Just announced is the full slate for this year’s NYFF, this year celebrating it’s 50th anniversary. Already announced were the opening, closing and centerpiece movies (Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, Robert Zemeckis’ Flight and David Chase’s Not Fade Away, respectively — all world premieres), and the rest of the lineup is as typically exciting and robust as it ever is, packed with auteur works culled almost exclusively from Berlin, Cannes, Venice and Toronto. Unveiling the summation of the best of arthouse cinema in 2012, Richard Peña, the Selection Committee Chair & Program Director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, […]
(Beloved world premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and was picked up for distribution by IFC Films. It opens theatrically on August 17, 2012. Visit the film’s website to learn more.) Beloved, the latest film from French writer/director Christophe Honoré, uses the history of the late 20th century as a framework for exploring the difficult love affairs of a mother, Madeleine (played as a young woman by Ludivine Sagnier and as an older woman by Catherine Deneuve) and her daughter, Vera (Chiarra Mastroianni). Like much of Honoré’s work, the movie is rich with allusions not only to literary and theatrical forms, but […]
A few months ago, I got to participate in StoryCode‘s hackathon for narrative media (you can read about it here), and one of the thoughts I walked away with was that, while creating transmedia properties around fictional narratives is very rewarding, something I really wanted to do was delve deeper into the world of nonfiction transmedia. So I was excited to learn about a documentary transmedia hack sponsored by POV and held this past weekend at their office in DUMBO. If anyone in America understands social documentary, it’s the makers of this PBS series, which has won nearly 100 major awards–Oscars, Emmys, […]
Alex Buono is perhaps best known for his work with the Saturday Night Live Film Unit. He shot the current opening for SNL, as well as many of the fake commercials seen on the show, but his passion is documentary and making independent films. “I’m always trying to get the next one off the ground,” says Buono, “and SNL, as much as I like it, it’s a lot of fun and I really like who I’m working with, [but] it’s this great day job I do while I’m trying to get a movie [going].” Most recently, Alex worked on the […]
A time comes in an independent filmmaker’s career when he asks himself if it’s been worth it. That filmmaker is usually somewhere in middle age, reminiscing on the life he’s spent running down money, negotiating deals, adjusting to changing trends in the film world, and occasionally finding time to be creative and make a movie. I came to filmmaking late in life, directing my first feature at the age of 42. Before that, I’d been an actor in the theater for several years. Filmmaking was a way, I believed, to earn a living doing something that had a more permanent […]
Released in the past few days were two terrific trailers for films coming out in September that we covered in our Summer issue: David France’s AIDS activism documentary How to Survive a Plague, and writer/director Ira Sachs’ late 90s NYC-set gay drama Keep the Lights On. Go here to read “Of Time & The City,” the fascinating conversation between France and Sachs about these two films, which act almost as companion pieces to one another, and the poignant histories behind them.
Second #7097, 118:17 (Note: the final post in the project goes up Friday.) A confession, of a different sort, about how a movie saved a young man. Can a scene from a movie detour your life, turn you in a new direction? I think it can, in the same way that a book read and just the right age can, or a band can by the sheer force of its ideas turned sonic. (One of the self-imposed rules for this project was to avoid the personal, the anecdotal, but figuring this is the second-to-last post . . .) Blue Velvet […]
Last week, Mike Birbiglia and Ira Glass released a cute little online short film to help promote their upcoming film Sleepwalk with Me, but their latest web marketing ploy is pure genius. My only question: how many people will realize this is a joke?
If you’ve read the current print issue of Filmmaker, on stands now, you undoubtedly came across “The Shooting Parties,” Donal Foreman’s fascinating compare-and-contrast visit to three low-budget film sets. Stepping onto a truly microbudget set (i.e., virtually no budget and a one-day shoot), a film budgeted in the low six figures, and then one in the mid-six figures, Foreman discusses how money shapes one’s filmmaking philosophy. Money and filmmaking philosophy are two things on Foreman’s mind now as our correspondent, who also happens to be a writer/director, is gearing up for his first feature back in his home of Ireland. […]
Though I must admit his theater work is a total blind spot for me, I’m a huge fan of what Martin McDonagh does as a writer/director in film. I loved the wildly funny Six Shooter, the violent and subversive short that won McDonagh an Academy Award, and his debut feature, In Bruges, was a darkly comic addition to the hit man movie subgenre that showed he could work skilfully on a larger cinematic canvas. For his new film, Seven Psychopaths, McDonagh seems to be ratcheting up the silliness factor — although I’m sure there’s some very black moments in the movie that […]