Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Hallowed Grounds: Days of Grace
“Fate depends on a soccer ball?” Is it possible distributors were discouraged from pursuing the U.S. release of guaranteed cult sensation Days of Grace after hearing such a trite voice-over line? It has been four years since Mexican director Everardo Gout’s marvelous marriage of art and kinesthesis premiered to fine reviews in a midnight slot out of competition at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Admittedly naïve about the business end of the industry, I’m aghast that this magnificent power surge of a movie, driven by a zapping vector only occasionally slowed for (sometimes literally) pregnant pauses, has taken so long to […]
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Daniel Zelman on Netflix’s Bloodline and Darkness on Television
Recently on a day when I was not feeling particularly well I watched the entire first season of Bloodline, the Netflix drama created by Daniel Zelman and Todd and Glenn Kessler. The show feels quite different from their previous collaboration, Damages. I love the slower pace and, additionally, Bloodline appeals to my fascination with families — the relationships between siblings and parents, and the impossibility of breaking from one’s familial role. Opening with family members convening for a celebration, Bloodline is set in the Florida Keys, and it has an impressive cast that includes Kyle Chandler, Sissy Spacek, Sam Shephard […]
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Anagram Creators May Abdalla and Amy Rose on Door into the Dark
The best work I saw at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival wasn’t a film at all. It was, instead, a lovely piece of conceptual counterprogramming in Tribeca’s Storyscapes section, Door into the Dark. An immersive theater piece by May Abdalla and Amy Rose of the U.K.-based company Anagram, Door into the Dark wasn’t positioned by curator Ingrid Kopp against the films in the festival. Rather, by including Door into the Dark within a program largely dominated by Oculus Rift VR work, Kopp used Door in the Dark‘s simply generated yet expansive mindscapes as a way of setting a high bar […]
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Screen Slate Founder Jon Dieringer on the Overhaul of NYC’s Repertory Film Listing Service
If you’re an avid repertory filmgoer in New York City, chances are Screen Slate is your lifeline. A daily collation of the five boroughs’ rep, independent, arthouse and gallery screenings dispatched straight to your inbox, Screen Slate has sent over a million emails since its inception in mid-2010. Founder Jon Dieringer is now looking to take things to the next level with a Kickstarter campaign that would allow for several site advancements, including customized alerts; sorting by filmmaker, venue, format and series; calendar functions and much more. Filmmaker spoke with Dieringer about his own curatorial process and plans for the site’s relaunch. Be sure to […]
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Digital Motion Picture Cameras in 2015: The Dust Settles
Have you heard? The United Nations designated 2015 the “International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies,” and cinematography made the cut. But is IYL 2015 finally the year in which the dam burst of innovation subsides, and new digital cameras and techniques no longer threaten to drown us? Surveying the latest advances in large-sensor digital cinema cameras for Filmmaker’s fifth annual round-up — written, as always, on the eve of NAB — gives me pause to consider how far we’ve come in the five years since Sony’s F3 and FS100 were cutting-edge… since Panasonic’s AF100 stirred passions, ARRI’s Alexa represented a bold choice, and RED’s hand-assembled Epic-M […]
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15 Sexy Things You Get to Do When You Think Your Film is Finished
Okay, you’ve spent seven years making your indie opus, another two years playing the festival circuit, and somewhere along the way you even managed to sell your film and get distribution. Hooray, you’re done and the party’s over! Your goal by this point is undoubtedly to move on and start working on the next film. But, wait a second, just because you’ve “sold” your film and you “got” distribution doesn’t mean your job as a filmmaker is “done” (or that you need to stop using “air quotes”). On the contrary, you’re still staring at a 20-to-life sentence for your film. […]
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“We’re A Lost Generation That’s Still Alive”: NYWIFT and IRIS Directors on The Writers Lab
Meryl Streep was making waves as usual when it was announced during the Tribeca Film Festival that she had come aboard to fund a new initiative from New York Women in Film and Television and the IRIS collective. Called The Writers Lab, the inaugural retreat will take place in upstate New York in September at the Wiawaka Center for Women, and pair eight women screenwriters over the age of 40 with established mentors including Gina Prince-Bythewood, Kirsten Smith, and Mary Jane Skalski. Filmmaker spoke with Terry Lawler, Executive Director of NYWIFT, and IRIS co-founders, Kyle Ann Stokes, Elizabeth Kaiden and Nitza Wilon, to […]
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Other Kinds of Violence: On Today’s True Crime Renaissance
The evidence might be circumstantial but there seems to be a true-crime renaissance happening in the upper echelons of liberal-minded non-fiction. People have been talking about The Jinx and Serial the way I can’t remember people talking about non-fiction before — they get all excited and say OMG a lot. Like the smart soap operas of the so-called Golden Era of TV, shows like House of Cards or Games of Thrones, these shows are guilty pleasures you don’t have to feel guilty about because they are safely highbrow. And while they’re certainly smarter than the shows about violent murders of […]
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Gregory Bayne and Christian Lybrook on their Tribeca N.O.W. Series, Zero Point
Screening in the Tribeca Film Festival’s Tribeca N.O.W. section (as in, “new online work”) is Gregory Bayne and Christian Lybrook’s Zero Point, a 45-minute independently-produced pilot for what the two Idaho-based creators hope will be full-on television series. Director, producer and screenwriter Bayne is well known to Filmmaker readers by virtue of his various documentaries (Jens Pulver Driven, Bloodsworth) and opinion pieces, and he’s been at the DIY distribution forefront long before it was in vogue. So, perhaps its appropriate, then, that he and producer and screenwriter Lybrook are now early adopters of a new indie model: rather than make […]
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The 2015 Tribeca Film Festival Awards
Below are the winners of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Note that the narrative awards were split evenly between Virgin Mountain and Bridgend, with three apiece. WORLD NARRATIVE COMPETITION CATEGORIES: The jurors for the 2015 World Narrative Competition sponsored by AKA, were Paul Attanasio, Sophie Barthes, Whoopi Goldberg, Dylan McDermott, and Burr Steers. ● The Founders Award for Best Narrative Feature – Virgin Mountain, written and directed by Dagur Kári [Iceland, Denmark]. Winner receives $25,000, sponsored by AT&T, and the art award “Ash Eroded Film Reel” by Daniel Arsham. The award was given by Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal […]
