Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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MacArthur Foundation to Cease Supporting Individual Documentary Film Projects
The MacArthur Foundation, which has supported over 300 documentary films since the mid-1980s, is ceasing grant support for individual documentary film projects. In a change announced on its website, MacArthur writes that it will actually increase its overall support for the documentary field but will do so by supporting partner organizations, many of whom have individual granting programs. Indeed, the announcement redirects filmmakers to POV, Firelight Media, ITVS, Sundance Documentary Fund and Tribeca Film Institute. In the post, MacArthur cites the more expansive work done by these partner organizations, which includes mentorship, editorial advice and audience engagement. From the site: […]
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Two From Rendez-Vous with French Cinema: Valley of Love and Story of Judas
Greeted with predominantly mixed-to-negative reviews at Cannes, Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love — tonight’s Opening Night selection of this year’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema — hit me so strongly I had to read up afterwards. Whatever the obvious problems with this movie may be didn’t register with me, so reading the notices helped. This isn’t a case of non-arthouse-friendly viewers finding a movie too slow and boring, but there are, I suppose, some obvious hurdles with this film. It starts as naturalism and unexpectedly keeps left-turning into mysticism, turns too jarring and ill-fitting for some (but, by definition, can’t movies turn […]
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No More Parties in LA: Knight of Cups
Here’s a snatch of dialogue I never thought I’d hear in a Terrence Malick movie: “My life is like playing Call of Duty on easy. I just walk around fucking shit up.” A good line: punchy, funny, mining comedy from an unexpected analogy, profanely concise and self-aware. It is also exactly the kind of thing you’d never expect to hear in a latter-day Malick film, where dialogue is nearly forbidden and vocal self-expression confined to vaporous voiceover. Malick began as a screenwriter for hire, and in Badlands (and only there) he displayed a great gift for laconic humor. For whatever reason (and it’s […]
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Learning by Making with Abbas Kiarostami
Lucid Dreaming. Alchemy. These are two unlikely explanations to consider for what I’m still not sure ever could have happened. As one of 52 filmmakers invited to participate in the Taller de filmando en Cuba con Abbas Kiarostami, I am not alone in describing the workshop as being similar to a somnambulistic experience. We bore witness to unexpected swathes of time that, along with illuminating encounters, metamorphosed into stories seemingly cut from the ethereal sun-drenched humidity and slow pace of our environs. A welcome retreat for both visitors and filmmakers alike, the Escuela de Cine y Television sits atop a […]
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“I Want to Know about You, and I Want Us to be Friends”: Documentary Filmmaker Iva Radivojevic on She Does Podcast
Iva Radivojevic is a documentary director and editor. She was born in Yugoslavia, raised in Cyprus and has lived in New York City since she was 18 years old. Much of her work explores belonging, and draws from poetry and personal experience. Her debut feature, Evaporating Borders, examines migration, tolerance and identity through the experience of asylum seekers in Cyprus. The film has received awards worldwide and was nominated for an International Documentary Association (IDA) Award and a Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight Award and screened over 80 times at festivals, including SXSW, Human Rights Watch FF, Rotterdam IFF, DokuFest and […]
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Graphic Textuality: Manoel de Oliveira’s Tetralogy of Frustrated Love
Regardless of what I’m about to say (which is basically that I loved Benilde but the other films in this series not so much), Lincoln Center’s four-day mini-series on Manoel de Oliveira is a major and welcome event. de Oliveira has long been feted by arthouse fiends as one of cinema’s untouchable masters and most rigorous thinkers, but seeing his work is not easy. The prints Lincoln Center is showing are impeccable and gorgeous; if you’re going to dive in, this is the way to do it. I don’t know who coined the phrase “tetralogy of frustrated love,” but the movies — 1972’s Past […]
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“Treat Me Like a Man”: K8 Hardy on Outfitumentary
“I wanna be where the boys are…” sings K8 Hardy as she makes her way to the final TigerPro discussion at the 2016 Rotterdam International Film Festival. She’s a panelist in a 90-minute panel discussion, “Commodifying the Queer,” and her attitude walking in is guarded. “Lately, my perspective is just, you know, treat me like a man,” she sighs before the panel begins. Gender, feminism, queerness, and identity are all subjects in Hardy’s work as an artist and filmmaker, but being “called upon as the radical feminist lesbian,” as she says once the panel begins, is stifling. “It’s so minimizing […]
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~64 Films Released in 2015 Shot on 35mm
When rounding up all the 2014 movies (as defined by the US release calendar) that I could confirm had been at least partially shot on 35mm, the tally was 39; after posting, I caught a few titles that I’d overlooked, but the number basically stayed the same. In researching this year’s follow-up edition, I was shocked to see that figure increase significantly to somewhere around 64 (I’ll get into the qualifiers in a bit). Was I really sloppy in doing my homework last year, or is the number of productions shot on 35mm increasing? It’s hard to tell, and there’s all kinds of asterisks attached. […]
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“I Never Show the Script to the Actors”: Kazik Radwanski on How Heavy This Hammer
With his second feature, How Heavy This Hammer, Toronto-based filmmaker Kazik Radwanski tackles the trope of the seemingly soulless main-child with a formal intensity that is at once casual and rigorous, and all the more unnerving as a result. Erwin (Erwin Van Cotthem) is unable to find anything of value in his life beyond the mental and emotional respite of fantasy computer games and the brutish diversions of rugby matches. His wife and two sons are nothing more than grating obligations, whose needs nearly drive him to the brink of an all out crisis. Radwanski renders these quotidian frustrations – […]
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Cracking Eggs: Looking for Financial Stability Outside of Independent Film
Though Elijah Wood beat us in the Moon Pie eating contest (five pies in two minutes), we took home the prize for best feature. We’d just premiered our second film, Tex Montana Will Survive!, at the Chattanooga Film Festival, where we stood in the hallway — too nervous to sit within the crowd — waiting to hear if anyone would actually laugh. The first joke lands with an uproar they could probably hear over the bombast of Furious 7 in the theater adjacent. Our fears were thankfully unfounded. Tex Montana was as funny as we thought it was… and we […]
