Filmmaker and distributor Ava DuVernay of AFFRM has launched a new podcast series, “The Call-In,” featuring conversations with black filmmakers. If you’ve read her conversation with Ryan Coogler in this issue’s Filmmaker, you know that DuVernay conducts an excellent interview. Here, in this first episode, she talks with Andrew Dosumnu, whose Mother of George is in theaters now and is highly recommended. The conversation also delves into the director’s recent hiring on Focus Features’ planned Fela Kuti biopic.
One of the great things about Independent Film Week is getting to meet so many other filmmakers who are sharing in the same experience working in independent film. On any given day of the conference you could be sitting next to a producer, director or distributor who might end up helping you on your next project (or maybe you’ll end up helping them!) You also end up hearing about a lot of great projects and films, which is exactly what happened one session this week when I found myself sitting next to Milo Daemgen, independent producer of various short & […]
At the end of a one-hour chat held on the first full day of TIFF, an audience member suggested that the Mexican director of Pan’s Labyrinth be renamed Guillermo del Toronto. The sentiment behind this fanciful idea lay in the fact that del Toro keeps returning to Toronto to film here, most recently the $250-million mega-actioner, Pacific Rim, and is now prepping the horror flick, Crimson Peak, before cameras roll next spring. “I’ve lived in L.A., Madrid, Budapest,” del Toro recalled before an invited audience at the Trump Hotel. “[A filmmaker] lives in a suitcase.” The Canuck version of the […]
We’re back to legendary cinematographer Gordon Willis in a Craft Truck interview as he cautions against “dump truck directing” — a term he coined to describe the bad habit of directors who aren’t discerning when shooting and overwhelm editors with footage. Willis’ sage advise comes in handy for the digital filmmaker whose temptation to fix everything in post can overshadow the simplicity of doing it right the first time. You can watch the rest of the interview here.
Growing up in Saudi Arabia, writer-director Haifaa Al-Mansour didn’t have access to movie theaters (there aren’t any), but she was still raised on a Hollywood diet. She ate up all the popular cinema she could via home video, and began forging a long-term love affair with the kind of infectious traditions found in big-budget American films. Those same traditions have spilled over, somewhat, into Wadjda, Al-Mansour’s groundbreaking debut feature, which is both the first movie filmed entirely in Saudi Arabia, and the first feature to be helmed by a female Saudi director. An arthouse release that premiered at the Venice […]
The title character in Alexandre Moors’ frequently stunning feature debut Blue Caprice is a mid-sized sedan, the type used by police departments across America as the principle member of their fleet, its steely menace a constant presence as it winds its way through nondescript, wan-looking American streets. The sedan in question in Moors’ film was also a police car, at least before it was retrofitted for terror by John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, who drilled a whole in the trunk from which the 17-year-old Malvo, at the ex-U.S. Army marksman Muhammad’s urging, shot 10 people to death during the […]
Premiering at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival is 1982, the directorial debut of noted independent producer Tommy Oliver (Kinyarwanda). Set in Philadelphia in the year of the film’s title, 1982 is the story of a father (an affecting Hill Harper) torn between his love for his wife, who has descended into crack addition, and his responsibilities to his young daughter. Set during the start of the crack epidemic, 1982 is an intimate film that returns us to a time, pre-The Wire and and all of the other drug dramas of the last three decades, when crack changed the character […]
After two small-scale New York indie features, set in the world of standup comedy (2007’s Goodbye Baby) and low-budget film (2012’s Supporting Characters), writer/director Daniel Schechter has made the unlikely but extremely welcome step up to a very different kind of movie. Life of Crime, which closes the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend, is not only based on a novel (The Switch) by the late, great Elmore Leonard but boasts a high-caliber cast featuring Jennifer Aniston, Tim Robbins, Isla Fisher, John Hawkes, Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def), Will Forte and Mark Boone Jr. A dark crime comedy, Schechter’s film […]
New York may have a film festival for every neighborhood, but La Di Da, the brainchild of programmer and critic Miriam Bale, has carved a niche for itself that feels more temporal than geographical. Now in its second year, the festival, whose title is a tip of the cap to Annie Hall’s choice refrain, has expanded upon its foundations as a communal haven for filmmakers creating aesthetically timeless, genre-friendly, and narratively experimental work. In doubling the selection, Bale deepens her exploration of films that, despite being very much of the here and now, feel as though they’ve been unearthed from […]
Appearing in the Wavelengths section of the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival is La última película, an experimental comedy about filmmaking and the apocalypse by two directors joined in collaboration by CPH:DOX’s DOX:LAB program. Filipino director Raya Martin (Independencia) collaborates with Canadian critic and filmmaker Mark Peranson on a crazily cinephilic conceit: remaking Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie as, literally, the last movie. The Color Wheel‘s Alex Ross Perry stars as a “disillusioned and delusional” filmmaker traveling to the Yucatan to make a psychedelic Western in the days leading up to the Mayan Apocalypse. Nicolás Pereda star Gabino Rodriguez plays […]