Dinosaur 13, the opening night film in the doc competition section, just became the first non-fiction acquisition of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. In a deal brokered by the film’s sales agent, Josh Braun of Submarine, Lionsgate and CNN Films bought North American rights for the buzz doc, which chronicles the real-life drama following the discovery in 1990 of the remains of “Sue,” the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex ever found. Dinosaur 13 will play theatrically through Lionsgate before having a TV premiere through CNN. The beautifully shot Dinosaur 13 had a lot of interest going into the fest, but […]
You may have heard of Laura Dekker, the Dutch wunderkind who announced at the ripe old age of 13 that she planned to sail around the world, by herself. Despite initial intervention attempts by her home government, Ms. Dekker set off from Gibraltar in August of 2010, in her 38-footer by the name of “Guppy,” and arrived in Sint Maarten 16 months later, fully intact. Much like her subject, Jillian Schlesinger did not go the safe route in her first full-length voyage as a filmmaker. A project four years in the making, with no opportunities for reshoots or reenactments, Schlesinger’s […]
Even though technology-focused artist Jonathan Harris has a project at Sundance New Frontier — I Love Your Work, a documentary about the makers of lesbian porn experienced in your own private viewing booth — he’s been stuck. Creatively stuck, that is. And at Transom, he’s penned (and illustrated) an essay, “Navigating Stuckness,” that is both a meditation on creative block as well as, writes the site, “an autobiographical journey with teachable moments.” He’s broken down the stages of his creativity by years, tracking his life alongside projects like the data visualization work We Feel Fine, the storytelling platform Cowbird and […]
Attention, our audience’s and our own — it’s a valued commodity these days. We struggle to command our audience’s attention, for them to discover our work and then, once they’ve discovered it, to actually focus on it. Meanwhile, we struggle to focus our own attention, to fight our society’s weapons of mass distraction so we can not just see our work to completion but fully discover the meanings within it. What role does attention play in your work? Can you discuss an instance where you thought about some aspect of attention when it came to your film? I’m the kind […]
Curious about the physical process of turning a short into a feature, Filmmaker magazine interviewed the producers of three separate films about their experiences. Each film was originally a short that previously premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and is now a feature making its World Premiere in the U.S. Dramatic Competition section. Last year director Damien Chazelle’s short won the Jury Prize at Sundance. This year, his feature of the same name, Whiplash, is the festival’s Opening Night feature. Transformed from an intense 15-minute short into a 105-minute full-length film, Whiplash maintained the same producing team but had to […]
It’s a busy 10 days for news breaks as Sundance is now officially underway. To start things off, Vimeo has just announced its partnership with crowdfunding platforms Indiegogo, Kickstarter and Seed&Spark, in a program that will allow them to cherry pick projects that have raised at least $10,000 for an exclusive digital premiere window on Vimeo on Demand. In exchange, the filmmakers will receive free Vimeo Pro accounts and access to a $500,000 Audience Development Fund to aid in project promotion. This announcement comes on the heals of Vimeo’s acquisition of 13 TIFF titles that will stream exclusively on VoD […]
Making a documentary about religion can be a tightrope walk. While there is frequently much to criticize within religious communities and cultures, the trick is investigating these issues without belittling the subjects’ beliefs; when done poorly, films like Bill Maher’s Religulous come off as nothing more than ill-informed and ridiculous themselves. Now Kate Logan, a Los Angeles-based documentary filmmaker with an evangelical background herself, is entering that arena with her first feature, Kidnapped for Christ, which plays at Slamdance this week. The film joins others like last year’s God Loves Uganda and 2010’s Sons of Perdition in looking closely at […]
The Academy Awards are an anomaly in that they manage to inspire outrage and debate around often obvious and safe selections. I could sit here and pout and tell you how shocked I am that Inside Llewyn Davis was “snubbed” in the major categories, but is that surprising given the Academy’s proclivities? This is a body that lives for pomp, circumstance (not for nothing does a David O. Russell film score four acting nominations, two years in a row) and Alexander Payne, the cinematic embodiment of Wonderbread. But let’s focus on the positives: The Act of Killing and the IFP-supported Cutie and the Boxer […]
The following essay appears in the new horror-film anthology, Hidden Horror: A Celebration of 101 Underrated and Overlooked Fright Flicks. Click here for an interview with the book’s editor, Dr. AC as well as for links to four other essays published at Filmmaker. “It’s all so horrible, isn’t it? The nightmare of childhood. And it only gets worse.” The prairie is a paradox: a place of bounty and scarcity, virility and decay, the sublime and the surreal. You can see this in the juxtaposition of lush landscape paintings depicting thick wheat fields, warm sunsets and quaint farmhouses, with black-and-white photos […]
Credit Manohla Dargis for kicking up a big discussion about the intertwined economics and cultural worth of independent film with her much-debated “As Indies Explode, An Appeal for Sanity” published in the New York Times. While her plea to distributors to stop buying so many movies struck Sundance-bound hopefuls as, well, a little mean, others are viewing her commentary in different ways. The latest is Columbia professor and journalist Tim Wu, who has penned a New Yorker response, “More is More in Independent Film.” “Dargis is wrong,” he flat-out writes, “making lots of films to yield a few hits is […]