Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Asia Society Announces First Dedicated NYC Retrospective of Uzbek Legend Ali Khamraev
“If there is a giant who sits astride the history of Uzbek cinema, it’s Ali Khamraev, one of those rare talents like Welles or Godard or Scorsese whose love for the medium is so intense that his best films burst with criss-crossing energies and insights, like a fireworks display.” –Kent Jones Ali Khamraev (b. 1937, Tashkent) is one of the great living filmmakers whose work has been too-little-seen in the western world. Throughout his career Khamraev has exhibited extraordinary artistic range, transitioning from realist social dramas to the “Ostern” (“Eastern”) genre of films— which transpose American Western tropes onto the regional history, […]
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“Long Time Artistic Relations Are Fascinating… And Hard to Maintain”: Rick Linklater on “Nouvelle Vague” and “Blue Moon”
One of our most prolific independent American filmmakers, Richard Linklater, now has two new movies in release. Nouvelle Vague and Blue Moon are both evocations of transformative moments in, respectively, narrative cinema and Broadway musical theater. Both are period films, ingenious in form and generous in spirit — in other words they are two of the best films of the year. Nouvelle Vague is set in Paris in 1959, when many of the critics who had formed a community around the magazine Cahiers du Cinema had already directed at least one feature. Desperate to catch-up was Jean-Luc Godard. Nouvelle Vague […]
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“Redemption is a Journey, Not a Destination”: Abel Ferrara on His New Filmmaking Memoir, SCENE
When it comes to filmmaker biographies, the “print the legend” maxim so frequently misattributed to John Ford has long been the preferred coin of the realm. Tales told out of school, dirty details of deals gone wrong, artistic hubris, on-set disasters — such recountings often obscure the actual realities of a filmmaker’s life and career. For much of cinema’s history, it was rare for directors to speak on their own terms, and with some notable exceptions, more important that a memorable narrative be broadcast posthumously. More oft than not, the more outrageous, the better. When written by the filmmakers themselves, […]
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Greenlight Coverage Celebrates Gotham Week Partnership and Recognizes Top Three Projects (Sponsored Post)
Greenlight Coverage was proud to partner with Gotham Week this year, offering script analysis and story development support to a remarkable range of submissions. Out of the many compelling entries, three projects stood out for their creativity, emotional resonance, and cinematic potential: The Ballad of Tita and the Machines, The Poem, and The Camford Experiment. Based on Greenlight’s coverage reports these screenplays ranked among the highest across every evaluation category, earning top marks for storytelling, originality, and thematic depth. The Ballad of Tita and the Machines – Scored 8.7/10 Set against the strawberry fields of California, The Ballad of Tita […]
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The Lights Blinked Through The Smoke: A Filmmaker’s Hazy Memories of the IFC Center, New York City, and a Dirty Bit of Concrete.
My relationship with the stretch of Sixth Avenue running between West 3rd and West 4th Streets, on one corner of which stands New York City’s legendary IFC Center, mirrors my relationship with cinema, bad tattoos, crushing hangovers, and a whole mess of memories that sit in the back of my brain like luggage stuffed in a collapsing mid-flight Ryan Air jet. The relationship is complicated, messy in an overloaded-Papaya-Dog sort of way, and something I profoundly cherish. I’ll back up. I won’t recount the full history of the IFC Center, or that stretch of the city — that’s what Wikipedia’s […]
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Knowing the Rich, Staying in LA (?) and Other Takeaways from the 2025 Film Independent Forum
If it’s true that the rich are getting richer faster than at any point in American history, then independent producers should devise ways to lure their dollars into films. That was one of three recurring finance-focused sentiments expressed at the 20th annual Film Independent Forum, a focused, thoughtfully curated two-day event that took place on 26-27 September at the plush Directors Guild of America headquarters in Los Angeles. Events included a “sacred and private” keynote fireside conversation in the main DGA theater with the sage Gina Prince-Bythewood (on the 25th anniversary of Love and Basketball) led by creator Lena Waithe; […]
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Ken Jacobs (1933-2025)
Ken Jacobs wasn’t just a single (albeit huge) formative force in experimental film, but a river through which an array of streams flowed to their own artistic destinations. For New Yorkers, the Williamsburg native was an easily-sighted local legend: The first time I remember seeing him speak was in 2019 at a MoMI memorial screening of work by Phil Solomon, one of his many notable students at SUNY-Binghamton. Jacobs was in full stentorian mode, taking to the stage to proclaim, by way of sorrowful introduction, that “a teacher should not outlive his students.” Later that year, he was in the […]
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Robert Redford: A Remembrance
On the sad occasion of Robert Redford’s passing, filmmaker Eva Vives pens this guest post on her interactions with the legendary actor, director, environmentalist, activist and Sundance Institute founder. — Editor I first met Redford by chance. Pete Sollett and I had gone to meet Sundance Institute’s Michelle Satter, Founding Senior Director of Sundance Institute’s Artist Programs, at the Sundance offices in New York after our short, Five Feet High and Rising, had won the festival. There was some kind of snafu, and I was asked to wait in an office while they sorted it out. I don’t remember where […]
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Inciting Incident: AI and Screenwriting at DePaul University
Sometime last year, Matt Quinn took an excerpt from a script he’d written and put it into an AI image generator to create a character. The associate professor of screenwriting, who also serves as associate dean for student affairs and director of L.A. programs at DePaul University’s School of Cinematic Arts, feels that it is his job to stay current with new technologies. He had previously experimented with various tools and had mixed feelings about generative AI and its connection to the filmmaking process. However, this experience was different. “It took a second, but it almost took my breath away,” […]
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Production Gear: A Primer on How Tariffs Inflate Costs and Erode Choice, and Why Costs Will Never Come Back Down
L.A. film and TV production, recovering in the long wake of the global pandemic, has been beset by strikes, streaming wars, a generational turn from legacy media, and now AI anxiety. Resulting historic lows in production have meant that industry freelancers are widely out of work. It’s a safe bet that the last thing the industry wants is another round of whiplash. Enter broad tariffs. A blast from the past, last signed into law by Herbert Hoover in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. I think we know how that turned out. The current American President, seizing questionable executive powers […]
