Issues
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The Explosions Within: Lynne Ramsay on You Were Never Really Here
Joe uses a hammer. A tough guy for hire — one who specializes in cases involving pedophilia and child trafficking — Joe owns a gun, of course, and he uses that, too. But for the jobs that truly matter, ones triggering the dark memories that clank painfully around inside his brain, he prefers the brutal simplicity of a simple hammer that can fell an adversary with one silent, well-timed swoop. Arrestingly embodied by Joaquin Phoenix in Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s fleet, impressionistic work of hardcore noir, You Were Never Really Here, winner of the Best Screenplay prize at last year’s […]
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Leslie Harris’s Return Ticket
“I was looking at old issues of Filmmaker,” says Leslie Harris — director of the 1993 indie drama Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. “There was Quentin, Robert Rodriguez, Nick Gomez, and then Matty Rich and John Singleton. And Juice was just coming out. It was a real male-dominated arena. My impetus was to see a black woman on screen, someone who wasn’t a wife or a girlfriend. Someone who had her own dreams — a strong, confident black woman’s voice.” That voice was Chantel’s — “precocious as hell, sharp as a tack,” wrote Beth Coleman, who interviewed Harris for […]
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Was 2018 the Year of the Woman at the Sundance Film Festival?
After the Sundance Film Festival’s awards ceremony, when female directors swept all the top categories, the response was ecstatic. “Women dominated Sundance,” cried the headlines. Social media blew up with congratulatory hashtags #womeninfilm and #femalefilmmakerfriday. “It felt like a revolutionary moment,” says Celine Rattray, who produced Sara Colangelo’s directing-award winner The Kindergarten Teacher. At the festival’s opening press conference, Robert Redford’s most memorable line was: “The role of men right now is to listen.” But did the film industry hear that? More than two weeks after Sundance concluded, five of the festival’s female-led jury winners had still not closed distribution […]
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Continuing Education
When I boarded a plane for Buffalo, N.Y., in 1981 to attend grad school at SUNY/Buffalo, my parents were shocked. I had just graduated from Queens College/CUNY with an undergraduate degree in biology and was destined for medical school. What my parents didn’t know was that I had become fascinated with experimental film — in particular, the work of Paul Sharits, who taught at the university’s Center for Media Studies (CMS). I was offered a graduate teaching position at CMS and bought a plane ticket to Buffalo, where I intended to spend one or two years, at most. Eight years […]
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Paris By Night: Making a Nathan Silver American Independent Film in Paris
Foreign productions shooting in France have two options to obtain tax rebates. One is to officially become a French production, which requires a co-production treaty and going through the French Ministry of Culture’s CNC agency. For Nathan Silver’s Thirst Street, that wasn’t a practical option: the United States is one of the few countries to have no co-production treaty with France. (The United States has no coproduction treaties with any country, in fact, but that’s another story.) According to Thirst co-writer/producer C. Mason Wells, the production had to go the more common Tax Rebate for International Productions (TRIP) route. The […]
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Short Film Confessions Redux
Thirteen years ago, I wrote an article for Filmmaker: “Confessions of a Short Film Programmer.” In my introduction, I hinted at the most brutal clichés filmmakers should avoid (uncleared movie posters on the walls, a protagonist drinking from a Jack Daniel’s bottle, revealing a character to be a mime), but I didn’t want to completely wallow in the negative. After all, as a programmer of short films at Sundance, I’m fortunate to have such a cool job, even if it also happens to be the only job I’m capable of doing professionally. Since the publication of that article, the world […]
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The Art of (Not) Compromising: DP Sean Porter on When and How to Hold Your Ground
For those of you following along, I had intended to continue my interview series on parenting — and had some cool interviews with people like Rachel Morrison (before she was nominated, OK?) — but Filmmaker, with its abundance of (truly) great interview features, politely requested I stay with my format, so you’re stuck with yours truly. Now, where was I? Oh yeah. Speaking of compromises! That’s yet another topic I’d love to hear other DPs talk about, but they don’t. So, instead, one of my favorite pastimes is getting my DITs to tell their stories. (Hint: they have good stories.) […]
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What I Learned in Film School
I learned a bit about cinema studies while getting an MFA at Columbia in the late 1970s and a good deal more once I began teaching, first at NYU and then Cooper Union, around a decade later. Always curious as to why students wanted to study film to begin with, I gave a standard first assignment that included a request for a description of the first movie that a student remembered seeing in a movie theater. As at least a third of the Cooper students were born outside the United States, the answers were fascinating. Really should have saved them…. […]
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So You Didn’t Get Into Sundance, Redux
“So you didn’t get into Sundance.” That’s the title of a 2009 blog post I wrote for Filmmaker’s website that gets a flurry of hits each December as, yes, a lot of people don’t get into Sundance. My post was written with a tone of plucky defiance — that mixture of self-care and can-do-ism that is the stuff of so much online film advice writing these days. I started by recommending filmmakers change their headspace by going to a museum or walking in the park, and then, a week or two later, dive back into their films by critically rewatching […]
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Letter From an Unknown Filmmaker
It was 1995 when Filmmaker and I were first introduced. At that time, my documentary BloodSisters was on the festival circuit, and the producer Henry S. Rosenthal called me to let me know that the latest issue of the magazine featured a picture of me with Jennie Livingston. Then he solemnly said, “You’re not going to be happy.” I ran out to get a copy — thrilled that I was in Filmmaker — and as I stood there furiously thumbing through the pages my elation quickly turned to defeat. There I was in a photo with Jennie and another person, […]
