This is not production designer Bart Mangrum’s first movie at the Sundance Film Festival. He designed Septien (2011, directed by Michael Tully) and I Used To Be Darker (2013, directed by Matt Porterfield), and was both an on-set dresser and extra in Stoker (2012, directed by Chan-wook Park). But this is the first time Mangrum has been at Sundance as the production designer of two feature films screening in the same category. Mangrum was born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, and still lives there. His father ignited his enthusiasm for art by teaching him how to draw during church around […]
Another vampire flick? For her debut film, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, Ana Lily Amirpour shrugged off suggestions that the genre’s been tapped one too many times in crafting a Lynch and Leone mash-up that gets to the root of our fascination with the timeless character. Shot in black and white and set to a distinctive soundtrack, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night unfolds in the depraved (and fictional) Bad City, where a vampiric young woman and loner forge an unlikely love story. Filmmaker spoke with Amirpour about the stylistic influences and flourishes in the film, as well as its […]
This is my fourth year attending the Sundance Film Festival, but my first as a producer with a film playing. In the last few years I have come as a spectator, volunteer, fan, and writer, but yesterday I premiered a film as a co-producer. Our film, Memphis, premiered Friday morning in the NEXT section to a sold-out audience. Last year I chronicled my experience at the festival through a barrage of photos of films I went to, meetings I took, and parties I enjoyed as I tried hard to hustle and find traction with some projects — one of which […]
“I couldn’t figure out if I was acting or telling the truth,” said singer Willis Earl Beal, making his film debut in Tim Sutton’s Memphis, at the movie’s U.S. Sundance Film Festival premiere yesterday. “That’s the way it is with my life. I’m trying to be real but I can’t. Or, if I am being real people don’t recognize it as that.” Beal — not from the film’s eponymous city, but like his character, a mysterious figure whose obliquely impassioned DIY soul soars over crackly, homemade backdrops — inflects Sutton’s film with his own very artful dodgery. Indeed, the spirit […]
For some, it is what they’ve been waiting for, a dream come true, a chance to finally make good on years of lonely work. For others, it is a terrifying minefield of certain humiliation. It is: TALKING ABOUT YOUR FILM. A theoretical dream come true – finally, someone wants to hear me talk about my film! Giving Good Press is a fine art, and, in some cases, a blood sport. The blog machine, the Twittersphere, the critic ratings, the Gray Ladies of print reviews — at a film festival, perhaps for the first time, directors are expected to satisfy their […]
Director Joseph Oxford and cinematographer Bradley Stonesifer created an imaginary world using cardboard boxes and rubber bands for their animated short film Me + Her. A labor of love that evolved over four years, their work was rewarded when the film was accepted into Sundance’s Short Film program. Oxford has worked in the industry since 2007 in a variety of roles, including production assistant and art director, but Me + Her is his first project as writer and director. Oxford first met cinematographer Stonesifer through a director friend, and they both worked on the film The Vicious Kind in 2008. […]
While Hollywood continues to generate three-dimensional spectacles, directors, industry pundits and audiences all continue to question the technology’s validity. In a recent story in The Hollywood Reporter highlighting the DVD release of The Wolverine, which includes a 3D Blu-ray, director James Mangold said, “The question is whether 3D will survive or not,” adding, “Is it more than a gimmick and can we make it more than a gimmick?” And after ESPN announced last June that it would shut down its three-year-old 3D sports channel by the end of 2013, Variety’s David S. Cohen explored both the predictions of total demise […]
The instructions are easy enough: Communicate your project idea in three pages. I think, “Great, I can bang this out in a day or two.” I sit at my desk and wait for the words to pour forth. And this is when my brain likes to take vacation. As 2014 rolls in and I am applying for grants for my new documentary project, I wish I could tell you that it gets easier to pen grant proposals each time I do it. Let me be honest: grant writing is tedious. It’s as much fun as writing a manual on video […]
Women, this is our year. I don’t say this because I’ve got numbers to back me up (because I don’t), or because I’m generally an overly optimistic cheerleader of life (though I am). I say this because it’s our only choice. This has to be our year. As Sundance kicks off in Park City, a large handful of women are about to debut their new films and fresh voices to the world. And after interviewing almost all of them myself I can say, in my most eloquent terms, that this year’s slate of Sundance female filmmakers is absolutely badass. The […]
Alternately lulling and urgent, otherworldly and deeply intimate, visionary filmmaker Godfrey Reggio’s Visitors is a film like no other. With its 74 shots — most feature films have hundreds if not thousands — and exquisite black-and-white imagery, it is, as Reggio says, “the odd one in” in today’s multiplex environment. And even with its Philip Glass score — mournful, haunting and one of the composer’s best — it still feels radically different than Reggio and Glass’s previous collaborations, the poetic films comprising the “Qatsi Trilogy.” No less visually seductive than those works, the non-narrative Visitors uses its images — which […]