Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Watch: What if Béla Tarr Made Polanski’s Repulsion?
“Inside every narrative film is a non-narrative film struggling to get out.” Here is a wonderfully distinctive video essay from critics Adrian Martin and Christina Álvarez López that reimagines Roman Polanski’s Repulsion as the work of Béla Tarr. Zeroing in on “the dank spaces and the dead moments, the images of food-as-object, the cycle of everyday activities, the endless, implacable passages of walking,” and other Tarr associated imagery, Martin and López explore filmmaking as elementary particles, tonally rearrangeable in line with a director’s vision and story. In a supplementary write-up at MUBI, the two cite Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review of The Tenant, wherein […]
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The Top 10 Movies, in Their Own Ways, of 2014
I’m not much for year-end listmaking — the release calendar variables for potential inclusion are pretty limited, so it feels like a pointless exercise in rearranging the same 20 pieces as everybody else, and I’ve probably written about the movies in question enough for the time being by year’s end. It is, nonetheless, the tail end of the season where people put out their lists and justifications, so I’ve laid out ten arbitrary categories that allow me to tout some titles, released in the US in 2014 unless otherwise noted. Best DTV Casualty Few people have reshaped the multiplex landscape as much in […]
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Five Questions for She Does Podcast’s Elaine Sheldon and Sarah Ginsburg
Premiering on Wednesday, January 14 is She Does, a podcast focusing on the creative lives of women working in the media created by filmmakers Elaine Sheldon and Sarah Ginsburg. As the podcast’s mission statement explains, “Going beyond their current career status, we explore each woman’s past to understand how their personality, background and philosophy informs their work.” Interestingly, the podcast is not discipline-specific, including not just filmmakers but technologists, designers, journalists, musicians and more. In addition — and impressively, given the purely independent, DIY nature of this series — Sheldon and Ginsburg are bringing an artistic polish to She Does, […]
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Producers, Rework Your Budgets: SAG-AFTRA Ups Low-Budget Contracts 25%
For low-budget filmmakers, the cost of hiring SAG actors has just gotten higher. Yesterday, as reported by Deadline, the SAG-AFTRA national board of directors approved a new contract paying actors working under three low-budget agreements a 25% raise. The ultra-low-budget agreement, for films under $200,000 dollars, such as Dan Mirvish’s Between Us (pictured above), now requires producers to pay actors $125 a day, up from $100. The modified low-budget agreement now has a daily minimum of $335 and weekly rate of $1,166 (up from $268 and $933, respectively). And the low-budget contract, covering films less than $2.5 million sees rates […]
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Fox Searchlight Acquires Noah Baumbach’s Sundance-Bound Mistress America
Fox Searchlight has struck early, acquiring Noah Baumbach’s highly anticipated Mistress America two weeks before its premiere at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. As described in the press release, “In Mistress America, Tracy (Lola Kirke) is a lonely college freshman in New York, having neither the exciting university experience nor the glamorous metropolitan lifestyle she envisioned. But when she is taken in by her soon-to-be stepsister, Brooke (Greta Gerwig) – a resident of Times Square and adventurous gal about town – she is rescued from her disappointment and seduced by Brooke’s alluringly mad schemes.” The film is written by Baumbach […]
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Watch: The Best Films of 2010-14 in Supercut Form
Kicking off with a dose of Skrillex and Spring Breakers, Kevin B. Lee’s latest supercut rounds up the best films of the decade thus far. The ranking was determined on the fairly informal basis of an all-are-welcome Twitter solicitation. I voted and am bitterly disappointed, though I guess not all that surprised, to see Computer Chess didn’t make it into the top 25. The most pleasantly unexpected inclusion is Kenneth Lonergan’s much-postponed, completely wonderful and nearly buried Margaret at #5. The Tree of Life — the closest thing we have this half-complete decade to a consensus milestone in film history — tops the list. For the full of list […]
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CITIZENFOUR Wins Big at the 8th Annual Cinema Eye Honors
“Eight years ago, the shortlist came out, and the Academy failed to recognize not just three or four good films. They left off all the good films,” began Laura Poitras, the first presenter and undisputed star of last night’s 8th Annual Cinema Eye Honors, held at Astoria’s Museum of Moving Image. Recounting a bit of the organization’s history before bestowing Finding Vivian Maier with Best Debut, Poitras remarked that Founding Director AJ Schnack forged a necessary “response to what was happening in the community” in creating this close-knit, nonfiction awards ceremony. Cinema Eye Honors is always a pleasure to attend on account of that sense of “community,” […]
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2015 Rotterdam International Film Festival Line-Up
Falling smack dab in the middle of this year’s Sundance, the Rotterdam International Film Festival presents a hearty, intercontinental alternative to the Park City indie calendar starter. The program has trickled out over the last few weeks, and looks to be about buttoned up with the Spectrum and Bright Future sections announced today. Of note on the American end is the world premiere of Nathan Silver’s Stinking Heaven, which I covered on a set visit this summer, and the international premiere of Britni West’s Tired Moonlight, starring Alex Karpovsky. There’s also a generous helping of some of last year’s most notable festival circuit […]
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Creative Capital Announces 2015 Moving Image and Visual Arts Awardees
Creative Capital, the granting and artist support organization, announced today its 2015 awardees in the categories of Moving Image and Visual Arts. Out of 3,700 submitted proposals, 46 projects were funded with the 50 supported artists ranging in age from 28 to 80. More than half our women, and and more than half identify as non-European American. Among the grantees are a number of artists who will be recognized by the Filmmaker readership. Here are just a few of them. Veteran director Michael Almereyda receives his first Creative Capital grant for a series of short films based on Italian folktales. […]
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Hiding in Plain Sight: The Beijing Queer Film Festival
My usual questions as I get ready for a film festival are whether we’ll be able to sell out the show and how the audience and local press will react. Preparing for the Beijing Queer Film Festival last September, I had a different sort of concern: would I be able to show our film without being arrested? The festival had invited me, my partner Joe Wilson and our main character, Hina Wong-Kalu, to screen Kumu Hina, a documentary about Hina’s life as a highly regarded native Hawaiian teacher and cultural leader who just happens to be māhū, or transgender. Because […]
