Issues
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Una Noche at the Berlinale
Two weeks ago I was on the phone to a lab in Canada, who were holding our film, telling them that 6 lab rolls of Una Noche were missing. The movie was supposed to premiere in Berlin in a matter of days. I proceeded to go through every frame of footage in the NYC lab double-checking to see if the shots were there. They were not. I did not tell anybody. I did not want to believe it myself. When the colorist, Martin, told me that we might have to use black slates with “missing shot” written on them, my breathing spontaneously […]
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RELEASED
18 years after traveling to Arkansas to make a documentary about the gruesome murders of three young boys by alleged Satan-worshiping teenagers, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky bring their crusading story of the West Memphis Three to a miraculous conclusion with Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory. By Jason Guerrasio -
Voices from the Grave
“I think we have really broken a new genre. It is the next evolution of factual storytelling.” So says Christine Connor, the creator and producer of ABC’s forthcoming drama-documentary hybrid series Final Witness, which begins its debut season in early 2012. In fall 2009, independent producer Connor pitched ABC’s Rudy Bednar the idea of a show that would present “true-crime murder stories told with an emphasis on narrative storytelling, narrated by the character of the victim.” A further hook was that Final Witness, in an attempt to move away from the look and feel of conventional true-crime re-enactment shows, would […]
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Family Matters
As a child growing up in Scituate, Mass., Nick Flynn was often left to explore on his own, and he got into varying degrees of trouble. Flynn’s parents were divorced and he had no contact with his father, living instead with his mother, who worked in a bakery. She remarried to a 21-year-old Vietnam vet, and, after their divorce, Flynn wound up living with her and a new boyfriend — a member of one of the largest drug smuggling rings in New England. Around the age of 18, Flynn started working for the smuggler — unloading fishing boats and as […]
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‘Til the End of Time
While the title of Eve Sussman’s (and her collaborative team Rufus Corporation’s) whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir –– shown as part of New Frontiers at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival –– refers to a seminal abstract artwork dealing with space, the video itself is all about time. In fact, this experimental piece’s apparent story about an American geophysicist named Holz (Jeff Wood) working in a post-Soviet industrial metropolis called City-A has no fixed time at all. That’s because the sum of the video’s parts aren’t just greater than the whole –– there is no whole. Through an algorithm, which Sussman has dubbed “the Serenity […]
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Editor’s Letter
The first thing I did after finally reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids this past summer was to get on YouTube to find the earliest clips of her I could. I wanted to sense the charisma she must have put out when she was young. It’s not like she’s not still charismatic, but it’s just that, like with every famous person, her charisma is now congealed with the aura of her fame. I wanted to see what she seemed like before she was “Patti Smith,” the woman who made Horses and Easter. Before she was that rock-and roll-icon, Smith was, as […]
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City Limits
Following up his impressive debut, Reprise, Joachim Trier uses a Pierre Drieu La Rochelle novel and the Norwegian capital to create the beautifully somber Oslo, August 31st. By Scott Macaulay -
Foreign Correspondents
Directors Joshua Marston (The Forgiveness of Blood) and Braden King (Here) discuss the making of their very different pictures through the prism of their shared experience — making an independent film in Eastern Europe. -
Listen as Your Story Talks to the Internet
Without a doubt, this is an amazing time to be a storyteller. We have moved beyond the simple democratization of storytelling and production tools. Funding, marketing and distribution solutions are commoditized, providing filmmakers numerous opportunities to bring their work to an audience. And now a new phase is arriving, one that merges technology with the creative process. Filmmakers will soon be able to take advantage of a world of connected objects in what has been termed the “Internet of things.” And in this environment, as always, there will be a need for good storytelling to provide a level of understanding, […]
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The Art of First Impressions: How to Cut a Movie Trailer
