Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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TFI NEW MEDIA FUND DEADLINE MAY 25
Supporting filmmakers who are delving into the medium of transmedia, the Tribeca Film Institute has currently opened submissions for its TFI New Media Fund. Seeking non-fiction, social issue media projects that are integrated across multiple platforms, four to eight projects will be accepted to receive $50,000 – $100,000 in funding. According to the TFI website, the fund is dedicated to nurture “projects that activate audiences around issues of contemporary social justice and equality around the world and demonstrate the power of cross-platform storytelling and dynamic audience engagement.” Eligible projects can be non-fiction or scripted as long as it’s based on […]
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Director Zach Clark on Vacation!
I first met Zach Clark last October when his excitingly subversive, sex-scene-less SXSW hit Modern Love Is Automatic opened Pornfilmfestival Berlin (where my own short The Story of Ramb O had its premiere). Since we barely had the chance to chat in the buzzing, jam-packed Moviemento hub, I was thrilled when I heard recently that Clark’s follow-up Vacation! (pictured above) was already on the festival circuit and would be playing theatrically at Brooklyn’s own reRun Gastropub Theater in May. Finally I had an excuse to find out what makes this offbeat yet seemingly well-adjusted director of a feature about a […]
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ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT: LOOKING AHEAD TO THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
In a time zone six hours away, the espresso is stockpiled. The line-up is out. The hotels are booked. The contestants are in their corners. It’s time for the industry’s storied annual trade show/summer camp, the Cannes Film Festival. Actors, producers and executives will tend to prioritize networking events, while film programmers, distributors and journalists will gorge on films until the juice runs down their faces. I plan to gobble movies until my eyes glaze over, flickering like bionic screens. A colleague recently complained about the tendency of festival goers to refer to films not by title but by the director’s name, which […]
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City of Life and Death — A Hammer to Nail Review
(City of Life and Death opened on May 11, 2011 at Film Forum in New York City. Learn more at the film’s official website.) In December 1937, China’s capital city Nanking fell to the invading Japanese Imperial Army. During the weeks that followed, the Japanese raped, tortured, and butchered the city’s remaining inhabitants; the death toll varies widely, but some estimates put it at over 300,000. Lu Chuan’s epic film, which screens at Film Forum through May 24 and in select U.S. cities after that, dramatizes the Nanking Massacre (also known as the Nanjing Massacre) from multiple perspectives. The major […]
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MARC MAURINO’S “INSIDE THE MACHINE” SOLD TO CBS FILMS
Yesterday Deadline reported that Marc Maurino’s spec script, Inside The Machine, sold to CBS Films. Beau Flynn and Tripp Vinson are producing for Contra Films. I want to wish Marc a huge round of congratulations for this sale. Last fall, I posted a series of pieces strolling down Filmmaker‘s memory lane. In each, I looked back at a single issue of the magazine, and in the second post Marc responded in the comments section with his own story. He wrote about how he discovered Filmmaker Magazine at a film festival and how it made him want to get into independent […]
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Six Asides on Paranormal Activity 2
Paranormal Activity 2 is not an avant-garde film, but only because no one has argued that it is. 1. The Importance of Framing The difference between commercial culture (pop culture) and the avant-garde is a matter of rhetorical framing. Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, created the conditions for the New Wave not only through his films, but through his words about his films, and about cinema in general. Confrontational, witty, manifesto-like, Godard framed the way people saw his films. Godard was an auteur of language, not just cinema. “A movie should have a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he famously […]
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Trailer Watch: The Skin I Live In
Here’s the teaser for Pedro Almodovar’s Cannes-bound The Skin I Live In. It’s been described as a horror film, and this clip does have a bit of Franju in it. (Click the headline if you can’t see the clip.)
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THE ONLY CAT VIDEO YOU’LL FIND HERE
I know cat videos and the internet go hand in hand. But for years I’ve resisted. Until now. Because it’s amazing. Here, a cat being given a bath. (Click on the headline if you don’t see the video.)
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Cannes : Films I’m Hoping Will Work Me Into A (Scentless) Sweat
The Australian-born critic Shane Danielsen wrote an amusing piece for Indiewire about this year’s Berlin Film Festival. He compared the smell outside some of the screening rooms to that of sperm. I remember it being stinky, but not that particular odor. Shane is, however, a reliable source. One of two things at Cannes that really gets on my nerves is the smell inside the press screenings, especially those that take place at 8:30 a.m. The 5000-seat theater is packed. No pun intended, but these projections are the pits, the lower depths of hygiene. Maybe it’s time constraints or perhaps cultural practices, but you […]
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TRAILER WATCH: “MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE”
Less than one year after Sean Durkin’s short, Mary Last Seen, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival comes this new trailer for the feature that resulted from it. (Click on the headline if you don’t see the video.) Durkin was one of our “25 New Faces” of 2010, and now his feature, which premiered at Sundance, has its international premiere at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section. From Jason Guerrasio’s interview with Durkin: I made Mary Last Seen to have something to send out with the feature script,” Durkin admits. But after taking a second pass at the edit […]
