Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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IFP Gotham Awards Announces Posthumous Chadwick Boseman Actor Tribute and Viola Davis Actress Tribute
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP, and Filmmaker‘s publisher) announced today that Chadwick Boseman will receive a posthumous Actor Tribute and Viola Davis an Actress Tribute at the upcoming 30th Anniversary Edition of the Gotham Awards. “Chadwick Boseman was an incredibly talented actor whose significance and impact onscreen and kindness offscreen will never be forgotten. We at IFP are forever indebted to him for all of his contributions to our organization, his legacy in providing mentorship and we are proud to honor him and all of his historical and groundbreaking contributions with this tribute,” said Jeffrey Sharp, Executive Director of IFP […]
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Ulysses, La Strada and Popeye: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations, Holiday Edition
One of the more interesting periods in the history of Italian cinema is the era of international co-productions that followed neorealism; kicked off by the massive success of MGM’s 1951 extravaganza Quo Vadis, the Italian film industry entered a boom age in which the location shooting, social consciousness, and limited resources of neorealism gave way to spectacular sets, glamorous Hollywood stars, and lavish budgets thanks to the country’s abundance of breathtaking scenery and attractive production incentives. One of the most expensive and entertaining of the 1950s historical epics was Ulysses (1954), a gorgeously photographed and cleverly written adaptation of Homer’s […]
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Ghost Dog, Moonstruck and Libeled Lady: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Criterion adds another excellent title to its collection of Jim Jarmusch films this week with the Blu-ray and DVD releases of Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, a 1999 feature that stands alongside Dead Man as one of Jarmusch’s richest and most fascinating movies. Like Dead Man, Ghost Dog follows a stripped-down narrative that’s made extraordinarily complex by the sophisticated network of cinematic, literary, and historical allusions Jarmusch weaves through it; in another director’s hands the same story could be a routine genre programmer, but the force and depth of Jarmusch’s philosophical vision elevates the film to a level […]
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“I Made an Audio Drama Under Quarantine and So Can You!”: Frank Hudec on His Pandemic-Produced Audio Drama, Craiglockhart
There was a meme floating around the interwebs in early April. It consisted of two photos of Donald Glover. On one from, I think, Community, where he is clean cut, smiling and drinking coffee, the caption reads: “New Year’s Day, Looking Forward to 2020!” Next to it was the “Three Months Later” photo; it’s a shot from a Childish Gambino video where he’s shirtless and holding a shotgun. My January 2020 pretty much mirrored Donald Glover’s sunny optimism. I had just received a contract to direct a long-gestating film of mine, which had been optioned by a French company […]
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Wroclaw’s American Film Festival Announces Winners of the 10th U.S. in Progress
The 10th edition of U.S. in Progress, the American Film Festival in Wroclaw’s post-production forum that brings together American independent projects with the Polish and international film industries, concluded on Friday with the announcement of the winning films. Among the awardees are Homebody, by Joseph Sackett, who was selected for this year’s Filmmaker 25 New Faces list, as well as a prior 25 selection, Geoff Marslett, who brought his The Boardinghouse Reach to the event. As the American Film Festival’s Artistic Director explained earlier to Filmmaker, this year’s event was held online, with projects being presented to European sales agents, […]
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Tennessee Johnson, I Spit on Your Grave and Adaptation: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
These days, director William Dieterle is best remembered for his dreamy, stylized melodramas of the mid-to-late 1940s (I’ll Be Seeing You, Portrait of Jennie), but in his own time his greatest successes were mostly sturdy prestige biopics like The Story of Louis Pasteur and The Life of Emile Zola. A key transitional film was 1941’s The Devil and Daniel Webster, which introduced a supernatural element to Dieterle’s work and paved the way for a return to the German expressionist style in which he had worked as an actor. Before the delirious flights of fancy to come, however, Dieterle made one last return […]
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Breaking Bad Habits, Making Better Calls: Director Ronni Thomas on the Pandemic Final Production of AMC’s The Broken and the Bad
What do you do when you’re a week away from finishing a documentary project about the world’s biggest and most renowned TV series and the world decides to end? It all began very normally about a year ago. AMC approached the company I work for, IKA Collective, with the concept of creating a docu-series focusing on real-world stories that mirror the fictional worlds of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. The show’s creators, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould were enthusiastic about the idea, and before long I was on my way to Green Bank, West Virginia to document electromagnetic sensitivity; […]
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Grace of My Heart, Hard Eight and Mallrats: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
I’m a big fan of anything and everything written and directed by Allison Anders, but I’ve always been particularly fond of her 1996 musical Grace of My Heart. A magical blend of the kind of intimate behavior-driven filmmaking Anders is known for with the scale and resources of a big studio movie, it’s one of the most generous films I’ve ever seen in terms of how much it gives its characters (all of whom are presented with deep empathy and respect) and the audience. The heart of the picture is the richly detailed story of a singer-songwriter (a fantastic Illeana […]
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Three Insights into America’s Predicament at the recent New York Film Festival: MLK/FBI, City Hall, Nomadland
The New York Film Festival concluded several weeks ago; the much-anticipated Presidential debates came and went. Today we face the outcome of an existential election, and I find myself still thinking about three exceptional films at NYFF 58, two documentaries and one drama, that throw certain features of our national political crisis into sharp relief, intentionally or not, as only great films can do. The documentary MLK/FBI, from accomplished director/producer/editor Sam Pollard, revisits the final decade in the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., ending with his assassination in 1968, a period during which our tax dollars underwrote […]
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Sundance Announces 23 New Documentary Fund Grantees
Twenty-three projects hailing from 21 countries will receive support from the Sundance Institute Documentary Fund. Announced today, the projects will receive $540,000 in unrestricted grant support with funds made possible by The Open Society Foundations and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. “During a time of shared crisis, it is essential that Sundance continue its steadfast support of artists across the globe,” said Documentary Film Program Director Carrie Lozano in a press release. “These films creatively assert our common quests, conditions and resilience as they interrogate notions of individual and collective power.” “Creative support for nonfiction storytellers feels […]
