Tomas Leach’s In No Great Hurry – 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter was one of my few true discoveries of 2013. While covering the Thin Line Film Fest in Denton, Texas, I pretty much stumbled upon Leach’s poignant portrait of the legendary NYC photographer in his final years — Leiter died this past November — without knowing much about the man who ushered in the use of color photography. Since that February fest Leach’s film has gone on to screen DOC NYC and now premieres theatrically at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on January 3rd. Filmmaker spoke […]
Every filmmaker is an anthropologist to some degree, but Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (above with The past actress Bérénice Bejo) is a rarity among the studiers. In his two most recent films alone, the Oscar-winning triumph A Separation and this year’s Cannes sensation The Past (which hits theaters today), the 41-year-old has proven himself a master chronicler of human minutiae, weaving the smallest of quotidian details into the grandest of layered, domestic drama. A filmmaker of richly palpable empathy, Farhadi can turn — as seen in A Separation — the pushing of someone out of a door into a life-destroying choice, […]
Clocking in at nearly four hours over several discrete parts, Oeke Hoogendijk’s The New Rijksmuseum details the taxing decade-long process of renovating the iconic Amsterdam art museum, home to many of the key works of the Dutch masters, that became an operatic civic brouhaha. First, the reconstruction of a central entranceway draws the ire of the city’s politically powerful bicyclists lobby, which is opposed to a partial obstruction of the central pathway that runs through the center of the museum’s ground floor that is an extremely popular thoroughfare for the bike riding hordes. The safety of the 13,000 bikes that […]
Nuclear Nation, Atsushi Funahashi’s remarkably touching and informative doc about some of the 1,4000 now-homeless refugees that were forced to abandon their town in the wake of the Fukashima nuclear catastrophe, foregoes the agitprop route, one which given the scale and potential world historical costs of the still unfolding fallout from the disaster seems appropriate, for a more grounded and humanitarian look at the tragedy. Instead the 39-year-old Funahashi, best known in Japan as a narrative filmmaker whose previous credits include 2005’s Big River and 2012’s Cold Bloom, remains focused on a group of refugees who exhibit tremendous poise and […]
A war on drugs, or specifically on the drug cartels that profit from them, a war separate from the 40-year-old campaign waged by the United States (though, of course, intricately tied to it) was declared by the Mexican government in 2006. With over 60,000 known murders in the country directly tied to the drug trade since then, what good is this war doing, one is tempted to ask? The Federal Police and the Mexican military’s joint operation, Michoacan, has proven toothless in its attempt to stop either the flow of dope through Mexico or the violence that surrounds this insatiably […]
Michael Capodiferro, a student at Hampshire College, has written the script for Even The Dogs Know and is planning to direct the short film as his senior project. The film is about the lengths someone will go to find someone to talk to. In a description of the project Capodiferro briefly outlined the process of developing the script: The script work for Even The Dogs Know began almost a year ago in January. It was a much darker, in-your-face, louder story than it is now. It’s taken me many drafts to build up the story and tear it down again and […]
Depicting professional snowboarder Kevin Pearce’s rise to the top of his sport and then his struggle to recover from a monster wipe-out and traumatic brain injury, Lucy Walker’s The Crash Reel is riveting, emotional, sobering and enraging. It tells a very human story as the endearing Pearce struggles to not only physically recover from his injuries but, at such a young age, to invent a new identity for himself and his future. At the same time, the film is a provocative, well-researched takedown of the extreme sports industry, which markets vicarious danger for energy-drink consumers and sneaker-wearers at the expense […]
The Unity of All Things, the first feature by artist Alexander Carver and filmmaker Daniel Schmidt, is an erotic queer sci-fi with an experimental narrative that combines particle physics, critique of global capitalism, various existential quandaries, and playfully perverse digressions into gender politics. It’s an unclassifiable micro-budget film shot on Super 16 and Super 8 in locations ranging from China, Switzerland, Chicago, and the Arizona desert, and has dialogue in at least three different languages. As its title might imply, the film’s ambition is undercut by a generous serving of self-aware humor. The film receives its New York premiere tonight […]
In 1988, VideoFilmFest launched as part of the Berlinale. It gradually evolved until it was rechristened the transmediale in 1998, and today it’s one of the premier festivals for film, art, video, and digital work. Kristoffer Gansing has been the festival’s artistic director since 2011, and for this year’s theme he’s selected the “afterglow,” an exploration of how media technologies and practices are turned into trash. As the festival’s website explains, “As media technologies have now become completely integrated into everyday life, they function similarly to natural resources, producing physical and immaterial waste products that get appropriated in such diverse contexts […]
Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael is finding a new audience of fans with his striking black-and-white camerawork in Nebraska, a father-and-son road trip starring Bruce Dern and Will Forte. With this third collaboration with director Alexander Payne, following Sideways and The Descendants, Papamichael is on a list of potential Oscar nominees. He was recently included in a Hollywood Reporter roundtable of five top cinematographers, a series that often portends year-end award winners. His other work includes James Mangold’s Walk the Line and Oliver Stone’s W. He just completed Monuments Men with George Clooney. Papamichael was born in Athens and studied photography and art […]