Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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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 […]
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The Five Cardinal Virtues of Tu dors Nicole
Upon its Cannes premiere and ever since, Stéphane Lafleur’s Tu dors Nicole (You’re Sleeping Nicole) was instantly and endlessly pegged as the Québécois equivalent of Frances Ha. Understandable, given that it’s a black-and-white portrait of two close girlfriends’ extended falling-out as one conspicuously matures while the other flounders aimlessly. Still, Nicole‘s tempered acridness and emphasis on the annoyances of minimum-wage jobs taken upon reluctant entrance to the working world makes Ghost World a closer point of reference. Despite taking place at a post-undergrad time in its characters’ lives, the vibe is similarly very high school (minus the unpleasantness and pain that can come with that terrain): […]
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Feminist Pornographer Jennifer Lyon Bell on Silver Shoes, PinkLabel.tv, and the Holy F*ck Film Festival
I’ve known Amsterdam-based, San Francisco-bred, Jennifer Lyon Bell ever since we met over half a decade ago at Brooklyn’s much beloved Monkey Town — back when a DIY, Williamsburg performance space could afford to host a Sunday brunch for CineKink Film Festival award winners. (Bell’s Matinée took the Best Narrative Short prize, while Un Piede di Roman Polanski, an homage to Roman Polanski’s foot fetish I co-directed with Roxanne Kapista, nabbed Best Experimental Short.) Since then Bell’s films have been both banned (Matinée from the Melbourne Underground Film Festival by the Australian Film Commission in 2009) and celebrated, most recently […]
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Aloha/Defending Cameron Crowe
If you’re a dedicated Cameron Crowe fan, you may have been forced to spend part of the last 15 years repeatedly explaining why. Since Almost Famous, Crowe’s non-documentary feature output has included two movies instantly/violently rejected by both critics and the public (Vanilla Sky, Elizabethtown) and one semi-soft family film that got a parody Twitter account and endless derision months before release solely due to the admittedly risible title We Bought a Zoo. His latest, Aloha, also has a dumb title and arrives savaged by Amy Pascal in emails made public as part of the Sony hack and ominously unscreened for press until the week […]
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TransFatty Lives Forever: How Director Patrick O’Brien Documented His ALS
Waiting to see TransFatty Lives at the Tribeca Film Festival, I was in line behind a woman who didn’t know what she was waiting to see. The couple in front of her were filling her in, telling her all about the filmmaker/subject of the film, Patrick O’Brien (once known as DJ TransFatty), his “journey” with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) and how the terrible disease had affected their own lives. It wasn’t a downbeat conversation in the slightest. They had discovered O’Brien through his online videos, posted over the course of ten years, documenting his worsening condition not with depression and […]
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The Safdies + Karl Ove Knausgaard on the Film Society’s Close-Up Podcast
Over the last several months, the Film Society of Lincoln Center has launched one of the better film podcasts out there, with guests including Paul Thomas Anderson, Olivier Assayas and David Cronenberg. (The podcast can be subscribed to on iTunes or listened to on Soundcloud.) But today’s doubleheader is particularly great and more than worthy of its own post. Sharing the episode are Josh and Benny Safdie, whose Heaven Knows What is this weekend’s must viewing, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, who has just released the fourth volume of his autobiographical magnum opus, My Struggle, here in the States and who […]
