Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Kate Logan Discusses Religion in Documentary and Kidnapped for Christ
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 […]
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2014 Academy Awards Nominations
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 […]
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Hidden Horror: Philip Ridley’s The Reflecting Skin
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 […]
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Columbia Professor Tim Wu Responds to Manohla Dargis’s “Too Many Movies” Argument
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 […]
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Astonishing Surfing Video Shows Power of Camera Drones
The technology cited by Filmmaker‘s Michael Murie in his 2013 Camera Tech Year-End Review is behind a beautiful surfing video by Eric Cheng that seems to be embedded on just about every site this morning. Five minutes of surfing bliss captured at Steamer Lane in Santa Cruz, California, the video features aerial shots of surfers, singly and in formation, that previously would have required expensive helicopter shoots. According to Cheng’s Tumblr, the footage was “taken with a DJI Phantom quadcopter, GoPro HERO3 Black edition camera, Rotorpixel HERO3 gimbal (http://rotorpixel.com), ReadyMadeRC FPV transmitter, receiver, and remote monitor, and modified DJI Phantom […]
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Hidden Horror: Wallace Worsely’s The Penalty
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. “Laughter burns a cripple like acid.” Having kids is hell for your hobbies. After adopting my son, Nicholas, I returned home to discover my father-in-law had boxed up all my DVDs and stored them in the garage to make room for a crib, mobiles, and large, brightly-colored pieces of plastic that light up and buzz. It was […]
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2014 MacArthur Grants Announced
In our imminent Winter 2014 issue, Joy Dietrich penned a helpful piece on grant writing for documentarians, in which she surveyed recipients of Cinereach, Creative Capital, Sundance, MacArthur, ITVS and Tribeca funding. Fortuitous timing then that MacArthur released its 2014 grants this morning to the tune of $2 million for 18 different documentary projects. The films tackle such disparate hot button issues as immigration, health care, carbon trading, elderly care and the drug trade. Keeping up with the times, there’s even an interactive web platform designed around global youth communities. Said MacArthur President Robert Gallucci, “This year’s documentaries illuminate serious issues […]
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Vimeo on Demand Announces 13 TIFF Acquisitions
Shortly before the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, Vimeo issued an offer to attending filmmakers. Let us have exclusive digital rights to your film for 30 days via our distribution platform, Vimeo on Demand, and we’ll give you a $10,000 advance. After that window — or until we recoup the $10,000, whichever comes first — we’ll provide our standard 90/10 revenue split, and you’re free to take your film elsewhere. I remember thinking it was a bold move, ripe for the “best of both worlds” scenario so many modern independent filmmakers desire. But would anyone be game? Turns out, more than […]
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What’s Ego Got to Do With It? At Sundance’s Arthouse Convergence, Ira Deutchman Imagines the Future of Specialty Exhibition
Just delivered in Utah at Sundance’s pre-festival 2014 Arthouse Convergence — where specialty exhibitors gather to discuss and debate trends, developments and threats to their collective business model — Ira Deutchman’s keynote is a witty and forward-thinking speech that looks to the past to consider reshaping the future. In his opening, Deutchman cites two truths he learned early on in his career: First, I learned that Business is dominated by people who are driven, sometimes myopic, and willing to do almost anything to succeed. The second thing I learned is that the Film Business, specifically, is driven more by ego […]
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Jerry Lewis’s The Total Film-Maker Available Online
The Total Film-Maker, that invaluable manuscript culled from 480 hours of Jerry Lewis lectures at the University of Southern California, made its way online last week, courtesy of Cinephilia and Beyond. The out-of-print book, which can fetch up to $500 a copy, is now available in PDF form, free of charge, for anyone interested in ingesting every pace of the directorial process from the definitive filmmaker-comic. Conversational and anecdotal, Lewis relates advice and observations that often demonstrate that though the years may change, the times stay the same. His chapter “The Money Man” concludes, “There is a trend back toward low-budget films […]
