Filmmaking
Filmmaking
-
Learning From Amos Poe
The following essay about Amos Poe appears in Filmmaker’s Winter, 2026 print edition in a section, Reflections, that looks back on 33 years of American independent film and Filmmaker Magazine. Upon the sad news of Amos’s passing on Christmas Day, 2025, we are posting it and sending condolences to Amos’s family and friends. — Editor Back when I was editing Filmmaker’s precursor, The Off-Hollywood Report, I’d attend the IFP’s Independent Feature Film Market. Filmmakers—some wearing sandwich boards or costumes—were hawking acquisition titles outside New York’s Angelika theater that were screening past the escalators inside, and the event always had an […]
-
30 Years On, The Heat Is Around The Corner. And In Several TV Shows
Released 30 years ago, Michael Mann’s Heat is an almost-three-hour-long odyssey through Los Angeles and the minds of two ideologically opposed men who inhabit it. Codes are established and broken, thrills are tempered by sobering terror, paths are chosen and exit routes mapped. If high-level thief Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) has steeled himself to sever relationships to anyone or anything at a moment’s notice, the man pursuing him, police detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino), is defined by a refusal to let go. He holds on to his angst, he tells his wife (Diane Venora), refusing to engage in cathartic […]
-
“My Method is Invisible Editing”: Editor Amir Etminan on “It Was Just an Accident”
From its opening head-on shot of a family driving down an unlit road to its devastating, confrontational climax, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident frequently deploys long takes to situate the audience within moral discomfort. While that formal restraint runs through the entire film, it still leaves room for a diverse editing style befitting Panahi’s first feature since the suspension of his twenty-year filmmaking ban. (Following the film’s release, the Iranian government has subsequently sentenced him to one year in prison in absentia for “propaganda activities.”) In its shot selection and fluctuating cutting rhythm, It Was Just an Accident […]
-
An Open Letter to SAIC Regarding Video Data Bank
On November 12, 2025, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) “gutted” Video Data Bank (VDB), the essential moving-image art distributor, archive and streaming platform. The elimination of 60% of its staff, including director Tom Colley, and announcement that it would as a result of this reduction no longer acquire new work, sent shock waves through the video art community, including the hundreds of artists represented by the distributor, an illustrious roster including, to name a few, Bruce Nauman, Miranda July, Martha Rosler, Tiffany Sia, Christopher Harris and Elisabeth Subrin. One artist included in VDB’s catalog is an […]
-
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, […]
-
“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 […]
-
“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, […]
-
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 […]
-
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 […]
-
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; […]
