Filmmaking

U.S. DIRECTORS CALL FOR JAFAR PANAHI’S RELEASE

A powerful statement from U.S. directors calling for the release of director Jafar Panahi from prison in Iran has been issued. I’ll let the petition speak for itself, but kudos to the organizers for taking action and assembling this illustrious group. New York, NY (April 30, 2010) – Jafar Panahi, an internationally acclaimed Iranian director of such award-winning films as The White Balloon, The Circle, Crimson Gold and Offside, was arrested at his home on March 1st and has been held since in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. A number of filmmaking luminaries have come to Mr. Panahi’s defense and “condemn […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 1, 2010 Filmmaking
ROGER EBERT RULES

You know that already, but to be reminded again, surf to this week’s must-read post on film criticism in the age of the internet. Yes, it’s sad that film critics are losing their jobs, but Ebert finds good reason to celebrate the diversity of voices the ‘net brings us. A key graph: What the internet is creating is a class of literate, gifted amateur writers, in an old tradition. Like Trollope, who was a British Post official all his working life, they write for love and because they must. Like Rohinton Mistry, a banking executive, or Wallace Stevens, an insurance […]

By Scott Macaulay on May 1, 2010 Filmmaking
NOTES FROM TRIBECA

With Tribeca wrapping up this weekend I thought this would be the right time to give some of my highlights from what I saw this year. Sadly, I didn’t get out to as many movies as I would have liked (but Howard Feinstein did, and he writes about some of them in his preview and at the half way point) but here’s some notes from my vantage point. Best Performance Melissa Leo in The Space Between. Leo plays a grumpy airline stewardess who after her flight is grounded on 9/11 has to watch over one of her passengers, a Pakistani-American […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Apr 30, 2010 Festivals & Events
TRIBECA WINNERS

The winners of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival were announced tonight. Feo Aladag‘s When We Leave received the fest’s top honor, the Founders Award for Best Narrative. The film follows a woman and her son as they try to escape her husband’s abuse and finds shelter with a family in Berlin. Best Documentary went to Alexandra Codina‘s Monica & David, which highlights a couple living with Down syndrome. Other winners include Dana Adam Shaprio‘s Monogamy taking home the New York Competition category and the outlandish comedy Spork won the first ever Best Feature in the Tribeca Film Festival Virtual category. […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Apr 29, 2010 Festivals & Events
SPARROW SONGS, GOD, KAROKE AND BANKSY

Sparrow Songs is a documentary project by filmmaker Alex Jablonski and d.p. Michael Totten, who are making and posting one short doc film per month on their site for a whole year. They are six episodes in, and the films are quite wonderful. Averaging about eight minutes, they are poetic essays that capture the essences of specific places, people, and moments, and that then, without pretension, build these observances into larger statements about love, truth, community, and the ways we are choosing to live our lives. The films include Porn Star Karoke, about the crowd that gathers weekly at an […]

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 29, 2010 Filmmaking
“CLEANFLIX” at STF

Despite being born and bred on our shores, Mormonism is still something of a fringe religion. For a lot of Americans, there’s something vaguely worrying about its army of clean-cut, nametag wearing missionaries. Neither Hollywood nor the independent film scene have helped the Mormon case for normalcy – their portrayals tend to fixate on the church’s checkered history with polygamy. Last night’s Stranger Than Fiction featured Cleanflix, a sympathetic look at the more mainstream side of Mormon culture. Directed by Andrew James and Joshua Ligairi, two filmmakers who grew up in the tradition (James is no longer practicing, but Ligairi […]

By Mary Anderson Casavant on Apr 28, 2010 Festivals & Events
TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL, PART TWO

Some good, or at least interesting, films surfaced at Tribeca this year—I’ll get to a few a couple of paragraphs down, and I wrote about others here last week—almost in spite of the umbrella organization itself. You can’t help but wonder: What is the template for this festival, which has been struggling to find its identity since its inception? Toronto, Sundance, Cannes, Berlin? San Francisco, Denver? Answer: It’s not cast from a festival mold at all, in spite of the invaluable input of former artistic director Peter Scarlet and David Kwok, as far as I can tell the only current […]

By Howard Feinstein on Apr 26, 2010 Festivals & Events
SUNDANCE DIRECTOR/SCREENWRITING LABS ANNOUNCED

Today the Sundance Institute announced the 13 projects selected for this year’s Director and Screenwriting Labs. Talking place in Park City, Utah June 1-25, the Labs will be filled with many familiar names to Filmmaker readers. 2008 25 New Faces alum Myna Joseph will be attending; as will Ondi Timoner, whose doc We Live In Public won the doc Grand Prize at Sundance in 2009; Ry Russo-Young, who was awarded our Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award for You Wont Miss Me at last year’s Gothams, will be attending with her latest screenplay; and ’09 25 […]

By Jason Guerrasio on Apr 26, 2010 Festivals & Events
JESPER JUST’S TRENTEMOLLER VIDEO

Artist Jesper Just, who Shari Roman wrote about for Filmmaker in 2007, directed this video, “Sycamore Feeling,” for the band Trentemøller. It was produced by Lucas Joaquin, Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen and shot by Kasper Tuxen. (Hat tip: Antville.)

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 25, 2010 Filmmaking
ERROL MORRIS’S BEST COMMERCIAL EVER

Via Twitter, Errol Morris called this the best commercial of all time. He may have a point. (Hat tip: HTML Giant.)

By Scott Macaulay on Apr 24, 2010 Filmmaking

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