Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Will Comcast Get Disney?
Earlier this month Comcast made an unsolicited bid to buy the Walt Disney Company for $66 billion. Other than acknowledging the offer, neither the Disney board nor management has formally responded to the offer. Over the last decade, Comcast has moved aggressively through a series of mergers and acquisition to become the nation’s largest cable television operator and, potentially, media combine. The Disney bid comes about two years after federal regulators approved Comcast’s $30 billion acquisition of NBC Universal. In 2002, Comcast acquired AT&T’s cable and broadband holdings for $29 billion. In 2004, it made a $48 billion bid for […]
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A Rogue’s Gallery of Gorgeousness: Charles Atlas and Antony’s Turning
It’s been a banner year for Charles Atlas. In 2012, the filmmaker and video artist was included in the Whitney Biennial, opened his first New York solo show, “The Illusion of Democracy” (the inaugural show of Lurhring Augustine’s brand new Bushwick gallery, no less), had seminal, rarely-screened works revived care of keen programming at local NYC film series’ Dirty Looks and Light Industry, and is now unveiling his long-awaited collaboration with enigmatic singer/musician Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons), which opens today at IFC Center. Turning, which had its New York premiere this past weekend at DOC NYC, is […]
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Susan Youssef, Habibi
Nearly 10 years in the making, Habibi is the semi-autobiographical first feature from 2010 “25 New Face” Susan Youssef, a tale of forbidden love between two Palestinian students who find it impossible for their affection to overcome the rigid conventions of class in Palestinian life and Israel’s ironclad security regime. With Israelis and Palestinians again in actively violent conflict, the film couldn’t be more newsworthy, but Youssef’s low-budget aesthetic ingenuity (she couldn’t shoot in Gaza, but faked it admirably) and a remarkable performance from Maisa Abd Elhadi, as the young woman at the center of multiple circles of conflict (family […]
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Ra’anan Alexandrowicz on The Law in These Parts
Ra’anan Alexandrowicz’s The Law in These Parts sheds new light on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from an unexpected perspective. Interviewing nine military judges, the director explores how Israel created a new legal system to control the Gaza Strip and West Bank after occupying them in 1967. At first, the state may have begun with the understandable desire to defend itself from violence, but its justifications quickly became self-serving. In one of the film’s most memorable examples, a woman was sentenced to a year and a half in jail for giving a “terrorist” bread. The film consists of stylized interviews with the […]
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First Winter Opens at Videology
Michael Tully of Hammer to Nail passed along this review of Benjamin Dickinson’s First Winter, written by fellow filmmaker Zach Clark. First Winter is an accomplished, compelling and unexpectedly timely first feature, but I debated a second about posting this. That’s because Clark is also the programmer of Videology, where the film is premiering tomorrow. That said, he opens with a quote from Andrei Tarkovsky so, with this disclaimer, I was cool to run it. — SM First Winter, Benjamin Dickinson’s microbudget entry into the slow-burn apocalypse pantheon, owes no small debt to that scant subgenre’s zenith – Andrei Tarkovsky’s […]
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Debating the Future of Hybrid Films at CPH:DOX
“Let’s start before we kill the term,” joked Jakob Hogel during the opening moments of “The Future of Hybrid Films,” a panel that took place last week at Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX. Preempting musty debate about the so-called hybrid genre, where various forms — usually documentary and fiction — are combined in single works, Hogel said, “We should be beyond the point of whether hybrid films exist, are dubious or morally wrong. They exist and who cares?” Hogel’s dismissal of hybrid handwringing doesn’t mean that the issues posed by such films aren’t being debated in the film industry. It’s just these debates […]
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Five Questions with Marfa Girl Director Larry Clark
Border patrol police and racial tension are not your usual ingredients for a teen movie. Like the adolescent characters they feature, teen dramas tend to be self-referential: they are rarely concerned with anything beyond drugs, unprotected sex, and emotional confusion. Larry Clark, best known for his 1995 film Kids, specializes in this genre, but his latest feature, Marfa Girl, somehow eludes the teen canon to offer a diagonal take on an oft-predictable format. Marfa Girl takes place in a small Texas border town that is home to a community of artists and a threatening number of border policemen. While hostility […]
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Jamie Stuart’s Short on Hurricane Sandy
Jamie Stuart has been Filmmaker‘s videographer for years, but became known to a broader audience in late 2010 when he captured snowbound New York in his short film Idiot with a Tripod. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, Stuart was out again filming the impact of extreme weather on the city, and has now released the short film Eternal Storm, to which he adds the following notes: I don’t know if it’s right to create art out of this experience, yet. I don’t know what the time limit is. But I have created something that I hope people can appreciate. And art always […]
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Destroying 17,000 Islands at CPH:DOX
While at CPH:DOX I attended a seminar titled “An Interactive Audience” spotlighting new works in transmedia. One of the projects discussed was 17,000 Islands, a work commissioned by the festival’s own DOX:LAB, directed by Indonesia’s Edwin (Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly) and Norwegian transmedia doc director Thomas Ostbye, and produced by interactive producer Paramita Nath. The project, in which Edwin (pictured) and Ostbye make a film that is then “destroyed” by its viewers over the internet, sounded fascinating, so afterwards I pulled Edwin aside to learn more. First, here’s the description of the project from the CPH:DOX catalog: 17000 […]
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Two Filmmakers Walked into a Bar…
The US in Progress market begins tomorrow. I fly to Wroclaw, Poland, in a few hours. Translation: I am frantically packing, burning DVDs, and researching European distribution companies. An Introduction: I’m a longtime film worker and first-time filmmaker. I’m in the final stages of finishing my first feature. I’m 33 years old, I have two daughters, and I live in central Pennsylvania. For over 12 years I have been a full-time alchemist attempting to fuse well-rounded family life with a career in film. This is an uncertain science and the results have been inconclusive. But A Song Still Inside, my […]
