Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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A Matter of Semitics: A Borrowed Identity
What’s in a name? Labeling is a risky proposition. Meant to attract, summarize, or simplify, sometimes all three, a tag’s position front-and-center makes it bait for bashing. Pigeonholing can repel as easily as it entices, or just may harmlessly connote something other than what was intended. In the cultural arena, a title can be artwork-specific and subject-appropriate, only to be slammed, censored, and overruled by the poison of protocol or more overt political and commercial censorship. In theory merely a signifier, it frequently serves as a convenient synecdoche for larger issues under hypocritical attack. Which brings us to Dancing Arabs, […]
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Jerzy Rose and Samy Burch on Casting Neighborhood Food Drive
Chicago filmmakers Jerzy Rose and Halle Butler are currently fundraising for their feature length satire Neighborhood Food Drive, about two egomaniacal restauranteurs and their unpaid intern as they throw a series of lavish and disastrous fundraisers. Below, Rose interviews his casting director Samy Burch about the process of pulling together both professional actors and otherwise for a cast headed up by Bruce Bundy and Lyra Hill.–SS Jerzy Rose: I have a vague memory of you telling me, after you’d seen Crimes Against Humanity, that you’d love to help me cast my next movie. I followed up one year later. I think I simply asked “How […]
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Finding Soul at U.S. in Progress at the Champs-Élysées Film Festival
Bonjouring my way down the Champs-Élysées, I arrive at Ladurée, a Parisian bakery nearly as iconic as the Arc de Triomphe. I sit among film distributors and we are presented with food almost too pretty to eat. We are in Paris for U.S. in Progress, a joint program between Black Rabbit Film and the Champs-Élysées Film Festival. The purpose is to expose U.S. indie films in post-production to European buyers and distributors and introduce the American filmmakers to the European market. The three-day event is organized bi-annually, first during the Champs-Élysées Film Festival and again during the American Film Festival […]
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Exclusive: Sam Fleischner and Iva Gocheva’s Porcupine
Straight from BAMcinemaFest where it preceded Krisha last Friday is Sam Fleischner and Iva Gocheva‘s short film, Porcupine. A far cry from the subterranean world of Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, Porcupine features Gocheva as a woman holed up in her sun-drenched Brooklyn apartment, trying and failing to reconnect with her partner through a series of unanswered phone calls. Strung together, her voicemails intimate a relationship — and several household items — lost. Check it out above.
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Kevin Smith, Branding and the Pressures of Independent Filmmaking: Rodrigo Reyes on the IFP Narrative Labs
I spent mid-June of this year within the folds of the IFP Narrative Labs, keeping an eye open for an endearing moment, an anecdote or an auspicious situation that could somehow encapsulate the intensity of the experience. After months of review, late nights grinding through hundreds of rough cuts, careful readings of submission materials and vigorous debates, the selection committee had whittled down their picks to a slate of 10 films from all over the country, all amazing and in varying stages of post-production. They brought us together in a theater in the heart of DUMBO for a week of […]
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Aiming for the Tectonic: Composer Keegan DeWitt on The Tribe
In the brutal closing sequence of Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s The Tribe, I stirred so uncomfortably that I shut and covered my eyes. The fact that the sounds of this truly stunning finale proved more traumatizing and lasting than anything I could have seen with my eyes is a bold testament to the powerful work Slaboshpitsky’s done with his film. He has made you ingrain yourself so completely with the restrictions he’s put on you as a viewer that your involvement is total and devastating. Loosely following the drug-dealing and prostituting tentants of a Ukranian boarding school for the deaf, The Tribe unfolds with […]
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Process vs. Result: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy Filmmaking Again from my Brother, Mike Leigh, Rory Culkin and My Newborn Daughter
Lou Howe landed on our 25 New Faces list in 2013 while in post-production on his debut feature, Gabriel. An IFP Narrative Lab veteran, Howe here describes the lead-up to his film, and how one crucial, family-oriented decision in pre-production reshaped and enriched it. Gabriel opens today in New York at the Village East. It’s embarrassing to admit it, but I see now that I had stopped enjoying making movies. It took me a long time to realize it, deep into post-production on my first feature Gabriel, I think, but I had lost sight of what I was doing over […]
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“I Had No Idea if It Actually Worked as a Film”: Christopher Makoto Yogi on the Sundance Directors Lab
Hawai’i-born director Christopher Makoto Yogi is at the Sundance Directors Lab with his feature, I Was a Simple Man. “Like marionettes on a toy stage, the ghosts of Seiichi’s past haunt the countryside in this tale of a Hawai’i family facing the imminent death of their eldest,” is how its described by the Sundance Institute. Below, Yoti describes his scene work with advisors at the Lab. Today ends week number three at the Directors Lab. These past three weeks have been a motion blur, too fast to process, but now in this brief Sunday respite I’m sitting outside looking up […]
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Kickstart Frederick Wiseman’s In Jackson Heights
The great documentarian Frederick Wiseman has turned to Kickstarter to complete his latest sweeping portrait, this time of the titular Queens neighborhood, In Jackson Heights. Wiseman is currently whittling down 120 hours worth of rushes to complete the finished product, which is set for a fall festival debut and a 2016 PBS broadcast. Check out a teaser of the film above, and read a bit about Wiseman’s editing process below. My job as editor is to make the film as best I can from the rushes. What I think about the subject matter is what you see in the final film. At least […]
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“What If I Had the Baby on the Mountain?”: Livi Newman on the Sundance Directors Lab
Olivia Newman is at the Sundance Directors Lab with her feature First Match, the tale of “a teenage girl from Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood [who] decides that joining the all-boys high school wrestling team is the only way back to her estranged father.” She is also eight months pregnant. Below, she writes about that experience. “What are you afraid of?” A month before the Sundance Directors Lab began, this question was posed to us via email by artistic director, Gyula Gazdag. I hadn’t yet met Gyula, and had no idea that he would eventually impart some of the deepest insights to […]
