Interviews
Interviews
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Five Questions with Beneath the Harvest Sky Directors Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly
Filmmaking team Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly first made their mark on the U.S. independent scene in 2009 with the documentary The Way We Get By, a heartwarming festival favorite about a trio of senior citizens who have spent years greeting U.S. troops returning from combat as they arrive at Bangor International Airport in Bangor, Maine. Four years on, the pair are once again telling a story set in Maine, but this time it’s a bleak, fictional narrative. Beneath the Harvest Sky, a 2013 IFP Narrative Lab project, tells the story of two teenage best friends whose paths in life are sharply diverging: […]
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Five Questions with The Dog Directors Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren
The real-life incident of a man robbing a bank to fund his lover’s sex-change operation was immortalized in Sidney Lumet’s 1975 classic Dog Day Afternoon, with Al Pacino winning an Oscar nod for his fine performance as Sonny Wortzik. However the true story of John Wojtowicz — the man on whom Wortzik was based — remains all but unknown. The remarkable tale of that robbery and of Wojtowicz’s life after he emerged from prison is chronicled in Allison Berg & Frank Keraudren’s documentary The Dog, which the pair shot over the course of over a decade, starting in 2002. It has its […]
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“25 New Face” Rodrigo Reyes on Purgatorio (+ Trailer Premiere)
There’s no lack of films and TV shows focusing on Mexican-American relationships mediated by the border, their focus most commonly on the never-ending drug wars. On TV, The Bridge and Breaking Bad criss-cross between the two countries, mapping out mayhem and violence, as do recent documentaries like 2010’s El Sicario, Room 164, 2011’s El Velador and this year’s Narco Cultura. 2013 “25 New Face” Rodrigo Reyes’ Purgatorio is a different kind of border movie, beginning with footage of rural Mexico as the director urges us, in voiceover, to “try to imagine what the world was like, many, many years ago. Try to […]
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Five Questions with I Am Breathing Directors Morag McKinnon and Emma Davie
A documentary that navigates the profound nature of a fatal diagnosis, I Am Breathing is full of spirit when it could just as easily rest on real life pathos. Neil Platt, a 34 year old diagnosed with motor neuron disease and now living out his final few months, is forced into new perspectives to combat his physical paralysis, speeding up his own understanding of the world to offer to his young son. The film does the opposite of dragging along morbidly — it elevates the viewer with Neil’s lightheartedness even as he moves towards an all-too-certain end. Filmmaker spoke with […]
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Gabriel Gomez & Julien Melendez on Robert Black and Possessed
Twenty years ago I spent a week with a Boy Scout troop riding a horse through the canyons of Moab in southeast Utah, feeling like young Indiana Jones in the opening sequence of The Last Crusade. Still, the red rocks, the brush, and the steep cliff walls created an ambiance unlike anywhere else, even the better-known national parks in the area like Arches and Zion and Bryce Canyon. While I was riding around half naively admiring the views, cutting edge musicians like Robert Black, a bassist and founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, were discovering Moab’s acoustic […]
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Color Grading The Kings of Summer
Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ coming of age comedy The Kings of Summer premiered successfully at Sundance this year, but it took a hectic few weeks of work to grade and produce the final deliverables in time to make the Sundance submission deadline. The Kings of Summer was graded by Narbeh Tatoussian, senior DI colorist at Blacklist Digital. Tatoussian has worked in the industry for over 16 years. He started in the shipping vault, then moved up through post-production and the QC department before becoming a tape room supervisor, assistant colorist and finally a colorist. During that time he says that’s he’s […]
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A Woman Under the Influence: Hannah Fidell on A Teacher
Hannah Fidell’s slow-burn character study A Teacher relies on a taut and unsettling performance by Lindsay Burdge in the title role to crawl deep under the skin of the viewer. Diana, a youthful and fetching as a high school teacher, is one of the year’s most fascinating indie film characters; a remote and somewhat coy woman who is nonetheless caught up in a forbidden sexual dalliance with a male student, one which grows from a delicate crush into a dangerous and foreboding full-blown obsession with alarming velocity. That we’re at turns sympathetic to, fascinated and repulsed by Diana is a testament to Burdge’s […]
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Independent Film: Hobby or Career? Kentucker Audley on the Eternal Question
Independent filmmaking: hobby or career? It is a question that has been on more than a few lips for years now. Though digital platforms have greatly democratized the distribution process, filmmakers are still reaping minimal financial returns on their work. Should the aspiring independent filmmaker pursue her passion wholeheartedly, or should she be pragmatic from the get go, making films as a hobby alongside a more lucrative career? Filmmaker spoke with Kentucker Audley, filmmaker, actor and proprietor of NoBudge, about the professional concerns of the modern moviemaker, and the benefits of having yet another passion project to keep you busy. […]
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All The King’s Men: Penny Lane on Our Nixon
In Our Nixon, director Penny Lane explores the Nixon administration by juxtaposing secret White House discussions from the infamous Nixon tapes with incredibly intimate Super 8 footage taken by avid amateur cineastes H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, John Ehrlichmann and Dwight Chapin. The fact that these men also happened to be the chief of staff, special advisor and assistant to our much maligned 37th President is one thing; that they were also three of Nixon’s closest aides and the key conspirators jailed during the aftermath of the Watergate scandal is another entirely. Despite what Ben Stein might say, Our Nixon has little to no polemical […]
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Kickstarter: Cheryl Dunye Takes Off Her Cool with Black is Blue
Filmmaker Cheryl Dunye recently launched a Kickstarter campaign for the post-production of her latest short, Black is Blue. In this guest post, Isis Asare of Sistah Sinema, the film’s community sponsor, talks with Dunye about this latest phase of her work. In one of the most moving scenes of Black is Blue, tears roll down Black’s – the film’s title character – cheeks after he makes a shocking discovery about a former lover. His emotional fragility is placed in sharp contrast with his sheer physical strength. In that moment, the viewer peers past Black’s masculinity, darkness, and confidence. The viewer […]
