Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Ken Jacobs (1933-2025)
Ken Jacobs wasn’t just a single (albeit huge) formative force in experimental film, but a river through which an array of streams flowed to their own artistic destinations. For New Yorkers, the Williamsburg native was an easily-sighted local legend: The first time I remember seeing him speak was in 2019 at a MoMI memorial screening of work by Phil Solomon, one of his many notable students at SUNY-Binghamton. Jacobs was in full stentorian mode, taking to the stage to proclaim, by way of sorrowful introduction, that “a teacher should not outlive his students.” Later that year, he was in the […]
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Robert Redford: A Remembrance
On the sad occasion of Robert Redford’s passing, filmmaker Eva Vives pens this guest post on her interactions with the legendary actor, director, environmentalist, activist and Sundance Institute founder. — Editor I first met Redford by chance. Pete Sollett and I had gone to meet Sundance Institute’s Michelle Satter, Founding Senior Director of Sundance Institute’s Artist Programs, at the Sundance offices in New York after our short, Five Feet High and Rising, had won the festival. There was some kind of snafu, and I was asked to wait in an office while they sorted it out. I don’t remember where […]
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Inciting Incident: AI and Screenwriting at DePaul University
Sometime last year, Matt Quinn took an excerpt from a script he’d written and put it into an AI image generator to create a character. The associate professor of screenwriting, who also serves as associate dean for student affairs and director of L.A. programs at DePaul University’s School of Cinematic Arts, feels that it is his job to stay current with new technologies. He had previously experimented with various tools and had mixed feelings about generative AI and its connection to the filmmaking process. However, this experience was different. “It took a second, but it almost took my breath away,” […]
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Production Gear: A Primer on How Tariffs Inflate Costs and Erode Choice, and Why Costs Will Never Come Back Down
L.A. film and TV production, recovering in the long wake of the global pandemic, has been beset by strikes, streaming wars, a generational turn from legacy media, and now AI anxiety. Resulting historic lows in production have meant that industry freelancers are widely out of work. It’s a safe bet that the last thing the industry wants is another round of whiplash. Enter broad tariffs. A blast from the past, last signed into law by Herbert Hoover in the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. I think we know how that turned out. The current American President, seizing questionable executive powers […]
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Find Your Power: Advice to New Filmmakers from Side Hustle Director Abby Harri
A new friend came up to me after a screening and Q&A recently for my first short as a director, Side Hustle. “I realized that you’re completely honest, in a way that must be deeply painful to you.” My brain immediately went to an answer I had just given to an audience question. A young woman asked, “Did you always want to direct or did casting work inspire you to direct?” My response was immediate: “I always knew I wanted to direct but my self-worth was in the gutter. So, I had to work on that most of all.” She […]
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In Memoriam, An Interview with the Late Documentary Filmmaker Joel DeMott and her partner, Jeff Kreines
In my recent Filmmaker conversation with Julia Loktev about the making of her monumental documentary, My Undesirable Friends, I cited the work of the late documentary filmmaker Joel DeMott, because I believe there is a straight line between DeMott’s approach in the late 1970s to shooting vérité documentary using shoulder-mounted 16mm cameras and Loktev’s latter-day methods using iPhones. DeMott, who died in June, has been eulogized in obits in Documentary and The New York Times, so no need to recap her venturesome life and career here. Instead, my way of paying homage to the contributions of DeMott and her partner […]
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“Nonsense Is the Only Thing That Makes Sense, Especially Now”: Sunita Mani, Back To One, Episode 355
You know the multitalented Sunita Mani from Glow, Spirited, Mr. Robot, or Save Yourselves! And now, just this year, she has roles in so many projects (like The Wild, Death of a Unicorn, A Nice Indian Boy, Government Cheese, His and Hers,The Roses) that one wonders how she has to time to do it all. On this episode, she takes us back to where it all started, improv comedy, and explains how being willing to fall down and get back up has served her work. She details the “emptying out” process that she needs to do before a new role, […]
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Grasshopper Film Acquires Non-Theatrical and Digital Rights to Birth Tourism Doc How to Have an American Baby
Grasshopper Film has acquired North American digital and non-theatrical rights to How to Have an American Baby, directed by Chinese-American filmmaker Leslie Tai, the company said in a press release. The company will release the film tomorrow, August 19, on digital platforms. From the press release: A decade in the making, the film is a haunting and intimate portrait of the shadow economy of Chinese birth tourism in the United States. With rare access and remarkable empathy, How to Have an American Baby takes viewers inside a hidden network of maternity hotels, expectant mothers, brokers, and medical providers operating at […]
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“It Pushed Me to the Limits of My Ability and Experience as a Filmmaker”: Matt Wolf on His Emmy-Nominated Pee-wee As Himself
Throughout his career, documentary filmmaker Matt Wolf has excelled at portraits of complicated artists and individuals whose work is both highly idiosyncratic as well as, at least seen in retrospect, emergent from specific cultural, social and political milieus. Early work include two films — a short, Smalltown Boys, and his feature debut, Wild Combination — about, respectively, two seminal downtown New York figures of the ’70s and ’80s, artist David Wojnarowicz and composer Arthur Russell. The 2017 short Bayard and Me looked at the relationship between civil rights leader Bayard Rustin through the lens of his relationship with boyfriend Walter […]
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Inside the Student Movement: Crafting Protest Journalism From Within
Dispatches, a feature-length vérité documentary I’m currently co-directing alongside Kira Boden-Gologorsky, follows protesters and student journalists covering the fight for free speech on Columbia University’s campus at protests which made international headlines and faced mammoth political backlash. But more than just chronicling those events, Dispatches explores what it means to report from within an institution while it’s in crisis and to film the story when you are already inside it. By the time tents appeared on our campus’ South Lawn in April 2024, I had already filmed dozens of hours of footage and spoken with countless students who had all […]
