Filmmaking
Filmmaking
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Big Sky Documentary Film Festival 2017 Announces Full Lineup
The 14th annual Big Sky Documentary Film Festival has announced the official selections of the 2017 festival, which takes place February 17-26 in Missoula, Montana. The festival will screen over 200 films from 50 nations as well as retrospectives of Academy Award-winning filmmaker Daniel Junge and Montreal-based film collective EyeSteelFilm. In addition to retrospective programs, planned special events include Healing Blue, a multimedia dance/film performance. Longtime partner HBO Documentary Films will present Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens’ new feature Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds on opening night. Closing night will be presented by Big Sky premiere sponsor Showtime Documentary Films. Other films to be screened during the festival include Leah […]
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Welcome to the Working Week: On Paterson and Groundhog Day
Every day begins the same: We wake up. Usually in a bed, often by an alarm. Sometimes a pet gets me, or a slice of sunlight, or the shrill beeps of a garbage truck. I awake with a slow fade, or maybe a jolt, or perhaps only after a series of false starts. We can delay our rise from bed, but the inevitable remains: A full day of consciousness awaits us. How will we use it? How do we live life so we can live with ourselves? For Phil Connors, he awakes at the strike of 6:00 AM to the […]
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Rotterdam Announces its 2017 Hivos Tiger Competition Films
The International Film Festival Rotterdam announced today the eight films that will comprise its 2017 Hivos Tiger Competition. Among the titles are films from the Chile, India, Bulgaria and the United States, the latter represented by the first narrative feature of kogonada, one of Filmmaker‘s 2014 25 New Faces. Commented Festival Director Bero Beyer, “This years line-up of the Hivos Tiger Competition features bold and daring filmmakers that don’t shun the use of other media, alternative narrative structures and provocative and relevant themes. The nominees and their works deserve international recognition for their artistry. We are proud to present each […]
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Is Section 181, Film Federal Tax Incentive, “Dead” in a New Trump Administration?
Section 181, the Federal tax incentive spurring the production of film and television in the United States is about to suffer, reports David Robb at Deadline, “a quiet death” — at least for the time being. Filmmaker has covered Section 181 extensively, with Daniel J. Coplan’s article from last summer explaining in detail how the incentive benefits independent film producers and investors. In brief, it allows investors to deduct 100% of their investment against their Federal taxes in the year of the investment. That’s opposed to depreciating that investment over multiple years. For a high net work individual, that could […]
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Jim Hemphill’s Best Blu-rays of 2016
To finish off 2016, I’d like to round up some of the year’s best Blu-ray releases that I didn’t get a chance to cover in my weekly column. It was an exceptional year for physical media thanks to labels like Criterion, Twilight Time, Arrow, Kino Lorber, and Olive, all of which continue to license neglected titles from studio vaults and give them the first-class treatments they deserve. While the list below barely scratches the surface of the efforts of these companies and others, it contains what I consider to be the most essential discs of the year — movies that […]
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Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot: On New Year’s Resolutions and Giving Up Midnight Movies
Moviegoers, and I mean like Walker Percy desperation level moviegoers, the kind you see at 12:30 AM screenings of Bad Santa 2, they’ve been looking more pallid and dour than usual of late. Gone is what was left of the spring in their hop, the hop in their step. I see them marching, usually solo, with their Red Vines or Twizzlers, into the darkness, perhaps this time never to return no more again. But even the womb of a dim theater seems to offer little comfort these days to the diehard moviegoer. There is less dreaming now. I should know. […]
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2016: Nonfiction Storytelling in a World of Fake News
“Truth is stranger than fiction,” as the maxim goes, and that was certainly the case in 2016. Following the election of Donald Trump, the fictional dystopian worlds of The Hunger Games, Westworld, and Black Mirror suddenly seemed pointedly realistic, and our new reality felt mighty strange. Some of the year’s most powerful nonfiction films, including Ava DuVernay’s 13th, Dawn Porter’s Trapped, and Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, took on new urgency as civil rights and reproductive rights increasingly came under fire. By intercutting scenes of Trump supporters physically assaulting African-Americans at his rallies with scenes of whites threatening black people during the civil rights movement […]
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The 20 Most Popular Posts of 2016
Again in 2016, when compiling this list of our 20 most popular posts on the site, I was gratified to see our customarily high substance-to-clickbait ratio holding steady. As always, our “top posts of the year” list is broken in two. There is a list of the top ten new pieces published in 2016, and then a list of the top ten previously published, or archival, posts. Befitting the magazine’s mission, there’s a strong current of practical filmmaking advice and DIY tutorials here, ranging from casting, finding a producer, developing a script and more. In terms of the newly published […]
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Animation in 2016: The Year in Review
When you think of indie film, animation may not be the first medium that comes to mind, and with so much else going on this year — both cinematically and in the world in general — it would be easy to miss that 2016 was a fantastic year for animation. The art form continues to present exciting opportunities for enterprising filmmakers, and this year it’s also given a plethora of great titles to those of us who simply want to watch quality animated cinema. So as the “Best of 2016” lists keep rolling in this December, here’s my take on […]
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The Best VR of 2016: Arnaud Colinart and Amaury La Burthe on Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness
This year’s DOK Neuland, DOK Leipzig’s interactive component (housed in what resembled an intergalactic pop-up tent in the beautiful, wide open Markt) allowed me a second chance to experience what will surely go down as the best work of virtual reality seen widely in 2016. Fortuitously, I’d been able to catch Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness — the accolade garnering (Storyscapes Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Alternate Realities VR Award at Sheffield Doc/Fest) VR companion piece to Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s much heralded documentary — at the charming Savannah Film Festival’s VR Showcase just the week before. […]
