Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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“THIS IS NOT A FILM” AND MORE: IRANIAN CINEMA AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
When is a film not a film? In one of the triumphs of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the remarkable documentary This is Not A Film, by Jafar Panahi and Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, asks this question and more as it portrays, diary-like, a day in Panahi’s life awaiting trial at his home in Tehran. Panahi talks on the phone with friends, illustrates with tape the boundaries of a future film set, chats with a garbage man who has just earned his Masters degree, and is kept company by his daughter’s free-roaming and giant pet lizard, Igi. If one is forbidden by law to make movies for 20 years, if one […]
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JAMIE STUART AT LINCOLN CENTER
Filmmaker‘s Jamie Stuart has moved uptown where he’s documented the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s build of their new Elinor Bunin theaters. He’s made four new pieces, characteristically backlit, and in black-and-white, and they have premiered at Vanity Fair, which also runs an interview with him. Below is his sit-down with Executive Director Rose Kuo, and a video in which he geeks out on all the new gear. And here, from the interview, is his take on the filmmakers of the future: Traditionally, the director’s job is to oversee things, and make decisions while you have a cameraman who shoots […]
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JAY DUPLASS TALKS KEVIN GANT
While I usually avoid Q&As (due to my impatience with too many audience members making statements rather than asking actual questions) I’m glad I stuck around after the screening of Jay Duplass’s short biopic Kevin, if only to meet the doc’s admirable director and arrange for an interview later. Unlike other filmmakers attending this year’s Arizona Int’l Film Festival, Duplass wasn’t in Tucson to publicize his film, per se, so much as to promote its subject Kevin Gant (who also showed up to treat us to a post-screening acoustic set), the Duplass brothers’ musical hero in the early ’90s who […]
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VON TRIER AT CANNES: FRENCH HYPOCRISY AT ITS WORST
The controversy that has resulted in the Cannes Film Festival — which shows itself to be the spineless tool of a government uniquely, like many of its citizens, obsessed with self-image — declaring Lars von Trier persona non grata on account of his comments that began with his upbringing as a Jew is a despicable, hypocritical mountain made from a molehill. (Would The Producers be banned here? Hardly. Will I lose my accreditation in the future for writing this? I would not put it past them.) Laws about expressing antisemitism are strict here (six months in prison, clearly related to […]
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LARS VON TRIER IS CANNES’ “PERSONA NON GRATA”
I missed the Wednesday morning Melancholia screening, having to moderate a table at the Producers Network breakfast the same time, but afterwards I happened to catch a snippet of the press conference. I tweeted a few comments, namely ones in which the director talked about this relationship with the film’s d.p., who started the project by telling him not to behave like so many “old or middle-aged directors and make [his actresses] younger and more naked.” “Don’t tell me that,” Von Trier said he told the cinematographer. Watching press conferences on those little TVs in the basement of the Palais […]
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Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo is now available on DVD through Factory 25. Visit the film’s official website to learn more. NOTE: This review was first published at Hammer to Nail in conjunction with the film’s theatrical release at Film Forum on May 12, 2010.) The knowledge that Jessica Oreck is an entomologist at the Museum of Natural History in New York City who has never previously made a film might cause one to worry that Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo will be an unavoidably stiff and grueling piece of video academia. Worry not, skeptic. Oreck’s wildly precocious exploration of Japan’s ongoing […]
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ECRAN TOTAL PUBLISHES FILM ACQUISITION PRICES
In America we’re used to seeing box-office results each Monday, but for American movies the sometimes more relevant figures — their foreign sales — are guarded trade secrets. Many producers, unable to get hard numbers for their comps, cling to outdated models and “percentage of the budget” charts when making business plans. That’s why the yearly feature by the French trade Ecran Total , published today here at Cannes, is so startling. By obtaining the contracts filed by French distributors at the public funding org, the CNC, the journal prints the acquisition prices of foreign films, taking the temperature of […]
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SLATED LOOKING FOR FINANCIERS, PRODUCERS & FILMMAKERS FOR MARKETPLACE
Slated, a site that provides a range of tools and services for filmmakers and the film industry such as Festival Genius, is currently building an online film finance marketplace and is looking for industry professionals to be involved with the beta launch of Slated Marketplace. Marketplace hopes to be a hub where filmmakers can pitch work to accredited investors and financiers while producers and others in the industry will get the inside track on new film properties. Participation in the beta launch of Marketplace is being offered for a limited time, to be considered complete their brief registration at slated.com.
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TRAUMA AND MYSTERY IN “THE RETURN”
What happened over there? That’s the question people keep asking Kelli (Linda Cardellini), the protagonist of Liza Johnson’s skillful debut picture, The Return, playing here in Cannes in the Director’s Fortnight section. Her friends, a counselor, a husband — they all assume some trauma occurred during her deployment, some event that has estranged this blue-collar worker, mother of two, and National Reservist from the reassuringly quotidian elements that made up her former life. The movie begins at the airport as Kelli returns home, but there are no yellow ribbons, and none of the welcoming crowds found in many stateside Iraq […]
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JONATHAN CAOUETTE AT THE CANNES DOCUMENTARY LUNCH
When Filmmaker polled our editors and came up with the 10 Best Films of the ’00s, on our list was Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation. Ahead of its time in its iMovie-edited home brew of diaristic lo-fi doc footage, Tarnation vividly depicted the relationship of the filmmaker to his memorably unstable mother. At Cannes this year, Caouette is back with his not-a-sequel, Walk Away Renee (pictured), dipping into the same footage trove but augmenting it with new material. This new footage consists of Caouette traveling cross-country to check his mom into assisted living, and sci-fi scripted sequences positing an alternate reality version […]
