While Ethel, Rory Kennedy’s portrait of her mom, widow of dad Bobby, might have made a splash at Sundance, it’s not the only descendant-directed doc about a member of political royalty to have played the fest circuit this year. With California State of Mind: The Legacy of Pat Brown, director Sascha Rice and her sister, executive producer Hilary Armstrong – both of them daughters of former California State Treasurer Kathleen Brown – have chosen to bring to the screen the story of their grandpa, the late Governor Pat Brown. Nicknamed the “Architect of the Golden State,” the two-term governor had a slew […]
In Sophia Takal’s Green, a couple of young, New York sophisticates travel upstate in order to research a book on sustainable farming, but when a working-class local woman becomes the object of their affection, jealousy and sexual gamesmanship threaten to ruin their relationship. Mining the insecurities that persist amongst young lovers is not necessarily new ground, but Takal, working with her fiance Lawrence Levine and roommate Kate Lyn Sheil, invests the storytelling with a moody disquiet, an emotional honesty and a jarring sense of foreboding that elevate the film above so many of its predecessors. Widely deploying the color of envy in […]
After debuting at the Slamdance Film Festival in 2011, Damon Russell’s Snow on Tha Bluff had a small theatrical release earlier this year. Writing about it then, Filmmaker’s own Brandon Harris described the film as “An incredible combination of found footage, no-budget narrative ingenuity and pulled-from-the-streets doc immediacy, [which] discovers in its incredibly charismatic and troubled protagonist, Curtis Snow, an American life many of us would probably rather forget about.” Since becoming available through such platforms as iTunes and Netflix Watch Instantly, Snow on Tha Bluff has found a new and highly engaged audience which has discovered and been electrified […]
In Detropia, the new documentary from directing partners Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, a gleaming sun rises over a handsome stretch of metal and glass, yet much of the landscape it kisses is neglected, overgrown, and decaying. This is the dichotomous portrait of Detroit delivered by the filmmakers, whose breakthrough film, Jesus Camp, likely rattled your core. With similar attention paid to stirring emotional heft, Grady and Ewing’s latest uncovers the splendor and squalor of a very American metropolis, whose all-time-low state of disrepair is punctuated by glimmers of its former — and, perhaps, future — glory. Painstakingly researching their […]
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation was created in 1934 by the then head of General Motors to bestow grants related to science, technology, and economics, and to make these subjects more appealing to the general public. Part of a shift towards doing so via the arts can be attributed to Doron Weber, who runs the Public Understanding of Science and Technology program. Weber introduced the concept of providing sometimes sizable grants to narrative films, dealing with science or the science community, over a decade ago, when the idea was relatively novel and returns were a total question mark due the […]
Journalists are often privy to inside information when a film deal goes down at a festival, but rarely do they take place on the other end of my dinner table. Nor do they generally concern one of my friends, as was the case at a certain dinner party on a snowy night at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Actually, until now, that has never happened. My friend is director Jamie Travis, and it was during a cast and crew dinner at a fancy pop-up steak restaurant when his little, low-budget indie, For a Good Time, Call…, was picked up for […]
Once I had a dream to make a documentary in some sort of third world or developing third world country setting. I had no direction, no story and no clear vision, so unfortunately that dream died. Nearly a decade later, I had moved on to building a career in the music video and commercial world. By this time I had no desire to travel to any third world country, but my best friend Rocky Braat did. After sharing an apartment and parallel lives for about seven years, Rocky had gone off on a much different path. He had stumbled upon […]
Juno Temple is on the move. For an interview regarding her loaded roster of new roles, in films as disparate as Killer Joe, Jack and Diane, The Dark Knight Rises, and Little Birds (released this Friday), the 23-year-old blonde Briton is calling from a car, which is shuffling her from one L.A. commitment to the next. “I’m sorry, I might lose you,” she says through a bit of static, shortly before the call is indeed dropped. But within moments, Temple is back on the other end again, her coo of an accent as beguiling as her onscreen presence. The whole […]
One of the year’s most startling debuts, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds is a queasily effective portrait of a society undergoing dynamic change. Unfolding over the course of a few weeks in the perpetually sunny Brazilian metropolis of Recife, the film centers on several families in one upscale block which is surrounded by new development. Yet the perpetual noise of high rise construction isn’t the only thing haunting the denizens of this seemingly comfortable and manicured urban space. Fear of crime and just-under-the-surface racial tension takes its toll on everyone in unspoken ways. Even as fading reminders of Brazil’s ever-present […]
Alex Buono, the cinematographer for the Saturday Night Live film unit, recently spoke at an event in Boston. (See: Alex Buono: Shooting for Saturday Night Live.) In addition to discussing his work on Saturday Night Live, he also talked about gear, technology, and his philosophy of shooting. Part of the reason Alex gave the presentation was to demonstrate and talk about the Canon C300, but he was careful to stress, as Roger Deakins said, “Cinematography is more than a camera,” or as Alex put it: “Filmmaking is not a science project.” Here are some of the topics he touched on: […]