As always, we’re breaking our annual “most read Filmmaker posts” into two lists — 10 posts published in 2017 and 10 archival posts that are still registering large readerships. Throughout the 20, and particularly in the archival posts, there’s a strong current of practical advice conveyed by working filmmakers — the hallmark of this magazine. Here are our most popular posts of 2017. Published in 2017 1. The Visual Language of Oppression: Harvey Wasn’t Working in a Vaccum. Our top post in 2017 was filmmaker Nina Menkes’s preview of a presentation she’ll give at Sundance next month, one in which […]

Nabbing Best VR Story at Venice, Bloodless is veteran filmmaker Gina Kim’s (perhaps best known for 2007’s Vera Farmiga-starring Never Forever) 12-minute immersive stunner. The US-South Korea coproduction was also selected as part of this year’s IDFA DocLab Digital Storytelling program, which is where I experienced it, having gone into the VR Cinema without even bothering to read the synopsis. And because of my cluelessness, the story’s climax packed a punch I never saw coming — one that shook me to the core. This is another way of saying that if you plan on experiencing the project on a future […]

If you were a director or producer coming up in the New York independent film scene of the early 1990s, you wanted to work with Thérèse DePrez. Right out of the gate as a production designer, DePrez, who had been diagnosed with cancer and passed away Tuesday in New York City, defined for herself an imaginative, boldly-colored and stylized approach that brought a high level of ambition and finesse to often meagerly-budgeted films. Not settling for generic indie naturalism — the gentle accenting of our everyday world that is the default approach on so many low-budget pictures — she cited […]

The following profile of production designer Thérèse DePrez was written by producer Ted Hope for Filmmaker‘s Spring, 1994 issue, and is being rerun on the sad occasion of DePrez’s passing this week in New York. After the standard art school stint, and the pay-your dues PA/grip/electric rigmarole, Thérèse DePrez nabbed her first designer gig on Tony Jacobs’s low-budget consumer/horror send-up, The Refrigerator, which sent her further down the blood-spewed path to art direct three straight-to-video horror pics. The creepy crawlers allowed DePrez to hone the “specialty prop” and set design skills she would later call on for Tom Kalin’s Swoon, […]

Winner of the Best American Indie at the Ft. Lauderdale Film Festival, Tomorrow Ever After, a time-travel tale directed by and starring Ela Thier, is available on iTunes and Amazon beginning Friday, December 22. Thier plays Shaina, “a historian who lives 600 years in the future, and is accidentally sent back in time to current-day America. War, poverty, pollution, greed, exploitation, depression, loneliness: these are things that she’s read about in history books. And while she studied this dark period of history (in which we are currently living) when money is viewed as more important than people, she has never, […]

So it’s that intense festival time of year again. You’re considering festivals, applying to festivals, maybe excited about the festivals you’ve been accepted to or recalibrating your expectations after unexpected rejection letters. If so, then the following ten do’s and don’ts may be helpful to you. These suggestions are based not only on my own work with clients, but also from some amazing advice from some really knowledgeable folks who I have had the pleasure of being on panels with over this past year: Basil Tsiokis (programmer, Sundance and DOC NYC), Tom Hall (programmer, Montclair Film Festival), Dan Nuxoll (Rooftop Films), […]

For years the space at 226 West 44th Street in Manhattan was known as Discovery Times Square; it served as a tourist-oriented gallery space that housed temporary exhibits that alternated between artifacts like the Dead Sea Scrolls or Chinese terracotta warriors and contemporary pop—and film—culture like The Avengers, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games. By and large these relied on physical items and held little relevance to those interested in film and video. On October 6, however, the space reopened as National Geographic Encounter, and the first exhibit there, Ocean Odyssey, relies entirely on interactive video, motion-tracking gaming technology, 3D animation and intricate […]

Recounting a recent conversation, Errol Morris says that he’s happy his friend understood Wormwood, the documentary filmmaker’s epic new work, as “an essay on ‘doing history.’” “I think it’s a lot of things, too,” Morris goes on to say, “but I like to hear that it’s about my obsessions with epistemology.” Obsession and epistemology—doesn’t the latter usually require the former? It certainly does in these reality-challenged times, when the act of landing on some honest reckoning with the social and political record requires a scrupulous method, unrelenting tenacity and, indeed, some small degree of obsession. All these qualities have been […]

After shipping the Fall 2006 issue of Filmmaker, where I had been the managing editor for nearly four years, I moved to Los Angeles to start my career as a movie director, the only thing I had ever wanted to do with myself. I had just turned 30, and I was behind schedule. At the time, my expectations didn’t seem so delusional. To begin with, I had found the story I needed to tell, something in a voice that was uniquely my own, and I wasn’t alone in my enthusiasm. I had a top agency and management company behind me, […]