While most producers these days are worried about the latest CPI number—that’s the Cinematic Price Index—one group of filmmakers is, somewhat paradoxically, not: those working on the lower end of the microbudget, or “no-budget,” continuum, producing finished features for the very low five figures. For them, production is retrofitted from whatever money can be raised, and if the price of gas goes up, well, the shoot just has to make do with less in another area. Among such filmmakers, there’s perhaps no one whose model is as stripped-down as Pete Ohs, who recently premiered his latest work, the well-received Jethica, […]

“Find the note, and then deviate,” urges experimental animator Jodie Mack. The colorfully clad artist is a third of the way through her antic presentation to the November 2021 Film Friends gathering hosted by the Echo Park Film Center. Now in its second year, the monthly online series this go-around is focused on “simple machines” for filmmaking. Mack has been cheerfully showing some of her own creations, like a bicycle-driven zoetrope, but speedily moves on to her love for singing. “My voice is a simple machine!” she rhapsodizes before breaking into a wide-mouthed croon, one or two notes above the […]

In 2012, after months in Buenos Aires helping care for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted mother, Gaspar Noé traveled to Cannes and saw Michael Haneke’s Amour, about a husband dealing with his wife’s stroke. “Oh my god, I cried watching that movie,” he says. “Even if that movie had nothing to do with my personal life, it was about someone who needs to die, and at that time we were considering how my mother could die peacefully.” After the festival, Noé returned to Argentina; his mother died a few weeks later. When the Palme d’Or–winning, and quite brutal, Amour went on to international […]