Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Rooftop Filmmakers Fund Grant Winners for 2015 Announced
Rooftop Films, which is heading into its 20th season, has awarded 13 cash and service grants to alumni filmmakers. The GarboNYC Feature Film Grants were awarded to directors Kitty Green and Sebastian Silva. Green will receive a monetary grant of $15,000 to help finish her new film, Casting JonBenet, and Silva will receive a $10,000 grant to support his film, Demon Me. Casting JonBenet, a documentary about the infamous murder of child model JonBenet Ramsey, marks Green’s second feature after her 2013 documentary debut Ukraine Is Not a Brothel. Among the films Silva has directed are Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus and Nasty […]
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Recipients of 2015/2016 TFI New Media Fund Announced
Tribeca Film Institute (TFI), in partnership with Ford Foundation’s JustFilms initiative, has announced the grant recipients of the 2015/2016 TFI New Media Fund. Grantees were selected by an advisory board comprised of Just Vision’s Julia Bacha, director Malika Zouhali-Worrall (Call Me Kuchu), director-producer Sandi Dubowski (Trembling Before G-d), Google’s Lisa Steiman and Chicken & Egg Pictures’ Jenni Wolfson. The fund provides monetary grants and support to nonfiction, transmedia projects which tackle a social issue. Each of the three selected projects will receive $50,000 in funding as well as expert mentorship for producers to help them develop their projects and build engagement with audiences. You […]
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Top Indies in the iTunes Store for 2015
As the year winds to an end, it seems everyone’s got a Top Ten list to share. In the case of iTunes, they’ve unleashed their Best of 2015 list, which is broken down into various lists, including the most downloaded films overall, the most downloaded independent films, the most downloaded documentaries, the most downloaded films that debuted at film festivals in 2015 as well as iTunes’ editorial picks. In other words, it’s a great place to start if you want to catch up on festival favorites or other indie hits that you may have missed so far. Interestingly, most of the […]
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Support Tangerine’s Juice Fund to Boost Emerging Female Talent
You’ve seen the abysmal statistics about women filmmakers, yet they still manage to shock. According to a recent study by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, the number of women directing the top 250 grossing films declined by 2% over the past 17 years. And that’s just one measurement. In 2013, Amy Hobby and Anne Hubbell launched Tangerine Entertainment with the express purpose of giving voice to more female directors. Now they are raising funds on Seed&Spark to support The Juice Fund, an annual award which recognizes women directors who have […]
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How The Award-Winning Rich Hill Made an Impact
It’s been nearly two years since Rich Hill, an observational documentary about three teens growing up in rural poverty, won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize Documentary Award at the Sundance Film Festival. But the conversation the film sparked continues today and the film’s engagement campaign is still going strong. Directed by Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos, Rich Hill invites viewers into three families’ homes where they witness first-hand the hardships and challenges the families face as they struggle to make ends meet. Following its premiere at Sundance, Rich Hill was acquired by The Orchard and Independent Lens. It was […]
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Why Ed Lachman Chose to Shoot Carol in Super 16mm
Carol is getting raves not just for Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett’s subtle performances, but also for Ed Lachman’s cinematography, which was inspired by mid-century street photographers such as Ruth Orkin, Esther Bubley, Helen Levitt and Vivian Maier. In a first-person story for Indiewire, the veteran cinematographer, who has worked with Werner Herzog, Sofia Coppola, Todd Solondz, Robert Altman and Steven Soderbergh, writes about why he and director Todd Haynes chose to shoot the film in 16mm in order to achieve the look of 1952. “We wanted to reference the photographic representation of a different era,” Lachman said. “They can recreate grain digitally now, but […]
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Early Adopters or Canaries In a Coal Mine? Niall McKay at the Screen Forward Labs
At the opening party for the Irish Broadway musical, Once, as my wife Marissa and I sucked down free drinks and hors d’oeuvres in a swanky Manhattan penthouse, we got the idea for creating a series about people in New York who go to events and screenings for the free food and drink. We called it On The Lig, an Irish/English expression for being “on the mooch.” Fast forward three years, one Kickstarter campaign and eight shooting days later and we have a wonderful new pilot. Starring Jonny Hopkins (The Leftovers, Public Morals and Kick-Ass) and John Keating (Boardwalk Empire, The […]
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The Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund is Open for Submissions
Good news for filmmakers looking for finishing funds to complete a feature-length documentary which highlights a social issue: The Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund is open for submissions through February 5, 2016. Even better, there is no application fee. The Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund will provide funding to four-to-10 feature-length documentaries. In addition, The AOL Charitable Foundation Award, a subset of the Fund, gives grants to four filmmakers whose feature-length documentaries illuminate the lives of women and youth around the globe. Previous grantees of The Gucci Tribeca Documentary Fund include Marshall Curry’s Point and Shoot, Marc Silver’s 3 1/2 Minutes, Leslee Udwin’s India’s Daughter […]
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Making Issue Films Doesn’t Have to Feel Dirty: Nick Berardini on Making Killing Them Safely
The term “issue” in the context of filmmaking can cause a lot of consternation for aspiring filmmakers. It can feel dirty just saying it out loud. When I first began making my debut feature, Killing Them Safely, I was at times apologetic for the subject matter. Early on, one of my producers would get in the habit of telling others it was “a film about TASERs,” and I would cringe. “It’s not a film about TASERs,” I often corrected him, “It’s a film about TASER International. There’s a big difference.” At times I felt like I was being a bit […]
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381 Minutes in 3,387 Words: Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights
I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that there’s no way for me personally to really break down Miguel Gomes’ Arabian Nights trilogy without going through it segment by segment — “reluctant” because this could be too long, for both me and you, the reader, but it must be done. Gomes’ previous two features Our Beloved Month of August and Tabu are vital, terrific, and whatever other approbatory adjectives you want to throw at them; he is, no doubt, a major director, and will be so again. Arabian Nights is not a major movie, but rather a messy sketchbook stuffing disparate short- and medium-length films into an unwieldily […]
