Interviews
Interviews
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Director Marten Persiel Discusses This Ain’t California
A while back I wrote about Marten Persiel’s This Ain’t California, the Berlinale-winning “punk fairytale” about skateboarding in East Germany that caused a bit of a stir overseas for its liberal use of staged reenactments. Regardless of the controversy, Persiel’s film is like nothing I’ve seen in recent years, the closest comparison probably being Grant Gee’s 2007 Joy Division (written by Jon Savage), which employs a collage of images to conjure up the Manchester atmosphere during that music scene’s heyday. In fact, Manchester and East Berlin shared a similar aesthetic in the ’70s and ’80s, composed of drab grey buildings […]
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Stunt Driving with the Biscuit Rig, Jr: Interview with Engineer and Driver Robert Nagle
Robert Nagle studied mechanical engineering and racecar design before becoming a professional race driver. But when he found out that some of the other drivers were working in the film industry, it piqued his interest. Said Nagle, “What I found was that it fulfilled a creative side of me that I didn’t really realize was there.” He left the racing world and hasn’t looked back, doing stunt driving for a number of films, including The Dark Knight Rises and Drive. One piece of equipment he’s been driving lately is the Biscuit Rig Jr., a driveable platform developed by Allan Padelford […]
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Meet the Latest SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grant Finalists (Part 3)
Last year on the Filmmaker website, we ran a series of pieces in which we profiled a group of finalists for the San Francisco Film Society’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking grant, run through the organization’s Filmmaker360 program. Now there’s a new set of finalists, and we are once again putting the spotlight on all those shortlisted for the grant. You can read Part 1 of this current series here and Part 2 of the series here. JONAS CARPIGNANO (WRITER/DIRECTOR), A CHJÀNA Synopsis: After leaving his native Burkina Faso, Ayiva makes the perilous journey across the Sahara and Mediterranean in search of a better life in Europe. Once in Italy, he […]
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Kathleen Hanna, Sini Anderson and Tamra Davis Talk The Punk Singer
Originally published following The Punk Singer‘s premiere at SXSW, this interview with director Sini Anderson, subject Kathleen Hanna and executive producer Tamra Davis is being rerun today as the documentary opens in New York at IFC Center. Hanna will be doing Q&A’s with Lizz Winstead of The Daily Show and signing copies of her new Julie Ruin record. Check the IFC page for times. In Greil Marcus’s punk-rock critical opus Lipstick Traces, the writer describes a kind of magic created by the sneering music of the Sex Pistols: “… the pop magic in which the connection of certain social facts […]
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Ron Eyal and Eleanor Burke on Stranger Things
Ron Eyal and Eleanor Burke’s elegant and evocative Stranger Things, which won Slamdance’s Narrative Competition Grand Jury Prize in 2011 is a moody and clear-eyed drama from a pair of our 25 New Faces in Independent Film, as tranquil and refreshing as an autumn afternoon along the rural British coast, where much of its story is set. A young, lonely woman named Oona (Bridget Collins), coping with the recent death of her mother (with whom she was clearly not close) and hoping to sell the house the deceased woman spent her last years making art in, returns to the home’s seaside village to […]
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Antonio Campos and the Case of the Conscious Camera (A Mystery)
In a moment where American independent cinema seems to be primarily focused with character and regional setting, Antonio Campos stands in stark contrast with his peers. Concerned with intricate problems posed by framing, camera movement and editing, Campos used a formal investigation into the medium to guide him through his debut feature, Afterschool, which is a kind of materialist examination of how reality is affected by the digital representation thereof. With his latest film, Simon Killer, Campos is less concerned with a topical milieu than he is with the mental state of the troubled eponymous individual; in the process of […]
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Amy Seimetz Breaks Through
Collaboration may well be Amy Seimetz’s favorite word. Some derivation of the noun weaves its way into the multihyphenate’s emphatic speech when discussing any facet of her decade long career. It’s how she found her footing, and how she has been able to surmount an impressive and far-reaching presence in independent film, and now, television. Seimetz began making films when she was 18, at home in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, a place she frequently returns to in life and work. Following a short-lived tenure at film school, Seimetz made her way to Los Angeles, where she met the experimental filmmaker […]
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Meet the Latest SFFS/KRF Filmmaking Grant Finalists (Part 2)
Last year on the Filmmaker website, we ran a series of pieces in which we profiled a group of finalists for the San Francisco Film Society’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking grant, run through the organization’s Filmmaker360 program. Now there’s a new set of finalists, and we are once again putting the spotlight on all those shortlisted for the grant. You can read Part 1 of this current series here. IAN HENDRIE AND JYSON MCLEAN, MERCY ROAD Synopsis: Based on true events, Mercy Road traces the political and spiritual odyssey of a small town housewife as she turns from a peaceful pro-life […]
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Remembering Jamaa Fanaka
Jamaa Fanaka, the eclectic and kind-hearted film director, the most commercially minded of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers and perhaps the most prolific student filmmaker of all time (all three of the features he made as a grad student found distribution), died one year ago today. Although word leaked out about his death a short time after he passed away, likely from complications of diabetes, I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t hear of it until several weeks later, when his obituary finally appeared in the New York Times. Ashamed because in the intervening year since I […]
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Hero Punk: A Cyberpunk Superhero Film Shot on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera in Green Screen
Kanen Flowers describes himself as a “former technology guy” who got into filmmaking around 2001 with the goal of writing and directing his own material. In 2007, he started work on Jack Forgotten, a project that he says is still in postproduction. Other projects have met with greater success; he started the That Post Show podcast, and a show called That Media Show, and has produced a variety of shorts and web-based content through his production company, Scruffy.tv. At the moment he’s working on Hero Punk, a full-length feature which was shot using the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. Hero Punk is […]
