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The Tribeca Film Institute announced the projects for its 2008 Tribeca All Access program today. The program is designed to “help foster relationships between film industry executives and filmmakers from traditionally underrepresented communities,” according the the press release. Tribeca All Access will provide the filmmakers workshops and opportunities to present their works in one-on-one meetings with more than 100 potential investors, development executives, producers and agents. The six-day event will take place during the Tribeca Film Festival in late April. The 37 narrative and documentary projects selected (the largest showing ever) are listed below. NARRATIVE Bardos, Anslem Richardson (Writer)Two family […]
Over at his Cinema Echo Chamber, Brandon Harris interviews Tom Quinn, writer/director of the excellent indie feature The New Year Parade, which screens tonight at the IFC Center. The film won the Grand Prize at Slamdance this year and is also a graduate of the IFP Rough Cuts Lab, which is where I originally encountered it. Harris originally wrote about the film here on the Filmmaker blog, and in the intro to the interview at Cinema Echo Chamber he dubs the film a “naturalistic, emotionally resonant look at the year long dissolution and repair of a South Philadelphia Irish family, […]
Screen Daily today runs a must-read edited excerpt of financier Ben Waisbren’s recent remarks in Berlin about film financing, the credit markets, slate deals, and the movie business overall. Here’s how they intro his piece: “In a prescient speech more than a month ago in Berlin, financier Ben Waisbren talked of impending calamity for the US wave of slate financing – banks won’t touch such mega-deals again until there is more transparency and a better alignment of investor and studio interests.”
Asia Argento — the writer, director and actor — has been justly celebrated this week by Nathan Lee in the Village Voice on the occasion of her starring role in Olivier Assayas’s latest thriller, Boarding Gate. Lee calls her “not only the most fearless actor of her generation, but also one of the most intelligent and commanding,” an assessment with which I concur. His piece is hard to excerpt, so I suggest you simply go to the link and read the whole thing. Also look for Travis Crawford’s piece on Mother of Tears, her father Dario’s latest feature in which […]
In her Deadline Hollywood Daily, Nikki Finke links to and comments on a Bloomberg.com report that states that the Sundance Channel is for sale and that Cablevision, which already owns the IFC, may be a potential buyer. From Andy Fixmer’s Bloomberg report: The Sundance Channel, the cable network built around Robert Redford’s annual film festival, is for sale and Cablevision Systems Corp. may be the eventual buyer, according to Pali Research. Owners General Electric Co., CBS Corp. and Redford are seeking $400 million to $500 million for the channel, which has 26 million subscribers, Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali […]
I had a business meeting last week in which there was an honest discussion about whether the “Two Girls, One Cup” phenomenon was played out or not. I’ll say no more. Apparently, though, it has not, as the internet meme has crossed over into the old-media world of Esquire magazine. Karina Longworth reports over at SpoutBlog: I’m fairly certain Cary Grant was never asked by an interviewer to watch internet scat porn so that his word-for-word reaction could be printed in a major magazine, but poor George Clooney lives in a different time. Presumably because there’s very little new to […]
Over at his DIY Filmmaker blog, Sujewa Ekanayake posts a long interview with Barry Jenkins (pictured) about his Medicine for Melancholy, one of the real discoveries (and a film I very much liked) out of SXSW. He talks about Godard, being inspired by Claire Denis’s Vendredi Soir, and whether Medicine for Melancholy is, in Sujewa’s words, “the Barack Obama of indie films.” Here’s his response to the latter — specifically, whether or not his film can “cross over” from the typical “multi-ethnic but largely white” base of indie film to reach more diverse audiences. “The Barack Obama of indie films.” […]
The social marketplace site, IndieGoGo, has announced the first film to reach its funding goal on the site. Titled, The Lilliput, filmmaker Minna Zielonka-Packer raised $10,000 through the site and will use the proceeds to film a sneak peak of the film. Here’s the synopsis of the film from the site: An American filmmaker travels to Poland to make a film about Gombin, the town her father was born in, as a memorial to him and to the Holocaust. Poland 2008 is a country of contradictions where the invisible torture of the past meets the hope of the future. To […]
Let me start off by saying I’m not a fan of award shows. And in no way am I speaking for the magazine, I personally don’t like them. How you can rate films (or music, or anything in the arts for that matter) is just beyond me. But there’s one thing that an award show can do if done right and that’s bring a community together. That’s what the inaugural Cinema Eye Honors did last night in New York City. Created by filmmaker AJ Schnack and Stranger Than Fiction founder Thom Powers (and sponsored by IndiePix), this celebration of non-fiction […]
The Film Panel Notetaker has an interview up with filmmaker Leah Meyerhoff, who is bringing a retrospective of her short films to the Boston Underground Film Festival this weekend. She is also beginning work on her first feature, Unicorns, which she hopes to begin shooting this summer. Here’s Meyerhoff answering the question of what made her want to be a filmmaker: I originally thought I wanted to be a marine biologist, something totally not in the arts at all. Then I went school at Brown and started taking film classes. I started with film theory, kind of more on an […]