Independent films get made, often miraculously, and we cover those films here at Filmmaker. But what about all those other projects that never, despite the best of intentions, make it through production, much less hit theaters? In this new series, “Letters from Blocked Filmmakers,” we’ll be hearing from directors who have struggled for years to realize their films only to come up short. Is the system to blame? Bad luck? Themselves? I’ll let the filmmakers answer these questions in their own words. I’m happy to be opening this series with this letter from Drew Whitmire, who has been attempting to […]
Kristyn Ulanday and Max Esposito graduated from the journalism department of Boston University in 2010. They both work commercially as freelance photographers and filmmakers, but in 2011 they also began a collaborative project called Full Frame America to tell the stories they wanted to tell. The first result of that collaboration is a 24-minute documentary, The Druid City, that focuses on the town of Tuscaloosa, Alabama and how the residents have coped after the town was hit by an EF4 tornado in April 2011. Filmmaker: How did you come to make this movie? Esposito: We both felt like we […]
Since Vine was launched a little less than a year ago it’s gotten a fair amount of attention from the technology press but not as much, it seems, from filmmakers. The premise, that all films must be limited to six seconds, doesn’t lend itself to narrative films; it has, rather, been a gathering place for stop-motion animators, encouraged by its use of iOS device screens as the camera shutter, and, more famously, porn. But the app has proven nearly as popular as Twitter, which bought it last October, and just this month it became the most-downloaded free app in the […]
A quick public service announcement, in case you’re not aware that the deadlines for Independent Film Week — organized by IFP, the publisher of Filmmaker magazine — are quickly approaching. Here’s all the info you should need: Independent Film Week (September 15-19, 2013) is the oldest and largest forum in the U.S. for the discovery of new projects in development and new voices on the independent film scene. The Project Forum is a meetings-driven forum connecting filmmakers with producers, funders, distributors, broadcasters, sales agents, festival programmers, and more. The three sections of the Project Forum with open applications are: Emerging […]
Jeff Nichols, a product of the vibrant class of the North Carolina School of the Arts film program that also produced David Gordon Green, Craig Zobel, Michael Tully, Jody Hill, Tim Orr, and Danny McBride, announced himself as a highly talented young filmmaker with his 2007 debut Shotgun Stories. The slow-burning rural drama was gorgeously shot in Scope and revealed Nichols’ ambition to create cinema on a big canvas, even when his budgets were small. Four years later, his sophomore feature, Take Shelter, about a father who believes an apocalyptic storm is coming, caught the imagination of both critics and […]
Youth culture didn’t start in the ’60s. In the parlance of today’s teens, the appropriate response to this might be “duh.” Teenage, director Matt Wolf’s artful new non-fiction film, uncovers the “hidden history” of youth culture and locates its origins in various youth movements in the first half of the 20th century. From German Swing kids to American Victory Girls, the film offers a veritable lexicon of lost teen vocabulary (“teen canteen,” “buzz bucket,” “boogie in the strut hut”), and reminds us that the invention of teenager culture depended on the invention of a new language — and one that […]
In the eighth part of Filmmaker‘s interview project with prominent figures from the world of transmedia, conducted through the MIT Open Documentary Lab, Vivek Bald, filmmaker, Associate Professor of Writing and Digital Media at MIT and a member of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, answers our questions. Bald’s ongoing project, Bengali Harlem, documents the history of two little-known groups of South Asian immigrants. For an introduction to this entire series, and links to all the installments so far, check out “Should Filmmakers Learn to Code,” by MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Sarah Wolozin. MIT Open Documentary Lab: How did you become a digital storyteller? Were there […]
What hath Veronica Mars wrought? When Kickstarter began, it was a place for projects that couldn’t find their money elsewhere. Projects that didn’t fit into easy categories. Projects from people without access to typical funding sources. Over the years, it’s morphed into many other things, including a pre-sale marketplace for new tech gizmos. The latest is a Money Guy Free Zone for Hollywood names. First, Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas turned to Kickstarter to fund what the owner of its IP, Warner Bros, would not. (Aiming for $2 million he raised $5 million). Now, Garden State director Zach Braff is […]
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty is such a fine, rare bird: Terence Nance’s Gotham Award-winning debut film is, regardless of its aesthetic pyrotechnics and self-reflexivity (it consists of a series of short experimental films that radically deconstruct Nance’s romantic foibles), wholly, fully, truly accessible to everyone. If Hollis Frampton and Nina Paley had somehow, through the force of magic realism, had a black love child, it would have grown up to direct something like this. It’s altogether unusual strategy for detailing Nance’s obsessive courtship of a young woman named Namik Minter — using reenactments, direct address, doc interviews, stop-motion and traditional animation to […]
We recently ran a series of articles on the filmmakers shortlisted for the San Francisco Film Society’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation grants, and the eight projects which were chosen to receive support were as follows: Jonas Carpignano, writer/director — A Chjana — $45,000 for preproduction Grainger David, writer/director — Nocturne (working title) — $35,000 for screenwriting Ian Hendrie and Jyson McLean, co-writers/directors/producers — Mercy Road — $40,000 for development Maryam Keshavarz and Paolo Marinou-Blanco, cowriters — The Last Harem — $35,000 for screenwriting Richard Levien, writer/director and Chad Burris, producer — La Migra — $20,000 for development Tommy Oliver, writer/director/producer — […]