Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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TRAILER WATCH: “ANTIVIRAL”
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.
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IFP ANNOUNCES FILM WEEK PROJECT SLATE AND INDUSTRY EVENTS
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 […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #149
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 […]
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Five Questions with Apichatpong Weerasethakul
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 […]
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LENA DUNHAM’S PROMO SHORT FILM FOR “NEW YORKER” APP
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.
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CLARESSA SHIELDS, SUBJECT OF DOC BY “25 NEW FACES” DIRECTORS, TRIUMPHS AT OLYMPICS
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 […]
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Five Questions with Drought Director Everardo González
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 […]
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TED HOPE HIRED AS NEW S.F. FILM SOCIETY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
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 […]
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FACTORY 25 ACQUIRES SOPHIA TAKAL’S “GREEN” FOR WORLD DISTRIBUTION
On of our favorite independent films of 2011, Sophia Takal’s debut feature, Green, has been acquired for distribution by Factory 25. Factory 25 will debut the film theatrically next month, with runs planned at reRun Theater in Brooklyn, Chicago’s Facets and other venues, will release the film digitally and on VOD platforms in November and will issue a DVD next Spring. Writer/director/actor Takal was selected as one of Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of 2011, and Green scored a Filmmaker-sponsored “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” Gotham nomination. Here’s the lede of my “25 New Face” profile of […]
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2 Days in New York — A Hammer to Nail Review
(2 Days in New York world premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and was picked up for distribution by Magnolia Pictures. It is available through various VOD outlets—Amazon, iTunes, etc.—on July 6, 2012, and opens theatrically on August 10, 2012. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) I’ve been known to knock the French, toodling around on bicycles with their phallic baguettes, vin rouge, and perennial boredom with all things Americain. But is there any way to withstand the Julie Delpy charm offensive? She had me at bonjour in this witty comedy, a sequel to her earlier film 2 Days in Paris. Delpy (who wrote and directed the film) […]
