Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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In Search of an Audience at the Points North Fellowship: Notes on Pitching Your Documentary
A week ago I traveled to a remote part of Maine from Australia. I arrived along with five other filmmaking teams for the Points North Fellowship, a program that provides emerging filmmakers an opportunity to present their works-in-progress to the film industry. The fellows arrive before the Camden International Film Festival (CIFF) is in full swing, before the buzz and “no vacancy” signs and packed waterfront restaurants. At the climax of the festival, the fellows will pitch their projects live to a panel of industry heavyweights (and in front of a 500-person audience) in the Camden Opera House, but before […]
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“Changing the Industry Game”: Queen Sugar Showrunner and Directors Talk Career Advancement at IFP Week
Filmmaker Elisabeth Subrin (A Woman, A Part) sends this short dispatch from IFP Week’s Screen Forward Talks: Notes to the Future Sunday program — specifically, the afternoon panel, “Through the Generations: Queen Sugar: Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey’s Queen Sugar.” The panel featured IFP alums Kat Candler (Hellion), Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), DeMane Davis (Lift), Lauren Wolkstein (The Strange Ones). Beyond the brilliance of the series itself, Ava Duvernay’s production model for Queen Sugar, a cable series on the Oprah Winfrey Network, is visionary and proactive. By choosing to hire only women independent film directors who have never […]
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‘Nobody Wanted This Story’: Paula Eiselt And Heidi Reinberg On Making 93Queen At IFP Week 2018
Here’s a typical story about a documentary (or an indie, or occasionally even an experimental film): It cruises the festival circuit, likely at Sundance. It builds up buzz. Perhaps it collects some awards. It scores a distributor. Several months — or even a year, now and then even years — later it opens in theaters, riding on hazily recalled accolades and hopefully at least polite reviews. It is or isn’t a success, and there’s a chance it spends eternity lost in the vast bowels of iTunes. Some people (and a few reviewers) assume this is the tale of 93Queen, Paula […]
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I Just Finished Directing My First Feature Film, Why Do I Feel Like I Have Post-Partum Depression?
Actress, activist and blogger Lynn Chen has just wrapped production on her directorial debut, I Will Make You Mine. Below, she contributes this guest essay on the common but rarely discussed post-partum blues that directors can feel after wrapping any film, but particularly their first. To learn more and donate, visit the project’s Kickstarter page. — Editor The post-wrap blues. The first time I felt them, I was eight. I was in a production of Maurice Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges, a one-act opera where a bratty kid gets sent to his room, and a bunch of inanimate objects come […]
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The Cine-Ghosts of Shirkers
Some of my best conversations have been with people who weren’t there. Absent was OK—even nonexistent was OK. As long as I imagined somebody was there. I did that as a prolific letter writer, I did that as a novelist, and most recently, I did that as a filmmaker. More than 20 years after the defining trainwreck of my youth—having my teacher/mentor disappear with all the footage of a 16mm film we’d shot together—I decided to make a film that would both document the joys and perils of teenage creativity and unfurl the detective work behind the mystery of the […]
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What Makes a Good Production Designer?
As a kid, the first and only thing I ever wanted to be when I grew up was an artist. I never got bored or minded being sent to my room as long as I could draw. I wasn’t the “good artist” at school—I couldn’t draw a superhero, or a realistic Snoopy. But I was often told (only by adults, so it didn’t mean much to me) that I had a great imagination. I had a pretty rich fantasy life and drew pages and pages of imaginary interiors, collections of objects and fashion wardrobes. If I had known what a […]
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The Agony and the Ecstasy: Self-Distributing the Independent Feature Rogers Park
I’m a midcareer filmmaker with a few features that have played at major international film festivals, including Sundance and Cannes, followed by modest distribution. So, you can imagine my shock when my third feature, Rogers Park, was programmed by… almost no festivals. Despite having what I thought was a track record, I found myself in the wonderful position of having made a no-star ensemble film that had no industry champions, no curatorial validation and no traction. After regrouping from a year of festival rejections, I had to make a decision. Should I throw in the towel and post my film […]
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A Matter of Trust: Independent Film and the Blockchain
In his novel Enduring Love, Ian McEwan constructs a striking metaphor of the tension between individualism and cohesion that lies at the core of modern society: Five strangers rush to save a child stuck in the passenger basket of a hot air balloon being uplifted by the wind. As the balloon soars, the helpers find themselves in midair, hanging from its ropes. Their cumulative weight keeps the balloon hovering over the ground, but one person letting go would break this fragile pact and put the others in greater danger. This scene, which resembles a social psychology experiment, asks the question: […]
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Scenes from a Marriage, Gloria and Rapid Fire: Weekend Blu-ray Viewing from Jim Hemphill
When Ingmar Bergman wrote the script for his six-part, five-hour miniseries Scenes From a Marriage in 1973, his wife told him that it was far too personal to connect with a wide audience. She was right about its specificity, but wrong about its appeal — when the show premiered on Scandinavian television it was a smash hit, leaving the streets deserted every night that it was on. Bergman re-edited the material into a feature film of around half the length for theatrical distribution in the United States, where it became a hit on the art house circuit on the heels […]
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25 New Faces of Film 2018
Click here to read this year’s 25 New Faces of Film.
