Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Guess Who’s Watching: Tribeca’s New Online Work
Tribeca’s N.O.W sidebar is noteworthy for two reasons: first, in that it aims to put forth the idea of the independent filmmaker as a brand, rather than the purveyor of a specific project, and secondly, because it suggests that the most successful online content is made for a clearly defined audience, or at least contains eye-catching enough packaging that can propel through the glut. “My Life in Sourdough” and “Eat Your Feelings”, for instance, call on the rather deep bullpen of internet foodies by situating a recipe at the center of each episode. The latter is boy meets girl plus 6 AM homemade pasta, and readymade for the […]
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“Sometimes You Have to Put Your Camera Down”: Director and Producer Hanna Polak on the She Does Podcast
Hanna Polak, a Polish director and producer, has the stamina and guts that most filmmakers would envy. And now audiences at film festivals around the world are experiencing her dedication through Something Better To Come, a documentary that Hanna shot over the span of 14 years. The documentary follows the lives of Russians living in a massive garbage dump, located 12 miles from the center of Moscow. Hanna filmed many people living in the garbage dump, but one person in particular stood out: a young girl named Yula. We watch Yula grow up on-screen, experimenting with hair dye and makeup, […]
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Beyond London: Alastair Roberts of the Royal Opera House on Live Cinema Broadcasts
One useful maxim in the ever-changing world of theatrical distribution is that transforming your cinematic screenings into a one-time events will help drive people to your film. Likewise, theaters are searching for ways to make their products stand out in a world flooded with easily available content. Among the many solutions to these dual problems is the live broadcast of events to theaters — plays, concerts, and any other type of live performances. Stage productions are obviously among the top purveyors of these broadcasts: the Metropolitan Opera in New York and the National Theatre in London both regularly show their productions in cinemas, […]
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Of Tarantino and TV: The Legacy of Goodfellas
In the mid-1980s, Martin Scorsese was regaining his footing as a director after a brutal few years. His passion project, The Last Temptation of Christ, had fallen apart at Paramount just days before production was scheduled to begin, and The King of Comedy had been a commercial, and largely critical, failure – in spite of the fact that it was, and is, one of the most incisive films ever made about celebrity culture. After years of working on studio movies with substantial budgets and luxurious schedules, Scorsese went back to ground zero for After Hours in 1985, stripping his methods […]
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Jennifer Phang, Nicole Beckwith and Stewart Thorndike Receive Inaugural SFFS Women Filmmaker Fellowships
The San Francisco Film Society announces today three women filmmakers as recipients of its SFFS Women Filmmaker Fellowships, a program supporting women making their second or third features in the genres of science fiction, comedy, action, thriller and horror — areas in which women are traditionally under-represented. Supported by the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the fellowships are run by Filmmaker360, the Film Society’s filmmaker services department, and they include financial support, programs and events, mentorship services and more. “We’re thrilled to be kicking off this new initiative with such talented individuals, and to help bridge the support gap we have seen […]
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Five Questions for Applesauce Writer/Director Onur Tukel
Onur Tukel’s Summer of Blood was a hit of the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival, a work that saw the Brooklyn filmmaker venture from the relationship comedy drama of his previous pictures towards a sly, anarchic genre tale — in this case, a vampire story. Far from a generic riff on the genre, it contained all of Tukel’s typical emotional queasiness and edgy humor while adding quite a bit of the red stuff. With Applesauce, his latest, Dylan Baker plays the role of a man coaxed into recounting a story from his past on a radio show one day. He probably […]
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“Can You Get to the Truth of Something?” Mike Finkel on True Story
I first met Mike Finkel around two decades ago through a mutual friend. He was planning to write a piece for Sports Illustrated on the log-rolling championship to be held in Wisconsin, and I was going to go with him to take photographs. It was a fun, strange day. It felt surreal, but it was nothing compared to the kind of surreal that Mike’s future held for him. Mike and I kept in touch. He continued his career as a journalist writing for prestigious publications including The New York Times. He was ultimately fired from the Times for compositing three […]
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PolarPro Has Tons of Clever Rigs for the GoPro Action Shooter
I know, another company with more GoPro accessories. At first I was skeptical that I’d see something new, but as someone who dives and hikes, just about everything I saw from PolarPro solved a lot of mounting and accessibility problems I’ve had in the outdoors, from keeping the camera quickly accessible to adding extra power. It’s not much of a surprise these are well thought out accessories. Company founder Jeff Overall is an action sports enthusiast himself and was looking for a decent polarizing filter for his GoPro for snowboarding. When he couldn’t find one he made it and started PolarPro during his […]
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Alma Har’el on her Work-in-Progress LoveTrue at the Tribeca Film Festival
Alma Har’el’s 2011 Bombay Beach is one of the most striking feature debuts of any sort, fiction or doc, in recent years. In writing about the film and Har’el for our 25 New Faces of 2011, I called it “not only a loving, deeply empathetic portrait of the diverse characters who make up the town” (a small burg in the Salton Sea) “but also a beautifully poetic cinematic essay on the power — and necessity — of play and self-invention.” Bombay Beach, shot largely by Har’el herself on a handheld, $600 Canon consumer video camera, had style to burn, and […]
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Georgian on My Mind: Tangerines
A four-hander of a chamber play shot quickly in a single location in the lush, mountainous Georgian region of Guria, Zaza Urushadze’s Tangerines was a surprise nominee for best foreign language film at the Oscars. The Georgian director’s third feature is meticulously crafted. Composer Nias Diasamidze’s repetitive sad strings are appropriate for a story where winning is implausible. Ongoing slight, smooth camera movements reframe relationships and offset the threat of stasis. Urushadze and ace DP Rein Kotov go for strong, contrasting lighting effects not only for their beauty in this widescreen picture, but as another weapon against inertia. Small and dynamic […]
