Second #4183, 69:43 In a passage from his 1952 essay “In Defense of Mixed Cinema,” André Bazin seems to predict the future, a future of watching movies in an age of interruptions and distractions. Bazin writes about watching Les Vampires (Louise Feuillade, 1915) during a night full of technical mishaps: That night only one of the two projectors was working. In addition, the print had no subtitles and I imagine that Feuillade would have had difficulty in trying to recognize the murderers. It was even money as to which were the good guys and which the bad. So difficult was […]
Arthouse distrib Music Box Films today announced that they will handle the U.S. and Canadian release of writer-director Ira Sachs’ semi-autobiographical relationship drama Keep the Lights On, which premiered at Sundance back in January and won the Teddy award (for best LGBT film) last month at Berlin. Sachs — best known for his films Forty Shades of Blue, the 2005 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, and The Delta — made headlines when he raised the final $25,000 of his budget for Lights through Kickstarter. Announcing the acquisition of Sachs’ film, Ed Arentz, the Managing Director of Music Box Films, said, […]
Producer Adele Romanski has built quite a filmography in a very short time. Last year, she opened David Robert Mitchell’s nostalgia-laced sleeper-hit Myth of the American Sleepover. And less than two months ago, she made a splash at Sundance with Katie Aselton’s Black Rock (which sold to LD Entertainment). Throw in a stint as a Sundance Producer’s Lab Fellow, plus several projects in development (including Mitchell’s Sleepover followup Ella Walks the Beach and Adam Bowers’ We’re A Wasteland) and it should become obvious that Romanski has been, to say the least, busy. So when did she find time to direct […]
Is Lena Dunham about to change television? Recent years have seen big-screen critical darlings like Michael Mann, Martin Scorsese, and Diablo Cody make the pilgrimage over to the small screen. But last year’s announcement that the 25-year old Tiny Furniture director would be masterminding a new series for HBO seemed a more direct link between the indie film and TV industries than had been attempted previously. And as if cementing this link, Girls premieres today with a special sneak preview screening at SXSW – the festival that initially launched Dunham’s career. Audiences are in for a treat, as Dunham’s wit […]
Jonathan Lisecki’s award winning short Gayby screened at over one-hundred festivals world-wide, and it’s easy to see why. Lisecki takes a potentially divisive premise – a single woman looking to become a mother commissions her gay best friend to knock her up – and explores it in a style that’s so frank, honest, and completely hilarious that it’s impossible not to be charmed. Anchored by wonderful comic turns from Jenn Harris and Matthew Wilkas (who reprise their roles in the feature version), the Gayby short is available now on the new Wholphin No. 15. Lisecki meanwhile has been preppng the […]
Too often contemporary crime dramas binge on the crime and skimp on the drama. This is not the case with Booster, director Matt Ruskin’s debut narrative feature, and his followup to Sundance Channel documentary The Hip Hop Project. The story of Simon, a Boston-based petty thief forced to turn to serious robbery after his brother is arrested, Booster features stellar performances from a handful of Boston natives, as well as veteran character actor Seymour Cassel. Ruskin’s film wrestles with provocative moral issues, taking care to imbue even its most externally-loathsome characters with life and heart. Premiering in Narrative Competition today, […]
Photographer Gregory Crewdson is renowned for his elaborately-staged photographs, huge in scope, size, and ambition. So filmmaker Benjamin Shapiro had his work cut out for him when he set out nearly a decade ago to follow Crewdson and demystify the artist’s process. But the biggest surprise of Shapiro’s long-awaited film is just how open, eloquent, and down-to-earth Crewdson is when discussing his art. Crewdson allows the audience unrestricted access to his shoots (not to mention his personal life), even taking us along as he searches for locations, subjects, and inspiration. Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters is a refreshingly frank look at […]
Caveh Zahedi is no stranger to boundary pushing. His filmography, a blend of narrative and documentary, has covered everything from drug tripping to sex addiction, all from a decidedly first-person perspective. But Zahedi’s latest, the bitterly-titled The Sheik and I, is perhaps his most flagrantly subversive (not to mention personal) work yet. Banned by the very government body that commissioned it, The Sheik and I finds Zahedi let loose on the Middle East. As he pushes boundaries in his attempt to “make a film about trying to make a film,” the resulting work, premiering at SXSW, promises to call into […]
In case you haven’t seen it, here’s Kony 2012, the half-hour documentary by the organization Invisible Children that’s swept the Internet this week. It’s about Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has been terrorizing the region around northern Uganda for a quarter century; a particular emphasis is on Kony’s notorious practice of kidnapping children and forcing them into military service. The film was posted on YouTube last Monday, and as of this writing it’s chalked up 62,172,848 views. Those kinds of numbers are impressive, and the people at Invisible Children, including director Jason Russell and two other American filmmakers who […]
With a focused, intense, and somewhat mysterious screen persona, actress Kate Lyn Sheil has stood out in a number of recent independent films, including Silver Bullets by Joe Swanberg and Sophia Takal’s Green. At SXSW this year she arrives with four titles, including Amy Seimetz’s Sun Don’t Shine and Bob Byington’s Somebody Up There Likes Me. Here I talk with Sheil about how she got into acting, being a movie fan, her influences and the particular pleasures of independent film.