Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Watch: Mike White on Why Pierre Bismuth’s Truly Unique Hybrid Where is Rocky II? Needs Your Support
The term ‘hybrid’ has become increasingly debatable when discussing the divide between fiction and nonfiction, though it’s a rather apt description of the French artist Pierre Bismuth’s cinematic inquiry, Where is Rocky II? Perhaps best known for his Oscar winning collaboration with Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry on the script for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Bismuth became obsessed with a fake rock, called Rocky II, that Ed Ruscha placed amongst its geological counterparts in the Mojave Desert around the release of the eponymous Stallone film in 1979. The pitch of Where is Rocky II?, Bismuth explained in an email, “is that a […]
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Director Maro Chermayeff on the Independent Lens Doc A Path Appears
Two years ago a team surrounding journalists Sheryl WuDunn and Nicholas Kristof and producer Maro Chermayeff released a four-hour documentary and multimedia project called Half the Sky, a companion to WuDunn’s and Kristof’s book of the same name. It dealt with basic human rights issues for women, focusing on topics like women’s healthcare, domestic violence and rape, and girls’ education in countries like Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Somaliland, and Cambodia, and I wrote a piece for Filmmaker about its transmedia components and outreach efforts. Late last year WuDunn and Kristof released their follow-up book, A Path Appears, shifting their focus from women in extreme […]
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Cinematographer Adam Hobbs on Shooting Sundance Competition Doc, Finders Keepers
Premiering this past week at the Sundance Film Festival was Finders Keepers, the tale of an eccentric Southern feud pitting two social outsiders against each other for the possession of a severed foot. Here, cinematographer Adam Hobbs discusses the challenges of mixed camera formats, long days and natural lighting, and choosing to shoot with prime lenses. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Hobbs: In 2010 I was working in commercial production, A close friend told me about […]
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Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, The Wolf Pack Top 2015 Sundance Film Festival Awards
In a ceremony tonight hosted by Tig Notaro and filled with special jury awards, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Wolf Pack took home the two top prizes — the Dramatic and Documentary U.S. Grand Jury Prizes. The former is an Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s adaptation of Jesse Andrews’ young adult novel, a film that picked up steam throughout the festival as word spread about its fusion of slacker comedy and heartfelt emotion. Fox Searchlight won a bidding war for the film. The Wolf Pack is Crystal Moselle’s bizarre and troubling documentary about six kids who find escape through […]
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Transmedia in Miami: Diliana Alexander on FilmGate Interactive
It seems that everywhere you look these days festivals and conferences for new media are springing up, and one of the fastest growing is Miami’s FilmGate Interactive, running this year from February 1-8. Now in its third year, FilmGate has already hosted numerous screenings, presentations, workshops, and works-in-progress. One of last year’s presenters, Jake Price, showed an early version of his new project The Invisible Season, about the Japanese tsunami and nuclear accident, that went on to screen at the New York Film Festival. Other past presenters have included POV Interactive and the NFB, and this year individuals like Murmur’s Mike […]
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transmediale 2015: Vicki Bennett and Citation City
Since 1988 transmediale has been one of Europe’s premiere events for showcasing transmedia and technology for art and narrative and nonfiction storytelling. Director Kristoffer Gansing (who spoke with Filmmaker last year) and his team continue to assemble cutting-edge films, installations, performances, workshops, and other events, turning the House of World Cultures in Berlin into a hub for all things new media. It runs this week from January 28 through February 1, and I spoke with a number of artists who are presenting video-based pieces at the festival. British artist Vicki Bennett has been working under the name People Like Us since […]
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“Trying to Play, More or Less, ‘By the Book'”: Results | Director Andrew Bujalski
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? I confronted plenty of fears, don’t know that I *conquered* any of them per se. On this movie I was taking most of the ideas & philosophies I’d developed over the last 15 years of work and tossing them out, trying to play instead, more or less, “by the book.” Of course I still made plenty of unconventional decisions and I suspect the movie is as idiosyncratic as anything […]
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Sundance 2015: Results, Entertainment and The Witch
He may not be your bag, but it’s tough to deny that Andrew Bujalski is one of the most distinctive American independent filmmakers working today. So distinctive that even when he sets his sights on the pseudo-pedestrian genre of the romantic comedy, he finds a way to completely reconfigure the shape of its central love triangle. In Results, Trevor (Guy Pearce) is an Australian in Austin who owns the Power 4 Life fitness studio, living and breathing his own advertising mantras about self-improvement. The recently divorced, suddenly rich Danny (Kevin Corrigan, brilliant) is new in town and eager to buy […]
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Pussy Riot: Celiné Sciamma’s Girlhood
We’re beautiful/Like diamonds in the sky. Clad in ripped-off-the-rack evening dresses with anti-theft devices intact, four teens who form a tight clique — semi-tough, to borrow from the Michael Ritchie/Burt Reynolds satire — lip-synch and boogie down to the assertive voice of Rihanna. Celebrating their frequently downplayed femininity, they spiritedly defuse in a hotel room rented for one special night, recharging from the heavy-attitude posturing and word- and fist-fights with newly cast rivals that interrupt their day-to-day aimlessness. Their loyal, affectionate companionship counters the ennui and male dominance entrenched in the world of charmless concrete projects that is Le Clos-Francais, their […]
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2015 Sundance Short Film Award Winners
Last evening at Jupiter Bowl in Kimball Junction, the 2015 Sundance Short Film Awards were doled out over a somewhat temperamental microphone. Stationed at the foot of a bowling alley, Director of Programming Trevor Groth said a few words before turning it over to Jared Hess, who is at the festival with his latest, Don Verdean. Hess told a nice anecdote about forcing his wife Jerusha Hess to invite Pauly Shore to a screening of their first Slamdance short decades back, before reminding the audience that any interest you court in a short film is reason to stay true to that unadulterated vision. The mic […]
