Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“THE ISLAND PRESIDENT” WINS TIFF DOC AUDIENCE AWARD
The Island President, Jon Shenk’s doc about Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed’s work advocating climate change legislation, has won the Documentary Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival. The doc is a spirited, pictorially dazzling story of the charismatic Nasheed’s charmingly quixotic attempt to use the fate of his island nation — ground zero when it comes to impending destruction by rising tides — to alert the world about the dangers of our carbon-producing modern lifestyles. One of the most interesting parts of the doc is Shenk’s behind-the-scenes look at Nasheed in his cabinet meetings and conferences. I interviewed Shenk […]
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IFW: “HECTOR AND HIMSELF” PRODUCER HELEN ALEXANDER, #1
So Independent Film Week is finally around the corner…coming to you from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada within Strategic Partners, the second module of the TAPS program 2011. After a superb week in Berlin, back in June, on module one with the Erich Pommer Institut, expectations are high! I am attending all three modules with our third project, feature fiction adventure Hector & Himself, a Dickensian style contemporary fable, which finds the protagonist, 25-year-old Hector, setting foot outside his attic room for the first time, after dreaming up an imaginary friend, Henry. His deranged mother has kept him drugged and locked […]
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IFW: “THE LIGHT IN HER EYES” DIRECTOR JULIA MELTZER, #1
The last three months of the last three years have been grueling and gratifying. We started shooting The Light In Her Eyes, about the leader of a women’s Qur’an school in Damascus, Syria,in June 2008. Flash forward to June 2011, and we’re still searching through our forest of footage to find the structure and story that we’re sure is there. And then suddenly in August—it creeps up on us and takes us by surprise—we have a solid rough cut! It feels both miraculous and expected. Now it’s the Friday before IFP’s film week and Laura and I are sitting in […]
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INDEPENDENT FILM WEEK BEGINS
The IFP’s Independent Film Week begins today. Centered this year around the new Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center, the event features talks, panels, seminars, screenings and events focused on the art and business of independent film today. You can find some information on the event at the IFP’s site here, and we’ll try to link to some of the live streams as the Film Week goes along. At 4:30 I’ll be doing a “Hot Button” conversation with producers Ted Hope and Mynette Louie that asks, “Is Independent Film a Hobby or a Business.” And throughout the week […]
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IFW: “PAVILION” DIRECTOR TIM SUTTON #1
My film needs a tag line. Well, that’s not all it needs. It needs an audience. No, too daunting, stick with the tag. Independent Film Week opens today and the wandering tribes of indie film will break bread. I bring with me a newly minted cut of Pavilion, an ethereal narrative feature film about the mystery of youth, and a fistful of cautious optimism. After processing the first leg of the IFP Narrative Lab in June, some editing tweaks, a couple of living-room screenings and a sweetened score by my collaborator Sam Prekop, the film is ready. Version Industries is […]
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TORONTO PHOTOS AND NOTES, #2
For several people I talked to, my favorite film at Cannes became their favorite film at Toronto. Oslo, August 31 is Joachim Trier’s follow-up to his inspiring hit film, Reprise. That movie, a tale of youth and best friends and literature and longing and rock and roll, was smart, sophisticated and with an emotional arc like a great mix tape. It was also somewhat dazzling in its montage, using split-screen, freeze frames and a European post-punk soundtrack to make its story of young Norwegian literati one that felt like young adulthood everywhere. After several years working on a larger-scale American […]
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TORONTO 2011: “WAVELENGTHS” PART I
For fans of experimental film, 2011 has been a year of heavy losses. Yet even as we mourn the deaths of pioneer filmmakers including Jordan Belson, George Kuchar, George Landow (aka Owen Land), and Adolphas Mekas, the 2011 Wavelengths programs at the Toronto International Film Festival indicated that experimental film is alive and well… and living in Canada. Aberration of Light: Dark Chamber Disclosure is a site-specific live projection performance that was a highlight of this year’s festival. In the projection booth, Brooklyn-based artists Sandra Gibson and Luis Recoder distilled a found 35mm commercial film print into rich, gorgeous beams of light that danced on […]
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TIFF 2011: THE YEAR OF THE DOC?
The buzz word at this year’s TIFF is “doc.” For the first time in its 35-year history, the Toronto International Film Festival opened with a documentary: Davis Guggenheim‘s From The Sky Down, which profiles the world’s most popular rock band, U2. Filmgoers and critics are also buzzing over Crazy Horse, by verite legend Frederick Wiseman; Samsara (by Baraka‘s Ron Fricke); Tony Krawitz‘s The Tall Man,; and Girl Model by Ashley Sabin and David Redmon. The doc vibe was in the air on Monday morning at a breakfast launch for Focus Foward. Sponsored by Cinelan and GE, Focus Forward invites big-name documentarians such as Morgan […]
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TORONTO PHOTOS AND NOTES, #1
The IFP organized a screening series at TIFF this year for RBC, the Royal Bank of Canada, at the Thompson Hotel. The event turned into a four-night run of Ryan O’Nan’s festival selection, The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best, which knocked out the crowd each night. As I moderated the Q&A’s, I can attest: this film plays. The movie was selected for the IFP’s Narrative Lab just this past summer, and it happily surprised all of us by finishing so quickly and making it to Toronto. The Brooklyn Brothers is a totally winning tale of a makeshift band on a […]
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The Blue Velvet Project, #18
Second #846, 14:06 They have walked together in the night for several minutes now, delicately circling the topic of evil, as if talking in code. Finally, Jeffrey takes a gamble: “I, uh, guess you gotta get back home pretty soon, huh?” he asks Sandy. Her reply, as usual, takes the form of another question: “Not really—why?” And then she offers to show him Dorothy Vallens’s apartment, whose weak gravity has been slowly pulling them closer. This is a fiercely political stretch of the film, given the context of Ronald Reagan and his elevation of family to mythic status. In his […]
