latest short film, I Love You So Much. Shore made our 25 New Faces list back in ’13, and I Love […]
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Trailer Watch: Peter Strickland’s The Duke of Burgundy
One of my would-be favorites of 2014 — it comes out next month — finally has a trailer. The Duke of Burgundy, Peter Strickland’s follow-up to the giallo homage Berberian Sound Studio, displays some of the best uses of repetition since Jacques Rivette. What begins as a fetishistic case of master and servant becomes increasingly murky as roles and hierarchy are blurred, then challenged. It’s a viewing experience that handily rewards the uninitiated so I won’t say much more, just that Sundance Selects will release it on January 23, and you’d do best to see it on a wide screen with surround sound.
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Trailer Watch: Paul Harrill’s Something, Anything
Best not to spoil the twists and turns of Paul Harrill’s Something, Anything, and the trailer for his drama is accordingly cagey. All you need to know: Harrill’s well-received debut drama follows a newlywed bride in the wake of tragedy as she tries to rebuild her life through a program of ascetism. The next film in IFP’s “Screen Forward” series starts screening January 9th; more information here. For a little more background, check out the essay Harrill wrote for us last year.
