Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“We Like the Poetic, Dreamy Quality”: DP Edu Grau on Passing
Rebecca Hall’s Passing is an adaptation of the Harlem Renaissance era novel by Nella Larsen of the same name. Starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as two mixed race women who “pass” for white in the 1920s, the film explores their acquaintanceship as one “pretends” to be white while the other lives life as a black woman. DP Edu Grau shares why they opted to film the Passing with a more vintage style. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Grau: […]
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“The Lighting Started from a Real Place of Honesty”: DP Mia Cioffi Henry on Superior
Having lensed several notable works that have been released in the last couple of years (Jeremy Hersh’s The Surrogate, Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Document, and the shorts In Sudden Darkness and Dominant Species, among others), New York-based DP Mia Cioffi Henry arrives at Sundance with Erin Vassilopolous’s stylish psychodrama, Superior, based on the director’s 2015 short, which Henry also shot. Below, Henry discusses her own journey back to this material following the short, how references find their way into finished works, and being open to the truth of practical locations. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the […]
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“The Whole Team Really Came Together in an Amazing Way”: Editor Jeff Boyette on Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir
The late James Redford’s final film, Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir, follows the Joy Luck Club author as she unpacks her legacy and lineage, contending with chronic illness, intergenerational trauma, and her relationship with her mother. Editor Jeff Boyette describes the emotionally taxing experience of editing the film after Redford’s passing and the power of Tan’s story. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Boyette: I ended up editing this film based on my long relationship with the director, Jamie Redford, […]
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“We Needed a Visual Approach that Would Match the Poetry of Mr. Ailey’s Words”: Jamila Wignot on Ailey
With Jamila Wignot’s documentary Ailey opening today from NEON, we are reposting Randy Astle’s interview with the director out of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Alvin Ailey’s choreography was as powerful and muscular as it was elegant and sublime. Most dance outsiders probably come to him through his most famous work, 1960’s Revelations, which exemplifies the fierce pride of the Black community moving from slavery through baptism and into celebration. The work also includes delicate and restrained moments, such as in an early pas de deux, where a slowly raised arm contains all the beauty of a the later exultation. […]
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Love Story, The Other Side of the Mountain, Hard to Hold, The Underneath: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
The weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day are flooded with new Blu-ray releases of vintage romances, starting with one of the most beloved and effective of all cinematic tearjerkers, Arthur Hiller and Erich Segal’s Love Story (1970). In a shrewd piece of promotion concocted by Paramount studio executive Robert Evans, Segal wrote Love Story as a screenplay but turned it into a novel while the movie was well along the way to production. The book came out a few months before the movie, became a bestseller, and director Hiller’s “adaptation” of Segal’s literary phenomenon opened to huge grosses. The movie […]
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Sundance 2021 Critic’s Notebook 1 (Abby Sun): CODA, Summer of Soul (…Or, How the Revolution Could Not be Televised)
This year, at least tacitly, Sundance is providing the infrastructure, or at the very least supplementing the marketing for events, panels, and film after-parties, that used to circle the periphery of private condos or invite-only events—the festival is the conduit, not the exclusive platform. My Sundance 2021 started not on opening night but in the weeks and months leading up to it, via viewing links shared in advance with many programmers and industry members. Long before that, due to the festival’s mostly-virtual nature, Sundance’s team had lots of news and announcements to share. In summer 2020, they revealed the festival’s hybrid […]
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“May Seem Like a Bad Idea to Shoot a Movie with Such a Camera”: DP Carlos Rigo Bellver on El Planeta
Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta is a modern day picaresque, following a young fashion student and her mother as they grift their way into small riches amid the backdrop of post-financial crisis Spain. The film explores consumerism, gendered expectations, and class with devilish humor. DP Carlos Rigo Bellver discusses making an intimate setting for Ulman, who plays the lead, and her mother, who plays Ulman’s mother, to feel comfortable and naturalistic. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Bellver: […]
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“I Had to Put My Own Interests Aside”: Editor Hogir Hirori on Sabaya
Hogir Hirori’s Sabaya tells the untold story of young survivors of Daesh sex trafficking. The documentary follows the actions of the Yazidi Home Center as they infiltrate the Al-Hol camp where several women and children were held against their will as slaves. As the editor of his own film (as well as the cinematographer), Hirori shares how he preserved the exigence of the Sabaya girls’ story while protecting their identities along the way. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this […]
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20 Anticipated Films and New Media Works at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival
“It’s about energy — how do we preserve the energy around the work and the artist?” That’s Sundance Film Festival director Tabitha Jackson speaking this morning at Sundance’s opening press conference about the thinking that went in to this year’s necessarily altered pandemic edition. With a slimmed-down schedule and screenings happening through the Sundance platform as well as at various “satellite screens,” Sundance has fully embraced the challenges and potentials of translating the Sundance experience to the ways in which we are living our (viewing) lives now. But several principles guided the Sundance team, said Jackson. One was the concept […]
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Dead Again, After the Thin Man, The Court Jester: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Kenneth Branagh was only 29 when he wrote, directed, and starred in his debut feature, a rousing adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V that garnered massive critical acclaim upon its release in 1989. As a result, the young filmmaker was offered every costume drama and literary adaptation on the studios’ development slates, but he turned them all down in favor of an original screenplay by future Queen’s Gambit auteur Scott Frank that had been kicking around for years. Dead Again was Frank’s throwback to the gothic melodramas and film noir pictures of the 1930s and ’40s, a gloriously theatrical combination of […]
