Online video’s come a long way in the seven-and-a-half years since the launch of YouTube, but it’s no secret that the landscape’s still constantly changing for filmmakers, both independents and studios. The big question, still, is how to best monetize online viewing, as a few recent developments have illustrated. Karin Chien has a great piece in the current issue of Filmmaker (available for subscribers here) about how some YouTube stars have built up massive audiences that have, in turn, supported them financially and empowered them to deal with Hollywood on favorable terms. But we all know that going viral can […]
So, I am in Amsterdam, attending my first IDFA, a fest I’ve been dreaming of attending since I first started working in documentary. IFP has 11 films in the fest, and four works in progress in the Forum, so I’m here for moral support, promotion of IFP, and reconnaissance. What is happening in documentary in the rest of the world? In advance of my arrival, I was most anticipating being a part of the Forum, “IDFA’s international co-financing and production market, Europe’s most important breeding ground for new documentary work.” The Forum presents works in progress to the international funding […]
The central metaphor of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, as I remember it, is the university; she talks about the vast number of people who participate in its creation – from those who fund & design it to those who actually build it – the result of which is a single (male) student being able to sit and write. Woolf’s point is to illuminate the gendered nature of the systems and structures on which scholarship is built, but the scale of resources that go into the screening of any one film – especially one overseas, in the context […]
A couple of weeks ago we selected Stephen Elliott’s Happy Baby for our curated Kickstarter page, and since then he’s been adding a number of provocative awards to the campaign. The most interesting was added today: for $6,000, Elliott will transfer to you his relationship with the actor and director James Franco, who starred in his feature About Cherry and owns the rights to his novel The Adderall Diaries. Muses Elliott, “What does that mean?” “I’m not really sure,” he continues. “I can’t promise anything from James, but I’ll send you a notarized document transferring full ownership.” Memorializing and transferring […]
The following is a guest blog post from the makers of American Commune, which is currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to cover post-production costs. — SM When my sister and I started making our documentary about growing up on America’s largest commune, we honestly didn’t intend for it to be a personal story. At the time, we were both working as directors at MTV in New York City and none of our friends or colleagues had the slightest clue we were born on a commune called The Farm. We had left as kids in the 1980s when […]
Nearly 10 years in the making, Habibi is the semi-autobiographical first feature from 2010 “25 New Face” Susan Youssef, a tale of forbidden love between two Palestinian students who find it impossible for their affection to overcome the rigid conventions of class in Palestinian life and Israel’s ironclad security regime. With Israelis and Palestinians again in actively violent conflict, the film couldn’t be more newsworthy, but Youssef’s low-budget aesthetic ingenuity (she couldn’t shoot in Gaza, but faked it admirably) and a remarkable performance from Maisa Abd Elhadi, as the young woman at the center of multiple circles of conflict (family […]
“Let’s start before we kill the term,” joked Jakob Hogel during the opening moments of “The Future of Hybrid Films,” a panel that took place last week at Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX. Preempting musty debate about the so-called hybrid genre, where various forms — usually documentary and fiction — are combined in single works, Hogel said, “We should be beyond the point of whether hybrid films exist, are dubious or morally wrong. They exist and who cares?” Hogel’s dismissal of hybrid handwringing doesn’t mean that the issues posed by such films aren’t being debated in the film industry. It’s just these debates […]
The US in Progress market begins tomorrow. I fly to Wroclaw, Poland, in a few hours. Translation: I am frantically packing, burning DVDs, and researching European distribution companies. An Introduction: I’m a longtime film worker and first-time filmmaker. I’m in the final stages of finishing my first feature. I’m 33 years old, I have two daughters, and I live in central Pennsylvania. For over 12 years I have been a full-time alchemist attempting to fuse well-rounded family life with a career in film. This is an uncertain science and the results have been inconclusive. But A Song Still Inside, my […]
Author Stephen Elliott (The Adderall Diaries) founded the culture website The Rumpus and recently directed his first feature, About Cherry. He’s launched a Kickstarter campaign for his second, Happy Baby, an adaptation of his 2004 autobiographical novel. The below is excerpted from Elliott’s Daily Rumpus newsletter, which, as a newsletter writer myself, I highly recommend. — SM Someone asked yesterday why I was doing a Kickstarter for my movie. He said he would donate $5, he doesn’t have very much money (which is fine), but he wanted to know why I needed you (he said, “Why do you need us?”). […]
Ingrid Jungermann was selected by Filmmaker as part of this year’s crop of “25 New Faces of Independent Film” along with her comedic cohort from The Slope, Desiree Akhavan. After chronicling the relationship between two “superficial, homophobic lesbians” in The Slope, Jungermann is striking out on her own with a new web series, F to 7th — currently in the final stages of its fundraising campaign on Kickstarter — in which the same “Ingrid” character reappears, now looking for her place in the world. Filmmaker briefly chatted with Jungermann about her upcoming show, going solo and lessons learned from The Slope. Filmmaker: Tell us about F to […]