Reports
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The Orchard Ripens
One of the busier buyers at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, The Orchard — per its website, a “21st-century distribution company with a global presence and a local feel” — has only recently made a name for itself as an arthouse distributor. Founded in 1997, they’ve been known as a leading distribution label for independent music; to date, digital music sales, streams and transactions from titles The Orchard oversees have accounted for 20 to 30 percent of all digital music revenue. But recently, The Orchard garnered media attention for its newly created film division, a division that applies the lessons […]
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Look Into the Cut: Jessica Brillhart on Editing VR
From classical Hollywood continuity editing to Eisensteinian montage, from the quick jump cuts of the French New Wave to the even more accelerated and spatially destabilized editing of the Hollywood blockbuster, filmmakers from the dawn of cinema have had to embrace, even if only on a subconscious level, some theory of editing. What, then, of today’s nascent medium of Virtual Reality (VR)? Some are calling VR the next phase of cinema, but many VR works are more akin to video games, where cuts are hidden within approaching horizon lines. Or where, inelegantly, an edit is simply a transition from one […]
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Scoped Out
When filmmaker Laura Poitras joined journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill to form the online news site The Intercept, it didn’t seem a certainty that she’d bring film to the site’s reporting on domestic spying, national security and foreign policy issues. After all, even before her Academy Award for documentary CITIZENFOUR, Poitras had shared a Pulitzer Prize and George Polk award for print reporting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post. And, after the awards, Poitras continued covering these stories in print and online — not just for The Intercept, a site owned by […]
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Click and Release
Back in 2011, around 50 percent of the films that played the Sundance Film Festival went on to receive distribution. “That was an unacceptable violation of our mission as a nonprofit to connect audiences and artists,” recalls Chris Horton, director of Sundance’s Artist Services, which was founded that same January in an effort to help filmmakers navigate the changing landscapes in funding, marketing and distribution. For the subsequent three years, Artist Services partnered with content aggregator New Video to distribute over 100 Sundance pictures, working with the filmmakers to determine the best possible release and windowing strategies. When Sundance’s deal […]
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Learning from Experience
Digital cameras have made it possible for more first-time documentary directors than ever to realize their visions, but there aren’t yet enough experienced producers ready to help those directors translate their talents into viable careers. “If you’re a director with an ambitious vision, you’re going to need help,” producer Amanda Branson Gill says. “In the narrative world, there are huge, built-in teams of people to support you. In documentary, we have this idea of the lone wolf. But you’re going to need a good partner, someone with whom you share the burden and who makes it possible.” A creative producer […]
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Picture Lock
As the pioneering Wexner Center for the Arts celebrates the 25th anniversary of its Film/Video Studio Program, we invited curator Jennifer Lange to pen this guest essay on the program’s history and upcoming retrospective. When Spalding Gray called the Wexner Center for the Arts “the spaceship that crash-landed on the prairies,” he was referring to the building itself, an icon of deconstructivist architecture designed by Peter Eisenman. As radical and unconventional as the building may have seemed at the time, the plans for what would take place inside its labyrinthine walls make Grey’s characterization all the more fitting, even prescient. […]
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Going Mobile: The Alpha1 Mobile Film Lab
In 1932, the Russian filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin convinced Soviet authorities to give him three decommissioned train carriages to turn into a mobile film studio. The “film-train” would travel across the USSR’s expanse, bringing with it 32 spots to sleep, six editing tables, a projection room and a film-processing lab. Equipped to handle all aspects of production and projection from beginning to end, the film train would record local issues and expose problems that the people would need to solve: in Medvedkin’s words, the portable facility would act as “a kind of special fire brigade to put out problem fires.” These […]
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Shakespeare in the Park: On the Set of Matías Piñeiro’s Hermia & Helena
Argentinian director Matías Piñeiro’s last three films have started from a Shakespearean source text: As You Like It for Rosalinda, Twelfth Night for Viola, Love’s Labour’s Lost in The Princess of France. In all these structurally playful and formally rigorous works, troupes of actors are working on new productions, and the films are given further continuity by a recurring ensemble cast and crew including actress Augustina Muñoz and d.p. Fernando Lockett. In Piñeiro’s newest production, Hermia & Helena, a young woman (Muñoz) comes to New York on a fellowship for a new Spanish translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though […]
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Kick Out the Jams
Ten years ago, without a sliver of experience, the Lebanese-born, Detroit-based Rola Nashef conceived what would become the short precursor to her acclaimed 2012 independent feature Detroit Unleaded. She had the idea to relate the quotidian trials of an Arab-American man working behind bulletproof glass at an inner-city filling station and had to figure out how to do it. “The short script,” she claims, “was the first time I’d written anything in my life.” After making the short, she spent a year with it on the festival circuit and another distributing it to universities for educational purposes, bucking the notion […]
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Crowdsourcing Erotica: Erika Lust’s XConfessions
A Swede living in Spain with a background in political science, Erika Lust is not your average feminist pornographer. The award-winning writer-director of over half a dozen erotic films, Lust is now embarking on what she considers her most important project yet. XConfessions is 100 percent crowdsourced, fan-generated erotica. Each month, Lust chooses two sex confessions from among the wide-ranging slew of fantasies posted to her site. (The submission process itself is free of charge. Just create an anonymous profile and you can read or write confessions as well as watch free videos.) Those favorites will then become short films […]
