Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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THOUGHTS ON NETFLIX… QWIKSTER… QWIKFLIX?
Late last night before going to bed I tweeted that I found (soon-to-be-former) Netflix CEO Reed Hasting’s “explanation and reflections” about his company’s pricing change “odd and confusing.” If you haven’t heard, Netflix is splitting in two. Hastings will remain CEO of a streaming video company that will retain the name Netflix. A new CEO, Andy Rendich, has been appointed head of a DVD rental company — formerly Netflix’s core business. The new DVD company will be called Qwikster. Qwikster? It sounds like a new on-the-go breakfast product. (Maybe that’s because I keep flashing back to that little Martian with […]
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ON THE GROUND AT INDEPENDENT FILM WEEK
As one of roughly a dozen full time staffers at IFP, I’ve been working the past six months to help launch the 33rd annual Independent Film Week. It’s our first year at Lincoln Center’s new Elinor Bunin Film Center, and more than a thousand indie filmmakers and industry professionals are in town for the festivities. In commemoration, I’ve dug up my long neglected digital camera, and I’ll be sharing photo highlights from IFW all week long. Here are some snapshots from Day 1: The team behind the upcoming Detroit Unleaded (editor Nathanial Sherfield, director Rola Nashef, producers Marwan Nashef and […]
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IFW: “BEST KEPT SECRET”
A year ago, I was banging my head against the wall of my Brooklyn apartment asking myself “Why?” Why another documentary film I knew would consume my entire life and prevent me from financial stability? Why a film made in the grittiest part of Newark, New Jersey, one of the country’s most problematic urban areas? Why not a film about Michelin-starred restaurants in Paris or cheese making in Rome? The answer was, of course — because I had to tell THIS story. Best Kept Secret is the story of a Newark public high school teacher who struggles to prepare her students with autism to survive […]
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IFW: “OUR NIXON”
Next week, my husband Brian and I will take our first documentary feature (Our Nixon) to Independent Film Week. I’ve never been to this event before, or to anything remotely like it, so I would describe my state of mind as Excited Anticipation, tinged with a slightly lesser amount of Bemused Bafflement. For the uninitiated, here is the little that I know about Independent Film Week (I should say more specifically the Project Forum): if you are selected by IFP to participate, you upload information about your film to a top secret server run by elves, and then various species […]
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IFW: “THE SWERVE”
Dear Gentle Reader, My name is Tommy Minnix, and I am really delighted to be guest blogging for Independent Film Week this year. Thanks to Scott and the folks at IFP for having me. I am participating in No Borders this year with a narrative feature called The Swerve. The script was written and will be directed by Dean Kapsalis, and I’m producing along with veteran indie producer Derrick Tseng. It’s a psychological thriller about a woman whose life spirals out of control when she’s bitten by a mouse. When we got the e-mail in mid-July that we had been […]
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IFW: “OBVIOUS CHILD”
Hi! My name is Gillian Robespierre. I’m a writer-director and so thrilled to be attending the 2011 IFP Emerging Narrative project forum with my script Obvious Child. It’s a romantic comedy about a young woman living in Brooklyn who has just had her heart broken, and after a spontaneous one-night stand, finds that she’s pregnant. She decides to get an abortion and move on with her life. Yes, it’s a comedy! Obvious Child was originally a short film I directed and co-wrote with Anna Bean and Karen Maine. After years of watching films that featured unplanned pregnancies ending in childbirth […]
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IFW: NEW TERRITORY
I am Ron Simons, an independent film producer based in NYC. I haven’t been a producer very long, having come into the role not quite by accident but certainly not as a childhood dream either. In fact, if you’d asked me five years to define the role of a film producer I would have been hard pressed to come up with a response that included half of what I presently do. By way of background, I’m an actor by training having spent a few years at University of Washington earning an MFA in acting from the Professional Actor Training Program. Before […]
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IFW: KICKING OFF “FIVE NIGHTS”
I will start by saying this: we are very lucky. Just a few weeks ago, we finished a remarkable Kickstarter campaign for my film, Five Nights In Maine. In 30 days, we raised $40,613 from 367 courageous and generous backers. The support from people we have known our whole lives and complete strangers humbled and inspired up. Our community proved that this is a film they want to see and be a part of. Now it’s time to take this energy to Independent Film Week! We are thrilled to be participating in this year’s No Borders International Co-production Market. My […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #19
Second #893, 14:53 In the early days of silent cinema, text and image coexisted, as intertitles directed viewers how to read a film, literally. In the best of these films, intertitles not only conveyed narrative information, but suggested possibilities of reading that allowed for the viewer to construct her own meaning from the relationship between text and image. In Blue Velvet, the LINCOLN street sign, which functions almost like an insert shot, is its own form of postmodern intertitle. [Christian Metz: “When approaching cinema from the linguistic point of view, it is difficult to avoid shuttling back and forth between […]
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TIFF: “I AM A GOOD PERSON/I AM A BAD PERSON”
Ingrid Veninger’s latest film has to be the fastest movie ever made for TIFF. The Toronto filmmaker was on her way to unspool her 2010 feature, Modra, at film fests across Europe when she seized the opportunity to shoot an entirely new film. That meant 19 days of scripting, casting and rehearsals in Toronto in March this year, 13 days shooting in north England, Paris and Berlin, then wrapping with five weeks of post in T.O. to make the TIFF deadline. That also meant Veninger presenting Modra in one cinema and then becoming “Ruby White,” who was premiering a fictitious […]
