If independent film is going to prosper well into the 21st century, many would agree that there must be some sort of interdependence between filmmakers, a collective effort that will help everyone to communicate and share resources. Thankfully, there is already a driven group of Americans who are doing exactly that, providing a template that indie film can examine and emulate. It’s the Occupy movement. No matter how you feel about their politics, Occupy has utilized new technology and social media better than many organizations and affinity groups in the United States. And if you look closely at how they […]
“In Production” is a regular column which focuses on notable independent films that are currently shooting. If you would like your film to be included in this space, please send an email to nick@filmmakermagazine.com Bellflower producer Vincent Grashaw gets into the director’s chair for Coldwater, a drama-thriller about a teenage boy who is placed in a “wilderness juvenile center” overseen by a malevolent army veteran. Produced by Grashaw, Kris Dorrance, Dave Gare and Sarah Farrand and co-written by Grashaw with Mark Penney, Coldwater was originally slated to shoot in 2004 with a different director at the helm and a high-profile […]
(The Ambassador had its world premiere at IDFA 2011 and its U.S. premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. It was picked up for distribution by Drafthouse Films. It launched on VOD and digital platforms on August 4, 2012, and opens theatrically at the IFC Center in New York City on August 29, 2012, and at The Cinefamily in Los Angeles and Alamo Drafthouse locations in Austin on August 31, 2012.) For the Fox News crowd, the Central African Republic could be seen as the future they’ve been waiting for: a skeleton government that rules hand in hand with ruthless, unregulated […]
It was a hazy Saturday afternoon in Berne, New York, and a motley crew of filmmakers holding shotguns, aimed at the sky, surrounded me. My mouth was dry and I felt the mind’s eye going black while gripping my barrel. “What the hell am I doing here and who are these strangers?” Well, I was asked to join a small group of filmmakers to shoot skeet and talk shop (and sadly, not form a militia). This past year was a whirlwind tour with my first feature art/documentary, Convento, which premiered at SXSW, played a bunch of fests and was picked up […]
New Large-Sensor Camera From Sony Sony has announced another new camera, the Sony NEX-EA50, which fits somewhere between the very consumer-ish NEX-VG20 and the semi-professional NEX-FS100. The common design element of NEX cameras is the use of Sony’s E-mount, which has a very shallow flange depth – the distance from the mount to the sensor – making it possible to use a variety of lens mounts with an appropriate adapter. The NEX-EA50 is clearly aimed at the event and documentary shooter. It has a new body shape with an integrated shoulder pad (which can be adjusted), XLR audio inputs, and comes […]
Trailers have the ability to psyche us up, freak us out, turn us off, and lead us very, very astray, but the heightened anticipation is part of the fun, regardless of how accurate a representation of the film that cleverly constructed little bugger ends up being in the end. Recently there’s been a spate of trailers for horror-themed animated children’s films, starting with ParaNorman (pictured above), which opened today. So which of these flicks is most likely to either give your kids nightmares, or send them down a lifelong path of genre appreciation? Let’s judge a book by its cover […]
Second #7144, 119:04 [Final post. Thank you to Scott Macaulay for taking a chance with this.] The blue curtain, creating the conditions for its own strange, vertical, blue-noise static. Remainders: 45,000 = total words in project 2 = frames that feature Dorothy, Jeffrey, and Sandy together 3 = frames including Aunt Barbara 17 = frames in which no human being appears 20 = frames featuring Jeffrey and Dorothy 23 = frames featuring Jeffrey and Sandy Robin Wood, from his classic 1979 essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film”: Some version of the Other [include, simply] other people. It is […]
One year ago, Nicholas Rombes proposed “The Blue Velvet Project” to me at Filmmaker. For 12 months, three times a week, he would scrutinize a single frame from David Lynch’s modern classic, looking both inside and outside of its aspect ratio for correspondences, allusions and meanings. For Rombes, it would be another in his “time-based” critical film essays — appropriately so, for it was because of another of these columns, 10/40/70 at The Rumpus, that I discovered his writing in the first place. (In fact, I interviewed him previously about this other fascinating project.) Nick had contributed to Filmmaker before […]
(Beloved world premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and was picked up for distribution by IFC Films. It opens theatrically on August 17, 2012. Visit the film’s website to learn more.) Beloved, the latest film from French writer/director Christophe Honoré, uses the history of the late 20th century as a framework for exploring the difficult love affairs of a mother, Madeleine (played as a young woman by Ludivine Sagnier and as an older woman by Catherine Deneuve) and her daughter, Vera (Chiarra Mastroianni). Like much of Honoré’s work, the movie is rich with allusions not only to literary and theatrical forms, but […]
Second #7097, 118:17 (Note: the final post in the project goes up Friday.) A confession, of a different sort, about how a movie saved a young man. Can a scene from a movie detour your life, turn you in a new direction? I think it can, in the same way that a book read and just the right age can, or a band can by the sheer force of its ideas turned sonic. (One of the self-imposed rules for this project was to avoid the personal, the anecdotal, but figuring this is the second-to-last post . . .) Blue Velvet […]