If you were desperate to know who was on the other end of Dr. Ryan Stone’s radio as she said her final goodbyes in Gravity, your prayers have been answered. Jonas Cuarón, Alfonso’s son and Gravity‘s co-writer, cajoled Warner Home Video into financing a companion piece to one of the heralded blockbuster’s many climatic segments, a seven-minute short called Aningaaq. After playing a handful of film festivals — including Telluride, where it preceded not the obvious choice, but John Curran’s Tracks — Aningaaq has found its way online, in conjunction with Warner Brothers’ announcement that it will be a Live Action Short submission for the 2014 Oscars. […]
Credit Bob Dylan and a 48-year-old song for the best music video of the moment. In “Like a Rolling Stone,” Dylan and co. create a channel-hopping interactive experience in which no two viewings are the same. Click through 16 different channels to watch various TV presenters, reality-show folk, celebrities and, oh yeah, Dylan himself, lip-sync to the song. From the press release: Nearly a half-century later, a groundbreaking interactive project has been created for the song, allowing fans to experience the classic recording in unprecedented ways. Celebrities and reality stars are featured throughout the various channels including cameos by Drew […]
“I feel so sorry for people who are not living in Detroit,” says activist icon Grace Lee Boggs, as she stands before a dilapidated cityscape in the opening sequence of American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs. A Marxist and lifelong Hegel disciple, the Chinese-American Lee Boggs gained notoriety in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, alongside her husband Jimmy Boggs, in the mid-20th Century. Today, she is still ardently devoted to her adopted hometown of more than half a century, galvanizing the local communities in her effort to revive the industrial wasteland that has become of Detroit. […]
As a longtime writer for both big and small screens and a member of Christopher Guest’s regular comic ensemble, Jim Piddock was an ideal creative collaborator on Guest’s 2013 TV series, Family Tree, which recently came out on DVD through HBO. The show centers on Tom Chadwick (Chris O’Dowd), a newly unemployed and recently single Londoner who breaks out of his stagnant funk by researching his family’s genealogical roots, discovering a branch of relatives in the U.S. and ultimately traveling across the pond to meet his Stateside kin. Piddock co-wrote Family Tree with Guest and also produced and acted in […]
The following is a guest post by writer/director Stelana Kiliris, who previously wrote about the pre-production stages on her film Committed. Picture it: a smooth beige 1958 Mercedes convertible parked in the dust; its plush red interior enveloped by layers and layers of white tulle attached to a bride, sitting next to a man in a dark blue suit. Look closer and you’ll see the sun beating down and ice packs tucked in every crevice while a make-up artist furiously dabs at the couple’s faces. The crew swirls around the car as they prepare for the final shot of the […]
“I don’t even really understand the second act,” a filmmaker said to me just last week. He obviously hadn’t read Syd Field’s Screenplay, which is nothing if not about act structure: the first, second and third acts, but also the inciting incident, pinch one, plot point one, midpoint, pinch two, plot point two and resolution. When I started reading scripts — both as a professional gig and as a producer — Field’s was the book to have on your shelf, and, setting aside Aristotle, was the one that ratified a storytelling paradigm that exists to this day. As a script […]
The following is a guest post from Jeremy Xido, the director of Death Metal Angola, which screens at DOC NYC on November 16. A few years ago, I was traveling through Angola researching a film about a railway when I stopped at the only cafe in Huambo, the country’s bombed-out second city, that served a decent cup of coffee. A young man with tiny dreadlocks in a blue button-down Oxford shirt waved me over. I sat with him for a while and chatted. We talked about what I was doing there and I asked him about himself. He said he […]
Last night at the Times Centre in New York, BRITDOC’s Puma Impact Award was bestowed upon the visibly shell-shocked filmmakers behind the year’s most innovative film, The Act of Killing. Director Joshua Oppenheimer, co-director Christine Cynn, and producer Signe Byrge Sørensen assumed the stage to collect their iridescent trophy – and its accompanying 50,000 Euro prize, to be split between the team and their activist efforts – from jurors Susan Sarandon, Zadie Smith, and Ricken Patel. Absent were two members of the jury, Gael García Bernal and Eric Schlosser, but, perhaps more notably, The Act of Killing’s anonymous co-director and 60 crew […]
The following is a guest post from filmmaker Bryan Poyser, who is currently crowdfunding the road show for his most recent film, The Bounceback. Bryan’s A.S.A. (Air Sexes As) name is “Lunchmeat.” I am currently in the midst of what must be the longest month and a half of my life. On October 4, we launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a “Road Show” for my film The Bounceback, which will wrap up this Sunday, Nov. 17th. I’ve barely been sleeping, I’ve had depressive lows and giddy highs, nearly all of my pride has been swallowed and yet […]
Only 32% of the world’s population has access to the Internet. That figure, coming from the organization A Human Right, means that 4.6 billion people are effectively left out of the Information Age that most of us take for granted. Individuals and organizations across the world are working to ameliorate that and spread online connectivity into underdeveloped and rural areas from the U.S. to Kazakhstan. And films like Tiffany Shlain’s Connected (2011) are starting to probe what can happen to global consciousness when the collective wisdom of the world, not just our meager social networks, are finally truly linked together. […]