As theatrical audiences continue to shrink due to COVID, DVD and Blu-ray sales wane and, for filmmakers, streamer licensing deals trend lower as companies prioritize original production, the film sales distribution business is transforming in real time. We’re now in the age of hybrid windowing, and with it a lot of head scratching and uncertainty. But hopeful independent filmmakers, sales agents and distributors are finding that one release model is generating unexpected upticks in revenue: AVOD (advertising-supported video on demand). “According to trade news and distributors I speak with, AVOD is one of the fastest growing categories and buyers for […]

As I began, for the eighth year in a row (!), to research the year’s U.S. releases shot in 35mm1, the two movie events I was personally anticipating didn’t primarily revolve around that format. One was Anthology Film Archives’s pandemic-delayed retrospective of Canadian experimental filmmaker, multihyphenate artist and all-round hero Michael Snow—initially scheduled for March 2020, finally screened in December and finished just before Omicron started surging around me. Most of his films were shot and shown on 16mm, making the few 35mm inclusions startling for their comparative, immediately perceptible sharpness and sheer volume. I went all in, taking a […]

Hic Et Nunc (HEN) launched in March. The site and interface have been growing rapidly and are still evolving. Here is how to get started on the platform. Setting up a wallet Your wallet will hold your cryptocurrency and enable you to buy and sell. It’s also how you connect, or log in, to HEN. We’ll focus on the Temple and Kukai wallets, which at different points have been recommended by HEN. These options store your data locally on your computer. When setting up a wallet, you’ll be presented with an automatically generated 8- to 12-word seed phrase. You’ll need […]

The following article was originally published in Filmmaker‘s Winter, 2021 edition. Digital technologies, incessantly lurching forward, are the ground we filmmakers stand on. No wonder we’re often unsteady on our feet. The pandemic has only become an accelerant. Although FaceTime and Skype were around awhile before both became verbs, it took the exigencies of the pandemic to flood our lives with Zoom calling, a digital convenience that has reshaped our relationship to proximity, travel and geography. Just ask Joe Biden. Doesn’t every production meeting now take place on Zoom? Production practices with renewed COVID relevance include use of zooms instead […]

Since 2015, I’ve annually rounded up interviews and features covering the previous year’s U.S. theatrical releases shot on 35mm, an inherently melancholy collation of (increasingly dead) links. (“This is your most quixotic project,” a friend messaged recently.) The 25-ish 35mm releases of 2020 I’ve tallied this time are in line with each previous year’s 30-or-bubbling-under features, a boutique fraction of the larger landscape. Each list builds toward a larger index of minor deaths. My first edition, covering 2014, noted the close of Australia’s last commercial film lab and Bong Joon-ho’s return home to South Korea after Snowpiercer, only to discover […]