As a film journo who usually prefers celebrating the fruits of cinematic labor over covering the messy business of making the product I’m often a bit squeamish when it comes to observing pitch sessions (in no small part due to the glaring abundance of older white faces dangling the purse strings). Fortunately, the folks behind the two-decade-old Hot Docs Forum, which utilizes the appropriately Harry Potter-esque, neo-Gothic Hart House student center at the University of Toronto, do an expert job of combining industry necessity with collegial fun. This is perhaps best evidenced by the Forum’s Cuban Hat Award, a prize […]

I have a Master’s degree, but my return to school as a 33-year-old wasn’t to chase a Ph.D. In my re-entry to so-called academia, I didn’t even crack a book open. The extent of my reading came in the form of reviewing consent waivers that outlined how I couldn’t take legal action against anyone who set me on fire or threw me off of scaffolding. I told acquaintances that I was leaving town for a couple of weeks for some continuing education, which was partially true. The detail I left out was that I was learning how to become a […]

Originally published on June 13, 2016, the following report of John Singleton’s Q&A with Walter Mosley preceding the 25th anniversary release of the director’s Boyz in the Hood is being reposted today alongside the tremendously sad news that Singleton passed away in Los Angeles following a stroke. Made when he was only 24-years-old, Boyz in the Hood — tough, indelible, richly observed and disarmingly sensitive — was a landmark work that garnered Singleton a Best Director Oscar nomination. (As Ashley Clark notes in his intro below, he became the first African-American and youngest person to be nominated for this award.) […]

New Jersey-born Kevin McMullin, a shorts and commercial director who runs the NYC production outfit Boy and Star, makes his feature debut in the Tribeca Film Festival’s Narrative Competition with the location-rich teen crime drama Low Tide. Alan (Keean Johnson), Red (Alex Neustaedter), and Smitty (Daniel Zolghadri) spend their summer breaking into houses along the Jersey Shore, an enterprise that escalates from youthful petty crime into something much darker when one particularly valuable score — a bag of gold coins — is discovered. The gang is fractured apart, a division exacerbated by the presence of the local beauty, Mary (Kristine […]

From 1979, just before the launch of CNN, to 2012, when she passed away, Marion Stokes — an African-American Philadelphia woman, communist, public access television host, collector of Apple computers, media critic — recorded continuous streams of 24-hour-cable news on VHS tapes that piled, floor to ceiling, the various apartments she owned throughout the city. (Born into wealth, Stokes, a fan of Steve Jobs, convinced her family trust to buy Apple stock at $7, long before the iPod.) Conserving stock by recording in extended play mode, she employed assistants who’d shuffle tapes in and out of the eight or so […]

Cinematographer Matt Mitchell lensed Little Woods, which world premiered at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival where writer/director Nia DaCosta won the Tribeca Film Festival’s Nora Ephron Award. Shortly thereafter, the film was acquired by NEON and is currently in theaters. Little Woods is a modern Western about two women in rural America. Shot in Texas, but set in North Dakota, the film is a carefully composed drama, while also very much feeling like an emotionally-charged thriller. I sat down with Mitchell before last year’s festival premiere to talk about how he went about creating the look and feel of the […]

For five years, I’ve been rounding up the previous year’s US theatrical releases of films shot, in whole or significant part, on 35mm—yes, this year’s tally is lower than any of my previous totals. The total number is unlikely to soar above 40 anytime in the foreseeable future, and every film loyalist taking the year off makes a large difference. Part of the low tally can be attributed to lack of new films from J.J. Abrams, Quentin Tarantino, P.T. Anderson, Ken Loach, Christopher Nolan, Martin Scorsese, Zach Snyder, James Gray—directors who simply won’t budge on working from film. That aside, […]

Taking place on a Saturday afternoon in the lobby of The Durham Hotel, “Framing the Conversation: Stanley Nelson” was the final panel discussion in a series of A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy chats at this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. (Though the festival itself is an arm of the Center for Documentary Studies at the prestigious Duke University, these always informative, free-to-the-public, laidback talks have been the 22-year-old Full Frame’s secret weapon for close to a decade.) In town to interview Nelson, the down-to-earth founder of Firelight Media, a recipient of both the MacArthur “Genius Grant” and a National Humanities Medal […]

Announced towards the end of last year, Nikon had their two new full-frame mirrorless Z mount camera systems on full display at NAB, which ran April 6 – 11 in Las Vegas. The Nikon Z 6 and Z 7 can both shoot full-frame 4K Ultra HD, can output a 10-bit N-Log signal via HDMI, can record up to 120 fps at 1080p, and contain standard video recording functions such as autofocus and timecode. While the Z 6 obviously has a lower ranking model number and is over a third less expensive than the Z 7 ($1,995 vs $3,399, body only), […]

Filing into the lobby of the comfortably chic Durham Hotel at noon on a Saturday for “The Pathway to Producing,” an A&E IndieFilms Speakeasy panel moderated by Ian Kibbe (Raising Bertie) of the Documentary Producers Association, it struck me that the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival is one of those rare fests, nonfiction or not, with genuine audience diversity. While one would expect people of color to show up for the always packed #DocsSoWhite discussions (of which there were two this year), non-white folks also fill the house for the conversations that have nothing to do with race or gender […]