Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Five Questions with Kill Your Darlings Director John Krokidas
After premiering his short film at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002, director John Krokidas vowed to be back two years later with his first feature film. Krokidas found that it took a bit longer than anticipated to get his film to Park City, but eleven long years later, Kill Your Darlings premieres in competition today at Sundance. The Beat generation has been a popular subject of films lately, but rather than adapt a Kerouac book or Ginsberg poem, Krokidas follows the nascent writers during their days at Columbia University and one particular event that shaped their future work and careers. In 1944, […]
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Five Questions with Emanuel and the Truth About Fishes Director Francesca Gregorini
Emanuel and the Truth About Fishes is Francesca Gregorini’s second feature film, but her first solo directorial undertaking. Influenced strongly by surrealism and her own personal struggles with loss, Gregorini’s film, which she also wrote, follows a teenage girl, Emanuel (Kaya Scodelario, Wuthering Heights), who struggles to comprehend her mother’s death. When a woman eerily similar to her deceased mom moves in next door, Emanuel finds ways to interact with her and develop a new relationship, learning they have more in common than anticipated. Emanuel and the Truth About Fishes explores how both children and adults cope with death and […]
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Unknown Pleasures: Viewing U.S. Indie Cinema From Afar
Catering to virtually every niche, Berlin offers some 70 film festivals each year. Since 2009, the first on the calendar has been the Unknown Pleasures Festival. Held during the first two weeks of January at the historic Babylon Cinema in former East Berlin, it is a work of love run entirely by three enthusiasts of US independent cinema, providing a sorely needed platform for recent American arthouse films. This year’s edition opened on a disappointing note with the German premiere of Michel Gondry’s The We and the I. Typically saccharine and contrived, Gondry’s latest portrays a group of Bronx teens […]
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How to Succeed at Self-Distribution if You’re Not Louis C.K.
James Swirsky & Lisanne Pajot are the directors, producers and distributors of the Sundance award-winning feature documentary, Indie Game: The Movie. Before we began production on Indie Game: The Movie, we saw Louis C.K. perform in our hometown of Winnipeg, Canada. It was a great show. He was hilarious, and we walked away cemented in the idea that Louis C.K. is one of the funniest people on the planet. Creatively, it’s hard not to be inspired by someone performing at the top of his or her field. However, little did we know, two years later, Louis C.K. would be inspiring […]
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Award-Winning Producer Paul Mezey Joins Cinereach Team
After collaborating with Cinereach for many years on films including Benh Zeitlin’s four time Academy Award-nominated film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Joshua Marston’s The Forgiveness of Blood, and Tom Gilroy’s The Cold Lands (premiering at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival), Paul Mezey has signed on as Producer in Residence at the not-for-profit production company and foundation. Mezey will support development, production and distribution of Cinereach’s films, as well as being involved in the organization’s grant-making activities and other key initiatives. Mezey is the founder of Journeyman Pictures, through which he has produced a number of critically acclaimed and award-winning […]
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The 2013 Art House Convergence | Upstream Color Offers A Unique Case Study
This past Monday night, as temperatures dipped well below zero, film curators and programmers from America’s art house cinemas gathered in a screening room in Midway, Utah, for a unique screening opportunity at the annual Art House Convergence. Shane Carruth, the Sundance award winning director of Primer, brought his new film, the highly anticipated Upstream Color, to the conference to show the film directly to art house cinema programmers a full week before the film’s World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. And while writers (like I) have been asked to embargo our thoughts on the film itself until the […]
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7 Recommended No-Budget Post-Production Tools
Being an independent filmmaker means we are often times working with very little money but still making our projects happen. We use any tools and tricks we can get our hands on to help us finish or enhance our films. Of course these have to fit within our budgetary constraints. Here is a list of post production tools that are affordable for the no budget filmmaker. 1. Blender – 3D Modeling & Animation (Win, Linux & Mac) I’m constantly amazed at what this FREE program can do. It includes many features found in competing 3D apps that cost hundreds and many […]
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The Sundance Question: What Did You Sacrifice to Make Your Film?
Each year, Filmmaker asks the Sundance Film Festival feature directors a question about their filmmaking process. We then compile any and all of the directors’ feedback and bring it to our readers courtesy of our “Sundance Responses.” This year we asked: “What did you sacrifice to make your film? Or, did your film itself have to make a significant sacrifice in order to be produced? And, looking back, how do you value that sacrifice now?” We’ll upload the responses individually, the day of each film’s premiere. So, as the festival progresses, click the links below. The Sundance Film Festival is being […]
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Second-Time Director: Kyle Patrick Alvarez and C.O.G.
Industry veterans and fresh faces alike are descending onto Park City this week, and for filmmakers with premieres it’s a heady mixture of excitement and anxiety. Writer/director Kyle Patrick Alvarez is among this crowd, ready for not only his film’s first screening, but his personal festival debut. It’s a significant career-high for the second-time director, but Alvarez is approaching the week with the well-worn wisdom his first feature brought. Alvarez wasted little time in launching his industry career. Immediately after graduating from University of Miami’s film program, Alvarez moved straight to Los Angeles and landed a job as Warren Beatty’s […]
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Cinereach Announces 2012 Grant Recipients
Cinereach announced today that it has awarded over $500,000 in grants to 22 feature-length film projects that applied for support in 2012. More than 2,000 applications were submitted, from filmmakers based in upwards of 100 countries. The 22 grantees in this round are comprised of twelve non-fiction films, seven fiction films, and three hybrids. The fourteen new grantees range from the early development stages to late post-production. The renewed support went primarily towards the completion of prior grantees’ films, including Cutie and the Boxer, God Loves Uganda and Narco Cultura, which will premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, and […]
