Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Arielle Javitch
For Arielle Javitch, whose first feature, Look, Stranger, is currently in post, moviemaking and movement have always been intertwined activities. She began her career as a dancer, and when a back injury sidelined her from performance, she began to make short dance films. “They started as pure movement, and then they began to get more narrative,” Javitch remembers. “One of my shorts was about refugees, and I used testimonies from different [refugee] stories, trying to make them visual through dance and other imagery. The film was beautiful, but it didn’t succeed, and then I knew I had to move into […]
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Danfung Dennis
Danfung Dennis, who is self-lensing his first directorial effort, says he had never handled a video camera before starting production. But for Dennis, who made his name as a photojournalist covering strife in China, Iraq and Afghanistan, the transition was an organic one. “The Canon 5D Mark 2 came out,” he remembers, “and it was very similar to the cameras I had been using. With just one button push I was shooting HD video.” Dennis, who had been shooting in Kabul for Newsweek, thought he might make a short Web video about the conflict there. But soon Dennis upsized his […]
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Susan Youssef
At the IFP Narrative Lab, a mentor said of Susan Youssef’s first feature, Habibi Rasak Kharban (literally, “Darling, Something’s Wrong with Your Head”): “It’s a classic story, like Romeo and Juliet.” True, but the roots of Youssef’s story go back far further. The film is an adaptation of the 12th-century Sufi parable Majnun Layla, which was itself based on a 7th-century Arabic story. Over the years, the tragic tale of undying love between a woman and the wandering poet her family forbids her to marry has formed the basis for countless works of art, from Shakespeare’s classic to several Indian […]
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Kasper Tuxen
“I started out as a child actor,” says Kasper Tuxen, the Danish d.p., who has in the space of a year become sought after by American independent directors looking for adventurous cinematic collaborators. “I was 13; I had a lead role in a Danish film, but from the first day of the shoot I was interested in cinematography.” When he got older Tuxen thought about becoming a rock musician but enrolled in the Danish Film School in Copenhagen instead. “It was a very technical education,” Tuxen says. “For four years it was all about film and exposure.” After film school, […]
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Mike Stoklasa
In December 2009, Mike Stoklasa uploaded “Star Wars: The Phantom Menace” Review, a 70-minute takedown of George Lucas’s 1999 film. Astute in its critique, perverse in its use of humor and hypnotically narrated in the first person by a serial killer character in severe need of a decongestant, the review used footage from the film, its DVD extras and the occasionally third-party source to systematically prosecute Lucas’s crimes against filmmaking and his betrayal of Star Wars fans’ pent-up devotion. Once posted, the video went viral. Lost co-creator and Star Trek producer Damon Lindelof gave it immediate mainstream cred at Slashfilm: […]
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Sultan Sharrief
Made piecemeal over four years, Sultan Sharrief’s Bilal’s Stand is a brazenly autobiographical, starless, penny-pinching production from Detroit about one black Muslim teen’s decision to go to the University of Michigan despite the naysayers in his family as well as in the diverse, suburban high school he treks to instead of the more toxic Detroit public high school nearby. Rough around the edges, it’s told with enough freewheeling inventiveness and first-person verve that it transcends its obvious financial limitations and offers a glimpse of utterly authentic working-class black life in the industrial Midwest. In the world of cinema, studio or […]
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David Wilson
You may know David Wilson best as the co-founder of the True/False Film Festival with Paul Sturtz. But in the seven years the well-loved documentary fest has been steadily increasing its visibility, Wilson has also been quietly honing his skills as a filmmaker. In 1996, after graduating from Hampshire College in Massachusetts and spending some time working on films in New York City, he returned to his hometown of Columbia, Mo., to make the short Magic City, which looks at the underground youth culture in the state. He followed that by spending the next few years helping to start up […]
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Radical Friend
Directors Julia Grigorian and Kirby McClure, who collaborate together as Radical Friend, are following their string of innovative music videos with their biggest project yet, but you probably won’t see it on YouTube anytime soon. Following up on the technological experimentation of their videos for groups like Black Moth Super Rainbow and Yeasayer, Radical Friend has been commissioned by the Creators Project (a collaboration between Vice magazine and Intel) to make something that seems part atavistic ritual, part Cronenbergian cyber-humanism. Writes the duo in an e-mail, “Our project is The Digital Flesh, and it’s very much aligned with our video directing […]
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Marc Fratello
Winner of the Focus Features Best Film Award at the 2010 Columbia University Film Festival, the Student Choice Award, and an Audience Award, Babyland by Marc Fratello is one of the most devastating shorts you’ll see all year. It starts off like a blue-collar version of a Nicole Holofcener film, or perhaps one by Todd Solondz. By day, a lonely young upstate New York woman (played beautifully by Marielena Logsdon) trolls baby boutiques and children’s bookstores, connecting with fellow mothers-to-be. The only thing is, the slight bulge in her blouse is only padding. She’s not pregnant. But such is her […]
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Brent Stewart
When you live next to Harmony Korine some unconventional ideas can creep into your head. So when Brent Stewart was thinking about making a chamber-piece drama on 35mm and shooting the whole thing with little to no camera movement he went to his famous filmmaking neighbor for some advice. “I knew it would be a challenge to pull off because even Harmony said to me, ‘Man, that’s risky.’” But, The Colonel’s Bride, Stewart’s debut feature, is an intimate look at loneliness, old age and death with striking photography, a haunting score and a stirring lead performance that shouldn’t be missed. […]
