Evan Louison last wrote about Abel Ferrara for Filmmaker‘s 25th anniversary issue in his report, “Letter from Rome.” Given the assignment to interview Ferrara in conjunction with his month-long MoMA retrospective, Louison responded with a five-part personal memoir that tracks the impact of the director and his work on his own life. Check back each day this week for the next in the series, and read Part One here. What REDEMPTION? “I’m just here to raise the flag of compassion and forgiveness, in a society that’s being overrun by hatred and violence.” Weekends in Manhattan, looking over your shoulder, anonymous […]

Evan Louison last wrote about Abel Ferrara for Filmmaker‘s 25th anniversary issue in his report, “Letter from Rome.” Given the assignment to interview Ferrara in conjunction with his month-long MoMA retrospective, Louison responded with a five-part personal memoir that tracks the impact of the director and his work on his own life. Check back each day this week for the next in the series. Nobody’s CLEAN New York became our only school and we made that trip by train or else in Nicky’s black house painted VW a 1000 times… Seeing Kazan arguing with Nicholas Ray on a street corner… […]

Most of the big news that comes out of NAB you’ll hear about, whether you’re there or not. Where NAB gets interesting is when you wonder around the cavernous Las Vegas Convention center, especially towards the back or perimeters, and stumble on some interesting gems of tools that might a unique solution or make production life just a tiny bit easier. Here’s a round-up of some of the smaller finds from NAB (as well as a few bigger ones), all focused around production (post-production is coming up next).  Litra Litra has some amazingly clever battery-powered portable LED lights. The LitraPro […]

With Zia Anger’s My First Film performance presented by Anger tomorrow at The Metrograph, here, from our Winter, 2019 print issue, is a conversation between Anger and filmmaker and artist Jillian Mayer, moderated by Sarah Salovaara, about all the various topics raised by the film, including how we measure success and failure in the independent world. Following the Metrograph performance, My First Film will play Sheffield Doc Fest June 7. From 2010 to 2012, Zia Anger, whose short, I Remember Nothing, landed her on Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Film list in 2015, made a microbudget feature film in her […]

Amy Dotson, Deputy Director and Head of Programming at IFP, Filmmaker‘s publisher, will be leaving the organization to become the Director of Portland’s Northwest Film Center. She’ll begin this new position in September, when she will also become Film and New Media Curator at the Portland Art Museum, a connected entity and where the Film Center stages its annual Portland International Film Festival. From the press release issued by the Museum and Film Center: In her new role, which she begins in September 2019, Dotson will be responsible for the overall vision of the Film Center, including strategic planning, fundraising, […]

As a film journo who usually prefers celebrating the fruits of cinematic labor over covering the messy business of making the product I’m often a bit squeamish when it comes to observing pitch sessions (in no small part due to the glaring abundance of older white faces dangling the purse strings). Fortunately, the folks behind the two-decade-old Hot Docs Forum, which utilizes the appropriately Harry Potter-esque, neo-Gothic Hart House student center at the University of Toronto, do an expert job of combining industry necessity with collegial fun. This is perhaps best evidenced by the Forum’s Cuban Hat Award, a prize […]

I have a Master’s degree, but my return to school as a 33-year-old wasn’t to chase a Ph.D. In my re-entry to so-called academia, I didn’t even crack a book open. The extent of my reading came in the form of reviewing consent waivers that outlined how I couldn’t take legal action against anyone who set me on fire or threw me off of scaffolding. I told acquaintances that I was leaving town for a couple of weeks for some continuing education, which was partially true. The detail I left out was that I was learning how to become a […]

Originally published on June 13, 2016, the following report of John Singleton’s Q&A with Walter Mosley preceding the 25th anniversary release of the director’s Boyz in the Hood is being reposted today alongside the tremendously sad news that Singleton passed away in Los Angeles following a stroke. Made when he was only 24-years-old, Boyz in the Hood — tough, indelible, richly observed and disarmingly sensitive — was a landmark work that garnered Singleton a Best Director Oscar nomination. (As Ashley Clark notes in his intro below, he became the first African-American and youngest person to be nominated for this award.) […]

New Jersey-born Kevin McMullin, a shorts and commercial director who runs the NYC production outfit Boy and Star, makes his feature debut in the Tribeca Film Festival’s Narrative Competition with the location-rich teen crime drama Low Tide. Alan (Keean Johnson), Red (Alex Neustaedter), and Smitty (Daniel Zolghadri) spend their summer breaking into houses along the Jersey Shore, an enterprise that escalates from youthful petty crime into something much darker when one particularly valuable score — a bag of gold coins — is discovered. The gang is fractured apart, a division exacerbated by the presence of the local beauty, Mary (Kristine […]

From 1979, just before the launch of CNN, to 2012, when she passed away, Marion Stokes — an African-American Philadelphia woman, communist, public access television host, collector of Apple computers, media critic — recorded continuous streams of 24-hour-cable news on VHS tapes that piled, floor to ceiling, the various apartments she owned throughout the city. (Born into wealth, Stokes, a fan of Steve Jobs, convinced her family trust to buy Apple stock at $7, long before the iPod.) Conserving stock by recording in extended play mode, she employed assistants who’d shuffle tapes in and out of the eight or so […]