I love being an independent filmmaker. Not for the few and far between accolades I’ve received for the movies I’ve made, but for the opportunities independent film has given me — a chance to have a voice and share that voice with others. I imagine this is why so many choose film as a profession. But independent filmmaking as we know it isn’t what it once was, when stepping behind the camera meant you had arrived at a certain level and achieved a certain distinction in your career. Directing movies was once reserved for those who had made previous achievements […]
Next month, Filmmaker will be partnering with the website Filminute, an annual online short film competition, by hosting five of the 25 one-minute films shortlisted for this year’s contest, which offers both a juried Best Filminute prize and the audience-selected People’s Choice Award. (In previous years, jurors have included District 9 director Neill Blomkamp, writer Michael Ondaatje, Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf and Crash director Paul Haggis.) The site is currently accepting entries for this year’s competition, with the submission deadline on August 20, and the entry criteria are as follows: Your film must be 60 seconds – no more, no less. Produce […]
Young Brandon Cronenberg definitely seems to be a chip off the old body-horror block, based on the evidence of this visceral and visually striking trailer for his debut feature, Antiviral. Any film in which Malcolm McDowell says, “You’ve become involved in something sinister,” I’m there.
Just released is the line-up for this year’s Independent Film Week, which will take place next month in New York, from September 16 to 20 at Lincoln Center. Announced today for IFP’s centerpiece event of the year are both the industry events and the 165 projects which have been invited to participate in 2012’s Project Forum. A complete list of the projects can be found here, while on the industry side there are such new initiatives as the IFP Producer of Marketing & Distribution Labs and a joint event of IFP and Filmmaker magazine, “REINVENT: Media Arts for the 21st […]
Second #7003, 116:43 The camera pulls back, low like in the beginning when it entered the lawn grass, to reveal Jeffrey, lounging, Sandy just having told him that “lunch is ready.” A concrete angel looks over him as he suns himself in his black pants and heavy black shoes. Order has been restored, but something has changed, something is different. You can feel it in the framing of the shot, in the oddly canted way that Sandy and the house bend inward, towards the center. In his recent book In the Dust of This Planet, Eugene Thacker questions the assumption […]
Two years after winning the Palme d’Or, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul returned to Cannes. It was a rare sort of visit, in which he didn’t go home with any awards, having won three major prizes with Tropical Malady, Syndromes and a Century and of course Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. He was there with his new film Mekong Hotel, too small and resistant to categorization to neatly fit within any of Cannes’ proper sections. Now, he’s at the 65th Locarno Film Festival with Mekong and his new short film Sakda, but as the president of the Concorso […]
Lena Dunham recently wrote a piece on the late Nora Ephron for The New Yorker, has an article about her college boyfriend in the current issue, and has further strengthened her relationship with the magazine by directing this fun little short film — starring herself, her Girls and Tiny Furniture costar Alex Karpovsky, and Jon Hamm — to promote their new iPhone app.
A month or so, we featured T-Rex — the debut doc directed by 2012 “25 New Faces” alums Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari — on our Kickstarter page. The currently shooting film is all about Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, a 17-year-old African-American boxer from Flint, Michigan. “It’s the first time in 2,000 years that women boxers will compete at the games,” Cooper said when Vadim Rizov interviewed him for the pair’s “25 New Faces” profile. “It’s pretty much the only thing we talk about these days.” And now the film got a whole lot more interesting. Earlier today, the young fighter won a […]
In Everardo González’s Drought, the residents of a barely-there area in northern Mexico called Cuates de Australia (a strange names whose origins even they aren’t sure of) search for water and travel about during the annual drought. The toll it takes on the land, people, and animals is sometimes deadly. A sort of documentary answer to Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, the film won the nonfiction prize at this year’s L.A. Film Festival and will play at the IFC Center in New York and Laemmle’s NoHo 7 starting this Friday as part of DocuWeeks. Filmmaker spoke to González about the project’s origins, participants, and […]
Big news: New York independent film producing veteran Ted Hope has been hired as the San Francisco Film Society’s new Executive Director. Co-founder, with James Schamus, of the seminal Gotham indie production company Good Machine, producer of dozens of films, including Dark Horse, Adventureland, In the Bedroom, The Savages and American Splendor, and, in recent years, a prolific blogger and industry critic, Hope will take the reins of a 55-year-old organization that not only mounts a large and respected annual festival but also engages in outreach, education and funding programs for filmmakers. From the press release: “Ted Hope is the […]