Ostensibly based on a true story, Trevor White’s Jamesy Boy recounts the ascension, demise and redemption of James Burns, a cavalier gang member whose story is an all too American one — he fell into a life of crime on the streets of Baltimore as a 14 year old, did some hard time, and was, somewhat astoundingly given the unrepentantly punitive nature of our disenfranchisement factories known as prisons, the better for it. He’s played by a promising newcomer, Spencer LoFranco, who is joined by an accomplished cast including Ving Rhames, Mary-Louise Parker and James Woods, in a somewhat surprising turn, […]
More often than not, filmmakers undertake the odd job to get by — not unlike, as Natalia Leite and Alexandra Roxo argue in their VICE series Every Woman, the storied “second sex.” “We started thinking about the most stigmatized, mysterious and hardest jobs women do,” Roxo narrates in the opening sequence. And so, the Brooklyn filmmaking team trekked across the country to slip inside the well-worn shoes (lucite heels) of a truckstop stripper, as captured in the New Mexico-set pilot of Every Woman. Filmmaker spoke with Leite and Roxo about the series, the dangers of overstepping exploitative bounds and the foibles of simultaneously acting […]
Having started life as a graduate film school project that was mostly financed on Kickstarter, Lotfy Nathan’s multiple Cinema Eye Honors-nominated documentary 12 O’Clock Boys, about a young boy named Pug who is immersed in inner-city dirt-biking culture, is an immediate and searing look at a particularly American coming of age on some of the country’s roughest streets. Pug’s mom, an ex-stripper named Coco, tries to steer him on a path of study and professionalism, urging him to consider training to be a veterinarian, but in this combative, crime-ridden stretch of West Baltimore, becoming an animal doctor is a remote dream. […]
I remember the first time I saw Sherman’s March and realized how revealing autobiographical documentary could be. Filmmakers who turn the camera on themselves run a high risk of self-indulgence, but when done right their films can intimately show the resilience of the human spirit, especially when their challenges appear insurmountable, whether in situations as grandiose as in Ernest Shackleton and Frank Hurley’s South or as ostensibly mundane as Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan’s Troublesome Creek. The process of making autobiographical films can even be beneficial for the filmmakers, psychologically or otherwise, provided they place therapy on a backseat to […]
When I met Canadian director Juliet Lammers during the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival – where we served together on a sprawling panel – her film Last Woman Standing, which made the Hot Docs 2013 Netflix Audience Award top five, wasn’t even on my radar. But it certainly should have been. Co-directed by Lammers and Lorraine Price, Last Woman Standing is more than a riveting sports flick (though it’s that as well). Unique in approach, the doc focuses just as much on the relationship rift between Ariane Fortin and Mary Spencer, two of the world’s best boxers, as it does […]
TIFF’s acclaimed Evolution exhibition — celebrating the career of hometown boy David Cronenberg — had just closed when OCAD University hosted a free discussion between him and TIFF CEO Piers Handling. For the past five months, the art school has been partnering with Toronto International on The Cronenberg Project, a multimedia exploration of the director of Dead Ringers, Crash and A History of Violence. It’s appropriate that the discussion before an audience of 325 students and VIPs centered on Cronenberg’s student years, early films and architecture. The talk began with excerpts from Stereo (1969) and Crimes of The Future (1970), […]
Filmmaker: Why did you first get into being an AD? Did you ever want to direct? Do you now? Wegenka: I started working as an AD after college. As a filmmaker I love production, the process of making films. As an AD I’m right in the thick of it, helping to create the director’s vision. I’ve been able to work with many directors I admire: Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch, David Mamet, John Waters, Robert M. Young, Wayne Wang, Martha Coolidge, Neema Barnett and many others. I’ve learned from all of them. Working with Lynn has been a joy, it has brought me […]
I’ve been hearing the praises of Drunktown’s Finest director Sydney Freeland being sung for some time now. The 2004 Fulbright scholar and Sundance alum – whose long list of awards includes a Sundance Institute Screenwriting Fellowship and a Sundance Institute Directing Fellowship in 2010, and a 2009 Sundance Institute Native American Lab Fellowship – has also long been a fixture on the cozy New Mexico filmmaking scene. (Since I programmed the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival 2012 it’s not surprising the Gallup native and I even share mutual friends.) That said, as a jaded critic it’s second nature for me […]
A three-time Webby Award winner and a 2009 World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader,” who has exhibited at MoMA and built the world’s largest time capsule with Yahoo!, Jonathan Harris can now add the firestarters IDFA DocLab Award for Digital Storytelling – for his latest interactive project I Love Your Work – to his esteemed CV. In it Harris invites us on an online journey not to the Arctic Ocean with Alaskan Eskimos – as he did in his previous piece, The Whale Hunt – but into the lives of nine women residing in a much hotter climate, that of the […]
Filmmaker: Why this movie? Why did you decide to do it? Kroot: I was compelled to do it! I have always been a big fan of the original Star Trek, which I loved for its mix of campy aesthetics and also its thinly veiled exploration of the serious social and political issues of the 1960’s. George Takei’s sexual orientation never occurred to me but I was very impressed when he “came out” at age 68 in 2005 to become a voice for LGBT civil rights and then marry his long time partner, Brad Altman. I noticed how George’s philosophy was […]