As the Eastern Oregon Film Festival runs this weekend in Le Grande, Oregon, the festival and filmmaker bring you another day of 24-hour online premieres. Below are Evamarie Shaller’s short, Die Wilder vom Montanon, and Brendan Colvin’s feature Sabbatical, starring Robert Longstreet as “a middle-aged Kierkegaard scholar.” Both are embedded below and are free to view for the next 24 hours only. Die Wilderin vom Montafon from Evamaria Schaller on Vimeo. DIE WILDERIN VOM MONTAFON (dir. Evamaria Shaller) Technical Info 2014 / Austria / 21min / Experimental Short Synopsis The Austrian mountains. Legend of itself. Powerful and wild. Dangerous and […]
As part of this weekend’s Eastern Oregon Film Festival, Filmmaker is partnering with the fest to stream four online selections. Today, for an exclusive 24-hour window, you can view Sam Kuhn’s short film, In Search of the Miraculous and Nathaniel Bennett’s short feature, Friendship. Program notes for both are below, and check back tomorrow at 9:00 AM EST for Evamaria Shaller’s Die Wilder von Montafon and Brandon Colvin’s Sabbatical. In Search of the Miraculous from Lion Attack on Vimeo. In Search of the Miraculous (dir. Sam Kuhn) Technical Info 2014 / USA / 15min / Experimental Short Synopsis A seventeen-year-old […]
Tuesday’s post looked at Neil Berkeley and Judy Chaikin as two filmmakers who wanted to create a theatrical release for their films to boost visibility, increase ancillary value and learn for themselves how to operate in the new hybrid model of distribution and marketing. Today we will look at Paco de Onís from Skylight, the company he runs with creative director Pamela Yates and editorial director Peter Kinoy, and their film/media project Granito Paco de Onís, Skylight and Granito According to de Onís, Skylight is “as much a filmmaking organization as a human rights organization.” Hence their goals are not about monetary gain […]
Linda Pan discovered her way into media after traveling down a vastly different path for several years. Linda, the first-generation daughter of Chinese immigrants, was raised in Saskatoon, Canada. Her parents persuaded their daughter to follow a path similar to theirs: electrical engineering. So she did. But ater two engineering degrees and a handful of hard family conversations, Linda talks about how she transitioned from electrical engineering to media business, attended Harvard Business School and climbed the ladder at MRC and Netflix. Today, Linda is the general manager of Sundance Now Doc Club and Vice President of Business Development at […]
Alternative distribution models are no longer the experiment, but are now the norm for the vast majority of filmmakers. However because of a variety of reasons, including not least contract obligations and a fear that exposing numbers may not show the filmmaker in the best light, many filmmakers have been reticent to give out the real numbers from their film’s releases. As a result, for last October’s Getting Real Documentary Conference, held by the International Documentary Association, I wanted to create a panel where the participants were required to reveal the data about the releases of their films. I wanted […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]