Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Director Nisha Pahuja on The World Before Her
India-born, Toronto-bred Nisha Pahuja’s beautiful and poignant The World Before Her won the World Documentary Competition Award at Tribeca Film Festival, where it premiered a few weeks ago. And while Pahuja grew up and lives in Toronto, she still has a fascination for her homeland. The World Before Her is her third film, after Diamond Road and Bollywood Bound, and her second dealing with India. It presents two sides of the country. For one segment of the film, Pahuja’s crew follows 20 “Miss India” contestants as they endure the pageant’s controversial month-long training regimen. The audience accompanies the women on […]
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ADAM BOWERS WINS IFP/RBC EMERGING VISIONS DIRECTOR PRIZE
Today, IFP in conjunction with RBC (the Royal Bank of Canada) announced the winners of the 2011 RBC Emerging Visions Program. The Emerging Visions Director Prize went to Adam Bowers (New Low) who received a cash prize and the chance to shoot an advertising campaign for RBC. The runner-up, Ryan O’Nan (The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best), was also awarded a cash prize. The two filmmakers were among 25 writers and directors who participated in the 2011 RBC Emerging Visions Program, a day-long event intended to bring filmmakers together to network with industry professionals and each other. In order to […]
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Director Matthew Akers on Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present
The self-described “grandmother of performance art,” Marina Abramovic has for almost 40 years been one of the leading lights of a still-marginalized form. Born to ex-partisan parents in 1946, in the early days of Tito’s Yugoslavia, she is the fascinating subject of Matthew Akers’ new documentary, Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present. Despite her international renown, the Belgrade-born, New York-based Abramovic failed to enter the public consciousness in the States until her blockbuster 2010 MoMA retrospective. Akers’ film is a sinewy tour through Abramovic’s peculiar life and working process as she embarks upon her most high profile performance yet, one […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #123
Second #5781, 96:21 Sandy and Jeffrey, on their way to the dance in the basement of a house. Jeffrey tends to arrive and depart the Williams house at night. The car creaks as it moves. What space does the car drive though? The space of streets at night, the insides of stores illuminated like enormous aquariums behind Sandy. But also the space of a mind, the mind of the film, with its own series of codes that reference other films, other images. Carl Jung: The collective unconscious—so far as we can say anything about it at all—appears to consist of […]
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WHEN KENTUCKER AUDLEY MET WES ANDERSON
Two figures from different ends of the independent film spectrum have a chance meeting in 1998. For the story behind the picture, visit Kentucker Audley’s Tumblr.
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SEATTLE FILM FEST CLOSES ANOTHER SPRAWLING, MONTH-LONG AFFAIR WITH AWARDS
When you go to the Seattle International Film Festival, you hear often that it is the largest, most highly attended film festival in the United States. 460 Films! 25 Days! 70 Countries! 160,000 attendance! Bigger is better! However, as I learned during the dying days of this year’s event, what makes SIFF one of the country’s more interesting festivals isn’t its size per se. Sure, other than pre-Rutger Wolfson Rotterdam, I can’t think of a festival that has approached this level of sprawl. So one can with relative fleetness dispense with the “this is my grand theory of modern cinema in […]
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HANNAH FIDELL AND “A TEACHER” AT US-IN-PROGRESS, PART TWO
June 8, 2012 (continued) 9pm – The dinner and award announcement are held above the Renault car company’s showroom, which seems like a strange place but the food was absolutely delicious and included the second of three steak dinners I will have while in France. Sophie Dulac, the grande dame of Parisian cinema, and her beautiful entourage arrive. She announces that A Teacher has won and Kim and I do this really cliché slow-motion turn to look at each other, not really comprehending the win until people urge us to go up. Four years of studying French in school finally […]
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IFP NARRATIVE LAB SLATE ANNOUNCED
This morning, the eight edition of the IFP Narrative Labs kicked off in New York City, and the 10 films chosen to participate were unveiled for the first time. Projects chosen came from places as diverse as Vershire, Vermont and Miami, Florida. Each year, 20 indie films with budgets under $1 million — 10 documentary and 10 narrative — are selected for participation in the IFP post-production labs, which gives filmmakers strategic help and guidance regarding the completion, marketing and distribution of their projects. IFP’s Executive Director Joana Vicente said, “We are thrilled to welcome another talented class of emerging […]
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Mission Accomplished: Lorrel Manning and Michael Cuomo on Happy New Year
I first met writer/director K. Lorrel Manning and actor/producer Michael Cuomo at the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, where we found ourselves the fish-out-of-water New Yorkers in a sea full of Southwest cinephiles. Their SXSW 2011 (sold out) hit Happy New Year is grounded in star Cuomo’s nuanced portrayal of a fictional outsider named Cole Lewis, a sergeant who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and now finds himself battling demons both mental and physical in the psych ward of a veterans hospital. I spoke with the two about their veterans outreach effort, Indiegogo versus Kickstarter, and the best […]
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A TRIBUTE TO AN EXCEPTIONAL MAN: MICHAEL RIVA, IN THE DETAILS
Production designer J. Michael Riva passed away in Los Angeles on June 7. Below he is remembered by Jon Reiss. — Editor When I first met Michael Riva I thought he was a bit nuts. It was thirteen years ago on a pre-school camping trip for our sons and he had outfitted his tent fit for a bedouin princess. This was accomplished without any expense – a brightly-colored French handkerchief over a side table here, a cot and mattress covered by sheer Indian fabric there, and on the “wall” of the tent he somehow managed to jerry-rig a small landscape. […]
