Reports
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ro*co Goes iTunes
“I think we, as an independent filmmaking community, focus way too much on the U.S.,” says Annie Roney, the Sausalito-based founder of documentary foreign sales agent and distributor ro*co films. “There’s a whole big world out there of potential viewers for documentaries. And I think the hunger for them is growing worldwide in the same way that it is here.” Helping to quench that hunger is a new partnership between ro*co and the London-based Bertha Foundation that will enable films from the ro*co catalog to be available digitally in international markets via iTunes. “We share a common goal with The […]
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Joke’s on You
At first glance, Rick Alverson and Tim Heidecker don’t seem like obvious collaborators. Alverson, indie filmmaker with two features under his belt, and Heidecker, on-half of absurdist Adult Swim comedy duo Tim and Eric, command vastly different audiences. But The Comedy finds the two joining forces — Alverson behind the camera and Heidecker in front — to create one of the year’s most challenging films, a dense character study more unsettling than it is funny. Set amidst the streets of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the film follows affluent aging hipster Swanson (Heidecker) as he widdles away his days, unemployed and rudderless. While […]
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Wrapping Independent Film Week
Memorable movie moments may be made out of triumph — the winning of the big game, the getting of the girl — but a career in film rarely reaches its triumphant third act in 90 minutes. Even the most successful filmmakers spend years on their journey, and it is for them — those waiting and hustling for their breaks — that Independent Film Week exists. Founded in 1979 by IFP, the publisher of Filmmaker, Independent Film Week has mushroomed over the past 33 years into a one-of-a-kind event that connects emerging and established artists with the producers, financiers and executives that […]
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Bay Area Boom
When Ted Hope moved from New York to the Bay Area in September to take over as executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, he was stepping into an organization that, with the recent success of its vibrant and generous Filmmaker360 program, had already been making a substantial impact in the independent film world. In 2008, the late Graham Leggat, then the SFFS’s executive director, identified the need to reevaluate the organization’s ailing Film Arts Foundation, which had been in existence for more than 30 years but, despite having a robust fiscal sponsorship program, had dwindled in importance because […]
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Networking Frenzy
This year the Independent Filmmaker Project, the nation’s oldest and largest advocacy program for independent filmmaking, moved it on up, transferring its signature event, Independent Film Week, uptown to the sparklingly new Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, home of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. In her introductory remarks, Amy Dotson, IFP’s deputy director, described the relocation as a “homecoming.” The IFP’s original Market began as a sidebar to the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, and both organizations were thrilled to be working in partnership again. For the lucky producers, writers and directors whose projects had been selected […]
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New Age Viewing
Now in its 42nd year, the Film Society of Lincoln Center has been a hallmark of the New York exhibition scene and one of the world’s most esteemed presenters of international and independent cinema. With its annual New York Film Festival and New Directors/New Films, as well as the bevy of year-round repertory programming in the Walter Reade Theater since 1991, it’s a destination for cinephiles the world over. Earlier this past summer the Film Society moved its center of gravity across 65th Street to the new Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center. A long-planned, state-of-the-art triplex that has been under […]
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Once Upon a Time
As the late ’60s wore on, African and African-American filmmakers began to descend on UCLA’s campus, recruited as part of a concerted effort by the university’s School of Theater, Film and Television to include more students of color. Among them were Charles Burnett, who arrived at UCLA to pursue a degree in film after thinking he’d become an electrician, and Haile Gerima, the son of an Ethiopian poet who had briefly studied drama in Chicago. They would be the lynchpins of a group of politically engaged black film students who ended up forming a subgenre of alternative cinema all their […]
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From the Rubble
I arrived in Kabul in late May of 2011 with seven weeks to realize two objectives—shoot a new video in the ruined Darul Aman Palace on the outskirts of the city and teach a one-month video workshop at the Center for Contemporary Art Afghanistan (CCAA). The CCAA is a small nonprofit, based in a dusty-pink villa on a side street in Kartechar, that offers classes for female students in cooperation with the Fine Arts Faculty of Kabul University. CCAA students typically spend their mornings at the university and their afternoons at the center. Like other such arrangements in operation around […]
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Justin Lin’s Family Network
“It’s not actually that different from early independent cinema,” Elaine Chin, President of Production of Justin Lin’s production company, Barnstorm Pictures, says of the new YouTube network, You Offend Me You Offend My Family, Lin has co-founded. “There’s no preconceived idea of what it should look like. YouTube is giving us free reign to go and try anything, and we don’t want to take that for granted. If anything, we want to surprise ourselves and be even more crazy.” Launched this June as part of YouTube’s move into original programming, YOMYOMF features short-form scripted and reality programs by new creators […]
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On Film School and Columbia’s 25th
In early May, with much hoopla, Columbia University’s graduate Film Program celebrated the 25th anniversary of its annual Film Festival at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. The auditorium was nearly packed as tuxedo-attired Ira Deutchman, Columbia Film Program chair, took the podium to introduce both the evening, a weeklong series of events and screenings honoring Columbia’s film school, and, more particularly, the school’s maturation over the past quarter century. The opening night featured some of the best student films to come out of Columbia, including Adam Davidson’s superbly paced Academy Award-winning short The Lunch Date, and Greg Mottola’s charming Swingin’ […]
