Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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DOC NYC 2016 Short List Films
DOC NYC has announced its 2016 Short List, which has a track record of successfully predicting other awards, including the Oscars. All of the DOC NYC Short List titles will screen during the festival with the director or other special guests present for their first screening. Additionally, all the directors or other collaborators will participate on Friday, November 11 in the DOC NYC Short List Day of panel conversations. Last year, the DOC NYC Short List had ten titles overlapping the subsequent Oscar Documentary Short List, and all five titles that were Oscar nominated. For the last five years, DOC NYC screened […]
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The Indie Memphis Film Festival Unveils Film Slate for 19th Edition
The Indie Memphis Film Festival has announced the full slate of films for the 19th edition of the film festival, which runs from November 1-7. Prichard Smith’s documentary The Invaders will open the festival and Stephen John Ross’s documentary Kallen Esperian: Vissi D’Arte is the Closing Night title. World Premieres include Mike McCarthy’s Destroy Memphis, Kathy Lofton’s I Am A Caregiver, Madsen Minax’s Kairos Dirt & The Errant Vacuum, Flo Gibb’s Mentality: Girls Like Us, and Lakethen Mason’s Verge, with Jennifer Anderson and Vernon Lott’s The Act of Becoming making its U.S. Premiere. Festival favorites include Sophia Takal’s Always Shine, Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson, Ira Sachs’ Little Men, David Farrier and […]
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Five Questions for Miss Stevens Writer/Director Julia Hart
We’ve seen our fair share of films about teacher-student relationships, but they tend to fall into either the titillating or inspirational categories. Miss Stevens is neither. It’s a quiet drama which is powerful in its subtlety. The plot itself is understated, but the execution is surprisingly compelling. The set-up involves Rachel Stevens (Lily Rabe), a lonely high school teacher who reluctantly chaperones three teens – including the troubled and charismatic Billy (Timothee Chalamet) – to a drama competition. In her directorial debut, Julia Hart, who co-wrote the film with her husband Jordan Horowitz, exhibits an aptitude for working with actors. Rabe won the Best Actress […]
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My IFP Film Week Experience Part 3: The Dust Settles
By the sound of it, “languish, from the Latin “languere,” meaning loose or lax, is sexy. It’s old-timey yet coolly sexy: Monica Vitti staring down giant waves in an Antonioni film. Except when used to describe a feature or series in development, that is, when it becomes trouble. Past the giddy rendezvous of filmmakers and industry types at the 2016 IFP Film Week, “languish” is a dirty dirty word no one would touch with a 10-foot boom pole. As participants head back to the trenches and roll up their sleeves, we wonder: will the new connections lead to a walk […]
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My First Film Shoot: A Lesson in Documentary Filmmaking and Flexibility
If you need any motivation to begin production on your first-ever documentary, here’s a tip: tell thousands of people you’re making a documentary. That’s what I did when I shared the news on Filmmaker and Facebook that I was going to make my first film, a short documentary, tentatively titled Sole Doctor. Of course, I loved the enthusiastic response. But hearing, “Can’t wait to see it!” from more than 100 people sure ratchets up the pressure to deliver. With my subject nailed down and a DP and sound mixer onboard, it was time to begin production. For the first shooting day, […]
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Trailer Watch: Mifune: The Last Samurai
“Mifune’s performance is layered, complex. He studied the movement of lions. He’s like a caged animal,” says Martin Scorsese in the (above) trailer for Mifune: The Last Samurai, the new documentary about Toshiro Mifune, the greatest actor from the Golden Age of Japanese Cinema. Directed by Academy Award-nominated director Steve Okazaki and narrated by Keanu Reeves, Mifune: The Last Samurai features rare archival footage and interviews with Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Koji Yakusho as well as Mifune co-stars Kyoto Kagawa, Haruo Nakajima and Yoshio Tsuchiya. Mifune appeared in nearly 170 films, including Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Throne of Blood, and Red Bear. The film […]
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The Power of 16mm: Directors and DPs Talk at IFP Film Week
Jake Perlin opened the IFP Film Week panel on shooting 16mm or Super16mm by saying that, as Artistic and Programming Director at Metrograph Cinema, he wants to see films in the way filmmakers want to make them: true to their vision. When it came time to shoot her second feature, director Eliza Hittman went back and forth as to what to what format to shoot on. When she was in grad school, she shot three short films on 16mm and fell in love with the format’s look as well as the shooting process. She learned to shoot in an organized […]
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Why Director Joel Potrykus is Releasing His New Movie as “Pay What You Wish”
Along with the debut of a brand new trailer (above) for Joel Potrykus’ The Alchemist Cookbook, distributor Oscilloscope Laboratories has announced that the film will be released via BitTorrent Now for pay-what-you-wish on October 7th. The Alchemist Cookbook is a portrait of a Sean, a young hermit in the woods who sets out to solve an old mystery, and loses his mind along the way. Starring Ty Hickson and Amari Cheatom, the film premiered at SXSW and screened at various other festivals including BAMcinemaFest and Fantasia. Potrykus, who previously directed Ape and Buzzard, recently penned an Op-Ed about why he’s a fan […]
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The Six Fonts of Cameraperson
Much has already been written about the piercing human insight of Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson. Working with material originally shot for a dozen other films, Johnson refashions the offcuts of her two-decade career as a documentary cinematographer into a patchwork memoir — one that reveals just as much about the woman behind the camera as the individuals who pass fleetingly before its lens. The effect is emotionally exhilarating, but the approach is unabashedly formal — and less has been written about the ways in which Johnson fractionates her footage in order to create a film of clear divisions and implicit rules. […]
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Feeling Empathetic through Virtual Reality at IFP Film Week
One focus of this year’s IFP Film Week is on the future of cinema in the form of Virtual Reality. A little background for those new to it: There are currently two ways of creating immersive worlds. The first wave and most common is spherical video, where you strap a bunch of cameras all together in an outward-facing circle. This approach has the familiarity of using cameras, but the viewer can’t physically move through the space — they’re akin to a locked-off tripod with a 360 swivel head, planted in one spot as characters and the world moves around them. […]
