Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Five Things to Catch at the FilmGate Interactive Media Festival
This year’s FilmGate Interactive Media Festival – “solely dedicated to new technology-driven production companies, actors, filmmakers, journalists, advertising and marketing agencies, gaming companies, and curious audiences interested in interactive media, virtual reality, and mixed reality projects from around the world,” as its ambitious mission states – will be held February 3-5 at the University of Miami School of Communication. Among the wide-ranging selection of interactive screenings, specialty workshops, parties and panels to choose from, several stand out as not-to-be-missed experiences. Glancing through the program, the following are just five – the first three art installations (two with a local flavor), the last […]
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Death Race 2050, Dragons, Worms and Parents: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Paul Bartel’s 1975 road race movie Death Race 2000 is one of the great exploitation films of all time, a model of how to use the creative freedom of working with limited resources within a marketable genre for the purposes of subversive satire. Produced by Roger Corman, it has a deliciously nasty premise: in the (then) future, the population is kept pacified by gory reality entertainment in the form of a cross-country road race in which drivers receive points for mowing down pedestrians. Bartel and screenwriters Robert Thom and Charles Griffith milk this conceit for all that it’s worth, ramping […]
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Anti-Art Criticism, “In the Age of Trump”
The joke between me and my Sundance roommate/colleague was that every review and write-up would contain the phrase “In the age of Trump.” Another phrase to watch out for is “now more than ever,” spoken verbatim twice during this year’s Sundance acceptance speeches. The proposition that independent film will “lead the resistance” against Our 45th President is a dubious one: I don’t remember The Lucky Ones or In the Valley of Elah helping anything in particular. The repeated invocation of certain dead phrases to summon up a spell against the darkness inevitably and a bit boringly brings to mind Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” […]
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Elements of Oz: Producing Live Video and Interactive Theater
When MGM undertook to produce a film adaptation of the book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1938 they wanted to use all the newest technological tools — think Technicolor — and special effects wizardry that they possibly could to bring the fantastic story to life. Equally, when the Builders Association decided to make the film the subject of their latest play last year — Elements of Oz ran Off-Broadway throughout December — they did the exact same thing. But for an innovative theater company in 2016 that meant integrating live video production, online clips, and a multitasking phone app into the onstage proceedings. New media […]
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20th Century Women: Mike Mills on Bringing a Personal Story to Life
After exploring a teenager’s odd obsession in Thumbsucker and helming the semi-autographical Beginners about his father coming out of the closet late in laugh, in his third narrative, Mike Mills returns to deeply personal material from his own life. 20th Century Women has been hailed as his best work yet and earned him an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay. The film is a coming of age tale about a teenage boy raised by three women from different generations in 1979 Santa Barbara. It’s a portrait of the city in a quieter, simpler time, as well as an ode to his steadfast mother […]
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Five Questions with The Secret Life of Muslims Director Joshua Seftel
The Secret Life of Muslims is one of the least assuming but most important web series rolling out right now, particularly in light of the Trump administration’s recent order banning Syrian refugees and immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US. Amidst the ensuing melee between supporters and opponents of the ban one point that has been repeatedly raised is that, by and large, those who support the administration have no regular contact with any Muslims. While this is not true in every case, non-Muslims who have had exposure to Muslim Americans and Muslim immigrants are more likely to […]
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Fear and Loathing and Black Rebels in Rotterdam
Being an American in rainy, gray Holland now, one feels compelled to apologize all the time. The 46th International Film Festival Rotterdam is halfway through and during the days I’ve been here, the 70-year-old old post-war liberal order seems to be collapsing all around us. It’s hard not to feel the twinge of embarrassment and guilt. That liberal order, one which has been enforced as often by violently repressing ostensible threats to its hegemony as by “spreading democracy and economic growth,” in the insufficient neoliberal sense, is finally being done away with, not by guerrillas and communist radicals but by the […]
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“You Are Forced to Look Very Carefully”: DP Alan Jacobsen on Strong Island
Hailed by Filmmaker as one of the 25 New Faces of independent cinema in 2011, Yance Ford makes her feature film debut with Strong Island, an intensely personal documentary on the 1992 death of his brother. Ford worked with DP Alan Jacobsen to create the film’s singular aesthetic, which combines long takes and a camera that never pans or tilts. Ford and Jacobsen drew inspiration from the long take masters, from Tarkovsky to artist Sharon Lockhart. Jacobsen spoke with Filmmaker ahead of Strong Island‘s premiere in the U.S. documentary competition at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Below, he touches on the painful nature of […]
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“How to Sell the Outrageous Premise of the Film”: DP Quyen Tran on Deidra & Laney Rob a Train
A pair of teenage sisters resort to train robbery to raise bail money for their mother in Deidra & Laney Rob a Train, a new comedy from director Sydney Freeland. Freeland returns to Sundance with her second feature after 2014’s Drunktown’s Finest, which debuted in Utah before earning a number of festival awards. Below, the film’s DP Quyen Tran (Pali Road) discusses the influence of the Coen brothers, filming on a moving train at night without any lighting and grounding an absurd story in naturalistic visuals. Deidra & Laney Rob a Train premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival and will be released by Netflix on […]
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DPs Yoni Brook and Joshua Z. Weinstein on Ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish Drama Menashe
Documentary director Joshua Z Weinstein makes his first foray into fiction filmmaking with Menashe, a drama set in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Borough Park in New York City. Weinstein shot the film with co-DP Yoni Brook, a fellow documentary DP and director. With dialogue almost entirely in Yiddish, the film premiered earlier this week in the NEXT lineup at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker spoke with Weinstein and Brook before the film’s premiere. Below, the two discuss the film’s necessary blend of documentary and fiction techniques, lighting scenes for first-time actors and earning the trust of a notoriously hermetic community. Filmmaker: How […]
