Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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IFP Announces Narrative Line-Up for its Annual Independent Filmmaker Labs
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today the ten narratives selected for the 2015 Independent Filmmaker Labs, IFP’s annual year-long fellowship for first-time feature directors. The creative teams of the selected films are currently attending the first week’s sessions – The Time Warner Foundation Completion Labs – taking place June 8-12 at the Made in NY Media Center by IFP. Featuring a stylistically diverse slate of sci-fi, fantasy, drama, young adult, comedy, hybrid and horror, this year showcases films from filmmakers across the nation. 70% of the creative teams hail from outside of New York and Los Angeles. […]
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Five Picks for the 2015 Northside Film Festival
Clocking in at just three days, the Northside Film Festival still provides enough breadth in programming to rival an event three times its size. In addition to the centerpiece DIY Competition and short programs, the fest has added an episodics sidebar this year, featuring Doron Max Hagay’s Monica web series, among others. Due to pre-screener availability, the following recommendations are features only, but that scarcely means you shouldn’t keep any eye on the other sections. Northside runs from today through Wednesday at UnionDocs, Nitehawk, Videology and the Wythe Hotel. Tired Moonlight If you missed Britni West’s Slamdance Grand Jury Prize winner at New Directors/New Films, […]
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Watch: Jack Dunphy’s Serenity
Jack Dunphy, a co-writer on Nathan Silver’s Stinking Heaven and a frequent collaborator of Caveh Zahedi, is currently raising funds for his first feature, Living With Others, on Kickstarter. To celebrate crossing his initial goal, Dunphy has released his animated, Sundance-selected short Serenity online. Living With Others, which just added Zahedi as an executive producer, will blend live action and animation, and Dunphy had the following to say about his choice: I’m punctuating the movie with animation because it makes it easier for me to communicate difficult thoughts and emotions. Subconscious hang-ups are brought to the surface when I animate, and that helps me realize […]
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Spy: The Third Feature by Paul Feig, Our George Cukor
During his career, George Cukor was often referred to as a “women’s director” for his facility with foregrounded female performers: Katharine Hepburn in no less than 10 collaborations, Jean Simmons in The Actress, the women in The Women. By that logic, Paul Feig is our Cukor: beginning with Bridesmaids (since we’ve confined I Am David and Unaccompanied Minors to the rubble of collective amnesia), he’s established himself as a specialist in female-led comedy, following up with The Heat and now Spy. In interviews prior to Bridesmaids‘ release, he mused that the film better not bomb or he’d have messed it up for women in comedy for decades. If none […]
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Five Questions for Sabrina Dridje about the Creative>>Founder Lab
The Creative>>Founder Lab is the newest offering from the Made in New York Media Center by IFP, a eight-week program intended to help creative professionals develop the business skills required to see their projects to fruition. Design thinking, monetization, rapid prototyping, how to speak with developers, gamification and systems thinking will all be taught by a team of leaders in their fields. (Note: IFP is Filmmaker‘s parent organization.) The fee for the program is $1,200, and only 20 spots are available. Deadline is June 18 at 11:59PM. More information can be found here at the link. Below, we ask Sabrina […]
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Imposters, Intimacy and Filmmaking: Director Christina Choe on Nancy
Nancy is a psychological drama about a female imposter, who lies to gain emotional intimacy and love. The genesis for this script started with my fascination with imposter stories (the literary hoax of JT LeRoy, Clark Rockefeller, Frédéric Bourdin in The Imposter, Gay Girl in Damascus fake blogger, etc). It’s only now that I’ve come to realize that my obsession with the fine line between truth/fiction, performance/reality and storytelling/confession, is something that started long before my intrigue with imposters. After a stint editing in the documentary world, I decided to try my hand at writing a screenplay. I had no idea what I was […]
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“You Just Keep Bad Things Away from Your Project — That’s What a Director Does”: Katerina Cizek on the She Does Podcast
Katerina Cizek is an innovative documentary storyteller who works across many media platforms. She’s currently the director of the National Film Board of Canada’s multi-year project entitled HIGHRISE, which examines life inside residential skyscrapers in suburbs around the world. Since it launched in 2009, HIGHRISE has generated interactive documentaries, mobile productions, live presentations, installations and films that have garnered Emmys, a Peabody, Webby Awards and recognition from the World Press Photo and IDFA Doc Lab, among others. On June 2, 2015, Kat and the NFB released the latest and final HIGHRISE project, “Universe Within,” that explores people’s digital lives online. […]
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“Couple That With a Long Take and I’m Ecstatic”: Chris Bell on The Winds That Scatter
A former critic for The Playlist, Chris Bell fulfills the promise of the observant, patient lens he wielded in shorts such as Bridges with his feature length character study, The Winds That Scatter. Baring more in common with the films of the great Abbas Kiarostami than say your average Brooklyn-based filmmaker, The Winds That Scatter follows a Syrian immigrant named Ahmad as he moves from job to job in nondescript New Jersey. Primarily structured in long takes and slow-burning, affecting episodes, The Winds That Scatter will have its world premiere at the Northside Film Festival next Wednesday at UnionDocs. Filmmaker: You’ve spoken about wanting to create something […]
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Cooed: A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
Powerful imagination and credible spatiality are among the major absences in today’s cinema lamented by Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson. A compensatory corrective is provided, of course, by his own films, including multiple award-winning commercials and the films in “The Living Trilogy”: Songs From the Second Floor (2000), You the Living (2007), and, just opening in the US, the marvelously wry A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014). The movies are assemblages of broad tableaus of relatively short duration, filmed with a static camera. The segments are like an inspired mix of tromp l’oeil, flattened Joseph Cornell boxes, and Gregory […]
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40 Locations in 18 Shooting Days: Lessons Learned While Making Doomsdays
Nobody ever comes out of a movie and says “great locations!” Unless the film is set someplace unusual like the Amazon or the UN or on an elaborately constructed set that makes locations a talking point, they’re largely taken for granted. But locations are nevertheless deeply felt by audiences whether they announce themselves or not, informing mood, camerawork, production design and performance. They’re also a cheap way to make an inexpensive film stand out, or at the very least make it look more expensive than it is. Among the oft-repeated cardinal rules of low-/no-budge filmmaking, there are two that apply […]
