Issues
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Order Fulfillment: Director Halina Reijn on Babygirl
It’s appropriate that Halina Reijn, the Dutch actress-turned-filmmaker who previously directed the Gen Z whodunnit Bodies Bodies Bodies, would look to ’90s erotic thrillers as fodder for her next feature. After all, her countryman Paul Verhoeven (she has a supporting role in his Black Book) is considered the de facto master of this genre, bringing his penchant for the perverse to Hollywood with pictures such as Basic Instinct. Babygirl, Reijn’s English-language feature debut as writer-director, is less enamored with this bygone era than it is interested in deploying its framework within a personal, subversively feminist perspective. But make no mistake: […]
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My Hot Librarian Summer: Libraries and Independent Film Distribution Strategies
It can take two or more years for independent films to progress through festival, theatrical, VOD, streaming and maybe airline releases, after which their discoverability fades. For filmmakers, the question then becomes, “How will people discover my movie now?” For many, the answer revolves around libraries. Across public, college and university libraries, there are estimates that up to 30 percent of library checkouts are movies, not books. Filled with DVDs, libraries have become the new Blockbuster—but, increasingly reliant on library-specific streaming services, they’re also becoming the new Netflix. Many of us independent filmmakers are so excited to sign a distribution […]
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The Future Looking Back At Us: Joanne McNeil on Cyberpunk
This year is the 40th anniversary of William Gibson’s classic novel Neuromancer. It’s a work of singular brilliance that arrived as part of a new vanguard. Back in 1984, in the Washington Post, author and editor Gardner Dozois identified Gibson as part of an emerging trend: new science fiction authors who had eschewed formulaic space operas for “bizarre hard-edged, high-tech stuff.” Dozois called these authors the “cyberpunks,” and the label caught on. Key works of cyberpunk like Neuromancer were produced in the ’80s alongside the boom in personal computers, and again in the ’90s as subscriptions to online services and […]
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25 New Faces of Independent Film 2024
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Play by Play: The Making of Hoop Dreams
In 1986, two recent college graduates in film from Southern Illinois University, Steve James and Fred (later Frederick) Marx, walked in the door. To them, Kartemquin was mecca. At the new, student-run Big Muddy Film Festival, Jerry Blumenthal had been an early presenter and judge alongside experimental filmmaker James Benning and Jim Jarmusch. He had shown Taylor Chain II and The Last Pullman Car. “I remember watching The Last Pullman Car and feeling, ‘Wow, this is really good!’” recalled James. “It lodged in my mind that Kartemquin was really interesting. And Jerry was very impressive—classic Jerry, thoughtful and funny and […]
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The Monster You Become: Coralie Fargeat on The Substance
Even for the most callous horror-heads, Coralie Fargeat’s debut feature, Revenge (2017), stunned with its gruesome rape-revenge plot and blunt-force style, announcing the French director as a genre talent on the rise, capable of invoking her cinematic inspirations while departing from them on her own frenzied, feminist terms. The Substance, which won the award for Best Screenplay when it premiered at Cannes earlier this year, somehow cranks up the madness even further, unfolding a dark Hollywood fairytale about aging and feminine beauty standards that stands among the most adventurous in the body horror genre. Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a […]
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Streaming 3D on the Apple Vision Pro
In the first week of January, I received an email from a programming manager at MUBI—arguably, the leading global streaming platform for arthouse and independent cinema—telling me that the company was working on a new project that would allow it to present stereoscopic (3D) films on its service in the immediate future and asking about the availability of my films’ materials and SVOD rights. Intrigued and perplexed, I verified that I had the rights to all of my solo projects and told MUBI it could include whatever it wanted. A week later, MUBI licensed non-exclusive U.S. and Canadian streaming rights […]
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Review This: Letterboxd and Independent Film Marketing
There are no silver bullets for solving the crisis in independent film distribution, but there are a lot of industry professionals looking to Letterboxd—and its opinionated and rapidly growing 15 million–strong community of cinephiles—as an important new tool for their survival. Most crucially, as one distributor put it, “They’ve opened up a new channel of communication between filmmakers and their audiences, both actual and potential.” And, unlike other major industry disrupters, from Netflix to Rotten Tomatoes before it, Letterboxd appears to be embracing independent films as a distinct part of its identity. Matthew Buchanan, Letterboxd’s New Zealand–based co-founder, told Filmmaker, […]
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On the Way to the Cutting Room: How to Be an Assistant Editor
If you’ve ever wondered, “What even is an assistant editor, and what do they do?,” you’re not alone. I find myself explaining my job repeatedly to my perplexed but well-meaning family members and even to other people in the film and TV industry. The job varies from project to project, but mostly an assistant editor deals with various technical aspects of post-production so the editor can focus on the creative work of editing. That said, it’s not an entirely technical role. Sometimes, an assistant gets the chance to help the editor creatively through assembling scenes or working on sound design; […]
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Editor’s Letter
Welcome to the fall 2024 issue of Filmmaker—our 32nd anniversary edition. Inside you’ll find, alongside our features, interviews and longform articles, our annual 25 New Faces section, which makes its 27th appearance. Over the past 12 months, we’ve been on the hunt for early career filmmakers who, individually and as a group, make a statement about how independent film is conceived of and practiced today. There is an unusually large number of hyphenates on the list this year—particularly producers, but also festival directors and cinematographers who are moving into directing while not necessarily giving up their day jobs. There’s a […]
