“The social web can’t exist until you are your real self online,” said Sheryl Sandberg on Charlie Rose last year. “I have to be ‘me’, and you have to be ‘Charlie Rose,’” the Facebook COO told the talk show host. “It’s me” — that single line appearing late in Leos Carax’s Holy Motors unexpectedly devastated me at the film’s Cannes premiere, and perhaps its memory is what’s causing me to recall Sandberg’s statement, which is certainly in line with similar comments by her boss, Mark Zuckerberg. In an age in which online platforms offer the possibility for anyone to craft for themselves a variety […]
Technology, collaboration and the rewards of spontaneous thinking — hackathons harness all three in events that are equal parts meet-up and late-night college term-paper deadline marathon. These multi-day crash sessions are popular in the tech world, gathering strategists, designers and developers to produce everything from fleshed-out concepts to fully designed apps. But does the hackathon format have anything to offer film? Can the problems of independent film — challenges of audience-building, discovery, and monetization — find their solutions in such accelerated brainstorming? Bond Influence and Strategy sought to find out this past weekend with Hacking Film, New York’s first film-centric […]
When the maternal grandmother of Arnon Goldfinger dies, the documentary filmmaker is confronted with the lifetime of furniture, gloves and books she left behind in the Tel Aviv apartment she shared with his grandfather. After he begins to document the long process of cleaning out and distributing the items among family members, an unexpected possession rises to the top: a newspaper article which hints at family ties to the Nazis. The Flat (which opens on Friday through Sundance Selects) follows Goldfinger’s initial question of how the article came to be in the apartment, and how it connects to his grandparents […]
You cannot create a film career by crowdfunding. Let me say it again. If you believe that crowdfunding has the potential to reach levels that will allow you to make movies on a consistent basis, movies that can compete with commercial fare or even modestly budgeted union-made films, you are going to be severely disappointed. I’m assuming that a career in film is what you want. But if your only goal is to get a project produced and have it seen by those who attend the hundreds of film festivals in the U.S. or the thousands of festivals that have […]
The Dragons & Tigers section has been the richest part of VIFF’s legacy, dating back to 1994. Each year, the Award for Young Cinema has highlighted an as yet unrecognized talent of East Asian cinema. This year the Dragons & Tigers jury was made up of Shinozaki Makoto, Joao Pedro Rodrigues and Chuck Stephens. I was able to see a few films from the competition, including the winner Emperor Visits the Hell, directed by Li Luo. An often perplexing, but always interesting film, Li’s movie transports a story (three chapters) from the Ming Dynast novel Journey to the West to […]
Stereotypes exist for a reason. They exist because they’re usually true, or at least they stem from a truth. For example, when filming in the countryside on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, a stereotypical image would be that of a herd of goats meandering through the set. Cliché? Unrealistic? Yet, this is exactly what happened every morning at 11am sharp while we shot a local feature film earlier this year. The sound man would roll his eyes in frustration, being the first to hear the clinking of their bells, the crew would move their gear out of the way and […]
A mainstream production with a mainstream star, Sinister employs such horror movie tropes as a nice family moving into a new house with a past, the supernatural traveling through photographs and movies, and suspiciously troubled children. Yet despite its potentially cliché setup, the film feels unexpectedly fresh; a mash-up of ghost story, serial killer thriller, and Ringu-style photo-phobia that is more than the sum of its parts. The film is anchored by a story of believable domestic strain, and probes slightly deeper than many films in its exploration of the primal idea that images, like the film itself, represent a […]
In what is easily the most informative internet message board thread I’ve ever come across, “birth – Harris Savides,” which was started on Cinematography.com by a young man you may have heard of named Jody Lipes on November 1, 2004, the conversation turns around midway through to the aggressive underexposure used by Savides on Birth (pictured above). One of the forum’s members, who claimed to have worked on Birth, explained that Savides underexposed the film two stops, and then pulled it two additional stops, netting a total underexposure of four stops – which seems to have sent the head of […]
Earlier this week, Filminute — the short film competition which Filmmaker partnered with last month — announced the winners of this year’s awards. On the site in September, we featured five one-minute films: Christian Fischer’s Indian Mystery, Stijn Ghijsen and Tara Fallaux’s Sarina, Rafael Morais and Vijessna Ferkic’s Still Here, Ant Blades’ Wildebeest and Jeanne and Louise Traon’s Colloque Sentimental. Here’s the release: LONDON/BUCHAREST/TORONTO, October 10, 2012 – Awards for the 7th edition of Filminute, the international one-minute film festival, were announced today. UK director Ant Blade’s dramatic and hilarious animation CHOP CHOP took top honours with the jury, while fellow […]
Gayby might be the first feature from writer/director Jonathan Lisecki, but its ace comic timing and deft depiction of physical humor suggest a seasoned comedic maestro. Expanded from a short that Lisecki shopped around the festival circuit in 2010 (it debuted at Slamdance and went on to hit more than 100 venues), the film is easily one of the year’s funniest, much thanks to its maker’s classic instincts for drumming up laughs. A veteran of independent theater, Lisecki couples a sharp, knowing wit with a mature sense of benevolence, yielding a well-rounded comedy for a demographic that desperately needs it. […]