This June, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presents the fourth annual BAMcinemaFest, featuring a lineup of some of the best emerging voices American cinema has to offer. And CinemaFest is just one of dozens that the Brooklyn institution presents each year, as BAM consistently shines a spotlight on the best in theater, dance, music, film, and more. Now, as the venue celebrates its staggering 150th anniversary, filmmaker Michael Sladek (Con Artist, Devils Are Dreaming) explores what it is about the Brooklyn instituation that has lent it such longevity in his new documentary BAM150. Filmmaker: Why BAM? What is it about […]
Watching the trailer for Jay Gammill’s new comedy Free Samples, one can almost hear the ghost of Clerks‘ Dante Hicks echoing in the distance – complaining, “I’m not even supposed to be here today.” The latest in a long line of dead-end job dramedies, Free Samples follows slacker twenty-something Jillian (Jess Wexler) as she fills in for her friend handing out free samples all day from inside an ice cream truck. Premiering this week in Tribeca’s Spotlight section, Gammill’s film aligns an impressive ensemble of indie notables, including Wexler, Jesse Eisenberg, and Jason Ritter. Filmmaker: Can you talk a bit […]
Independent documentary filmmaker Lee Storey has won her long battle with the Internal Revenue Service over deductions related to her film, Smile ’til it Hurts: The Up with People Story. The IRS’s case against Storey panicked the documentary community as it was poised to declare documentary filmmaking itself “a hobby” and not a professional, profit-seeking endeavor eligible for tax deductions. However, the same judge, Tax Court Judge Diane L. Kroupa, who said during a hearing, “By its very nature, a documentary to me means that it’s not for profit. You’re doing it to educate. You’re doing it to expose,” has […]
Second #4935, 82:15 1. The car has come to a halt. Jeffrey’s crime has been to look at Frank, just as we also have been looking at the film itself. 2. “I shoot when I see the whites of the eyes,” Frank says at this moment, almost directing his stare at us, but not quite. This is either the statement of a psychopath or of a film director. 3. In Don DeLillo’s 1997 novel Underworld, there are these sentences: There is no space or time out here, or in here, or wherever she is. There are only connections. Everything is […]
Here’s the trailer for The Fourth Dimension, the collaborative film by Harmony Korine, Alexey Fedorchenko and Jan Kwiecinski. (All trailers should be scored using Songify.) From the press release The Fourth Dimension stars U.S. actor Val Kilmer and is the first film to come from Golsch Film Words and VICE, and brings together a trilogy of directors from across the globe: Harmony Korine from the U.S., Russia’s Alexey Fedorchenko and Polish-born Jan Kwiecinski. Find out more at GrolschFilmWorks.com.
At last year’s Tribeca Film Festival I discovered two of my favorite films of the year, Alma Har’el’s Bombay Beach and Panos Cosmatos’s Beyond the Black Rainbow. I’m hoping for at least as good a track record this year, and in surveying the schedule I see more than enough potential candidates. Assuming I can successfully surmount my usual Tribeca challenge — getting into a film-festival headspace while working at home in New York — here are 25 films I’m interested in checking out. As befitting the mission of this magazine, there’s a heavy American independent focus, and I’ve also avoided […]
Every ten years, the Texas Board of Education revises its textbook standards, leaving the curriculum decisions up to a staggeringly small council of fifteen members. And while this practice has been critiqued on a national level before, The Revisionaries shines a particularly introspective light on the entire procedure. Focused around Board of Education member, devout Evangelical Christian, and all-around complex figure Don McLeroy, this new documentary from director Scott Thurman and the Silver Lining Film Group is sure to stir up debate at the Tribeca Film Festival and beyond. Filmmaker: What originally interested you about the Texas Board of Education? […]
To properly evoke the apocalyptic landscape and tone of his directorial debut, filmmaker Benjamin Dickinson lived like he filmed – amidst the chilling rural winter that his characters find themselves trapped within. Opting to forgo electricity and even food while filming the movie’s most desperate sequences, Dickinson and his crew lend what should prove to be a hard won authenticity to First Winter. Premiering in competition this Thursday at the Tribeca Film Festival, First Winter stars Lindsay Burdge, Paul Manza, and Kate Lyn Sheil. Filmmaker: Talk to me a bit about the genesis of First Winter. Where did the idea […]
Second #4888, 81:28 The red, terrifying beauty of the bridge truss as Frank and his gang take Dorothy and Jeffrey on a joy ride “out to the fuckin’ country.” These shots of the truss underside, bathed in light that may as well emanate from hell, are a sort of reverse-universe visual analogy of the earlier nighttime shots of the underside of trees as Jeffrey walks down his street. In Robert Bolaño’s novel 2666, in the section “The Part about the Critics,” each of the three main characters has a different and disturbing dream on the same night: Espinoza dreamed about […]
At first it seems curious that the starting point of this brilliant, definitive documentary about the late Jamaican reggae sensation Bob Marley is archival footage of Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, the facility from which 60 million Africans were crammed through the Door of No Return to commence lives of total servitude in the West. Marley was the offspring of a black Jamaican mother and a white English father (who posed as a captain), whom he met only a handful of times. In the film there is no mention of slavery in the family history. Late in this elegantly elliptical movie, Marley […]