Reports
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Metrograph Tribute to the Brothers Young Recalls Heroic Era in Indie Filmmaking
(L-R) Aaton’s Jean-Pierre Beauviala, Willem Dafoe, Irwin Young, and
director Bob Young on the set of Triumph of The Spirit, Poland, 1989.
Since the passing in January of Irwin Young, chief mensch at New York’s fabled DuArt Film Lab, there has been an outpouring of tributes and reminiscences, including a packed memorial at Lincoln Center in May. But no tribute has been… Read more
Abandoned Goods: Artists and Filmmakers Jillian Mayer and Zia Anger Talk about Anger’s Film/Performance My First Film and the Meanings of Failure and Success
My First Film
With Zia Anger’s My First Film performance presented by Anger tomorrow at The Metrograph, here, from our Winter, 2019 print issue, is a conversation between Anger and filmmaker and artist Jillian Mayer, moderated by Sarah Salovaara, about all the various… Read more
All the Work Without the Workers: Appreciating Sleep Dealer On Its Tenth Anniversary
Sleep Dealer
Appraisal of the aesthetic and intellectual merits of science fiction, not to mention the sheer joy of encountering it, lately tends to be subsumed by talk of the perceived accuracy of a work and its predictions. We are living in… Read more
Are Film Festivals Struggling?
The Cleveland International Film Festival (photo: Andrew Wells)
When the Los Angeles Film Festival shuttered after 18 years, the independent film community mourned. There were “R.I.P. LAFF” posts on Facebook, lots of sad emojis and expressions of shock (“absolutely floored,” said one filmmaker). But the closure of LAFF,… Read more
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Something Sinister
As the industry and media have increasingly placed a spotlight on the filmic achievements of female directors, the recent rush of celebrated genre films masterminded by women — Julia Ducournau’s Raw, Alice Lowe’s Prevenge, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook and Karyn Kusama’s The Invitation, among them — has been cited as a welcome phenomenon, but it’s not an altogether new one. A network of female-driven genre film festivals that celebrate the activities and influence of women in the genre cinema community have been running for, in some cases, decades. Filmmaker and programmer Briony Kidd says, drily, “The idea that it might […]
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Spirit of a Startup: Brooklyn’s Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema
The value of a film school, like any institution, lies not in the sum of its parts but in the people who walk its corridors and inhabit its classrooms and offices. And the people who walk the 68,000 square feet of the new Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema in Brooklyn — its students, faculty and administration — are animated by the effervescent spirit of a startup. Yet the parts that make up the school are without a doubt impressive, too. Purpose-built on two floors of a renovated building in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, the school boasts state-of-the-art lecture and editing rooms, DaVinci […]
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Critical Review: Iyabo Boyd on Feedback Loop, a New Advisory Service for Filmmakers
“If filmmakers actually knew what industry people thought of their projects and were able to receive constructive criticism and what I call ‘productive honesty,’” says Iyabo Boyd, “they’d be able to improve at a much faster pace than just with that filmmaker peer-to-peer thing.” Boyd is speaking here of the realization that led to the creation of Feedback Loop, her new advisory service for filmmakers. Boyd — an independent film producer (the ’17 Berlin-premiere and Tribeca selection, For Ahkeem), writer/director and veteran of filmmaker support organizations (most recently Chicken & Egg, but also Tribeca Film Institute and IFP) — has […]
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Four on the Floor: The Quad Cinema Returns
Six years ago or so, when I was still a struggling freelance critic, a trip to NYC’s Quad Cinema was something to anticipate with dread. The theater had recently dipped its toe into four-walled exhibition, and much of what was on tap were films that should not have existed, the results of dumb money being thrown at terrible documentaries and even worse narratives. When the Quad closed in May 2015, it felt more like a mercy killing than anything else; its reopening this April starts a new, brighter chapter. The theater’s history as an institution of NYC filmgoing started in […]
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Lab Experiments
When Steve Cossman founded Mono No Aware 10 years ago, he was literally the entire organization. Operating out of his apartment, Cossman — who’d attended Albright College and had just returned from a two-year program at Prague’s FAMU film school — wanted to engage with and assist the expanded cinema community. “Expanded cinema” goes far beyond traditional notions of the avant-garde: Cossman cites a recent piece by Julie Dumas as a good example of the kind of work his organization supports, in which RGB lasers pointed at a single surface created a piercing white light. “There were two buckets with […]
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Episodic and In Your Ears
While the migration of independent filmmakers to the small screen is a much remarked about phenomenon, another entertainment platform, one growing even faster than television, is opening its loving arms to independent directors, screenwriters and producers. Podcasting, for its first decade or so, has consisted primarily of interview shows, like Marc Maron’s WTF, and the occasional fresh approach to journalism, like Serial. But now it’s moving more and more into the fiction world and creating alluring creative opportunities for independent storytellers. Founded in 2014, Gimlet Media has been making a name for itself producing shows like StartUp (about starting a […]
