Filmmaker Magazine’s Winter edition, which premiered last week at Sundance, is now available on newsstands and, for the iPad, on Apple’s App Store. Download the Filmmaker app free, and the issue is only $2.99. And here’s what’s inside: — Straight from Sundance, our cover story on director Shane Carruth, who follows up his cult classic Primer with the mindblowing new feature, Upstream Color. It’s the first major interview with Carruth about his new film, which hits theaters April 5. He discusses his long gap between projects, his cinematography, and his reasons for self-distribution. He also unpacks the meaning of his […]
The best type of filmmaking takes us into worlds we’ve never seen before. Through cinema, we can journey into the past, into the future, to outer space, just around the corner, or to the ends of the world. But there’s one place we haven’t been, until now. A new film, Wadjda, breaks down one giant cinematic barrier, marking the first feature fully shot in Saudi Arabia in the history of film. And on top of that, its director, Haifaa Al Mansour, is a woman. Wadjda, played by Waad Mohammed, is a 10-year-old girl growing up in a world built upon […]
New Yawk New Wave has been running at Film Forum since January 11 but still has a couple of precious days of life left. In a way, it’s one of the more ambitious curatorial projects to emerge from the theater’s august archivists. The series isn’t bound to a single era (it encompasses the period from 1953 to 1973), genre (everything from madcap comedy to downcast drama makes an appearance), or even style (there’s New Wave, cinema vérité, post-noir, and whatever you want to call Robert Downey Sr.’s still-photos-plus-voiceovers oddity, Chafed Elbows). Besides New York origins, the main thing this wildly […]
If you’re shooting a full-length feature, the cost of purchasing, developing and transferring your film to digital can easily be more than the cost of a digital camera. (If your shooting ratio is 4:1, you’d spend over $10,000 for 16mm and $20,000 for 35mm.) And in some cases more than the total budget of your film. It’s no wonder then, that digital cameras have become dominant in indie film production, and that RED, with its head start as an “affordable” digital cinema camera, has become dominant at Sundance. Ted Schilowitz, co-founder of RED Digital Cinema, noted that “there are so […]
Tuesday night at 92Y Tribeca in downtown Manhattan, critics Nick Pinkerton and Nicolas Rapold presented Walter Hill’s 1981 Southern Comfort and the man himself afterwards. “I’m very pleased that you’re looking at this movie 30 years later,” Hill first said when sitting down for a 57-minute Q&A. “You’ve made an old man happy. The movie, when it came out, got mostly bad reviews and did absolutely no business. Did better in Europe and Asia.” “Did better in Europe and Asia” is a common lament for American director prophets without honor in their own country. Hill’s not precisely one of those […]
So I was thinking Don’t Look Now, but my sis had Scooby Doo on her mind as we drifted through the eerie fog on Venice’s Grand Canal. We were headed towards San Zaccaria, where we would catch a boat for the last leg of our journey to San Servolo island. Mai and I met up in Frankfurt — she from L.A. and I from Brooklyn — to fly together into Venice for the Biennale College Cinema, where we would develop and pitch our feature film A Case of the Dismals. The fog thickened as we boarded the waterbus to the […]
The Brazilian drama Neighboring Sounds made it onto many critics’ best-of lists for 2012 and recently won Best Feature at the Cinema Tropical Awards in New York, which recognize excellence in Latin American cinema. The film’s director, Kleber Mendonça Filho, was in town to accept the award and to attend a screening at the Museum of the Moving Image of short films he produced over the last decade. The first of these shorts was made in 2002, the year Fernando Meirelles’ urban epic City of God burst onto the international scene and Madame Satã played at Cannes. In the decade […]
Receiving its international premiere in Rotterdam, Big Boy is photographer and filmmaker Shireen Seno’s lovingly lo-fi, Super 8-shot tale of a young boy, pressured by his family to “grow” — not emotionally but physically. Set in the 1950s, Seno intriguingly remembers in Big Boy a childhood in the Philippines she did not experience. Taking her inspiration from family tales as well as the visual traces previous generations have left behind, Big Boy, in the words of the Rotterdam programmer, is about a Filipino past that is “not only nostalgic, but also about the violence often hidden just below the surface.” […]
Red Giant is known for their effects software, including Magic Bullet Looks, Colorista and Trapcode Particular. But they are also developing a name for themselves with a series of short films that are both entertaining and great demos of how-to-do effects on a budget. It probably doesn’t hurt that they also demonstrate how to use their software too! Director Seth Worley and Aharon Rabinowitz, director of Communities at Red Giant, spoke at a recent meeting of the Boston Creative Pro Users Group about the production of their latest short, Tempo. Worley first came to Red Giant’s attention when the company […]
Film as Software The final installment of this series is about the actual screening of The Lost Children feature film at Film Society of Lincoln Center. In working out this screening, I am working with a concept called “Film as Software.” What exactly does this mean? To me it means film taking on some of the qualities of software. One of those qualities is the ability to react to user input in real time. That’s my take. But I asked Mike and Hal of Murmur to join in on the discussion. Murmur is the hybrid studio/technology company handling the interactive […]