Issues
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Killers in Italy and the Forest
Wake Up and Kill A seminal crime movie from one of Italy’s most important and underrated directors of the 1960s, Wake Up and Kill represents a fascinating intersection between the neorealist films that preceded it and the explosion of Italian genre fare to follow. Directly inspired by then-recent headlines, the picture tells the story of Luciano Lutring (Robert Hoffmann), an armed robber known as the “machine gun soloist,” who committed over a hundred heists in Italy and France. In real life, Lutring became a sort of folk hero, but in director Carlo Lizzani’s riff on events that had taken place […]
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Rep Reborn, Downtown: The Story Behind NYC’s Metrograph Theater
Though NYC is one of the best places in America to see repertory cinema, the number of theaters in the city has decreased greatly over the decades. That’s as true for rep houses as it is for first-run venues; the Metrograph will be programming in both fields. When the two-screen venue opens in March, it’ll be the first new independent movie theater to open in Manhattan in a decade; fittingly, it sits across the street from the long-boarded up Loew’s Canal Theatre. On a mid-December day, founder Alexander Olch, CEO Ethan Oberman and programming and artistic director Jake Perlin walk […]
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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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Kickstarter Announces Sundance-Bound Projects
The countdown to Sundance 2016 has begun with a slew of recent announcements of film selections for the festival, which runs from January 21-31. Earlier this week, the crowdfunding platform unveiled the list of Kickstarter-funded works which made the cut for this year’s festival, including new documentary features from Dawn Porter (Trapped), Penny Lane (NUTS!) and Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker (Unlocking the Cage). Read the full blog post here and check out highlights below: This year at Sundance, we’ll be crossing our fingers for a great roster of docs and dramatic features in competition for major awards: NUTS!, Spa Night, Trapped, and When Two Worlds […]
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Rooftop Filmmakers Fund Grant Winners for 2015 Announced
Rooftop Films, which is heading into its 20th season, has awarded 13 cash and service grants to alumni filmmakers. The GarboNYC Feature Film Grants were awarded to directors Kitty Green and Sebastian Silva. Green will receive a monetary grant of $15,000 to help finish her new film, Casting JonBenet, and Silva will receive a $10,000 grant to support his film, Demon Me. Casting JonBenet, a documentary about the infamous murder of child model JonBenet Ramsey, marks Green’s second feature after her 2013 documentary debut Ukraine Is Not a Brothel. Among the films Silva has directed are Crystal Fairy & the Magical Cactus and Nasty […]
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How The Award-Winning Rich Hill Made an Impact
It’s been nearly two years since Rich Hill, an observational documentary about three teens growing up in rural poverty, won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize Documentary Award at the Sundance Film Festival. But the conversation the film sparked continues today and the film’s engagement campaign is still going strong. Directed by Andrew Droz Palermo and Tracy Droz Tragos, Rich Hill invites viewers into three families’ homes where they witness first-hand the hardships and challenges the families face as they struggle to make ends meet. Following its premiere at Sundance, Rich Hill was acquired by The Orchard and Independent Lens. It was […]
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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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Toronto, Camden and Venice
TORONTO by Scott Macaulay High Rise has long been considered one of the J.G. Ballard’s most “adaptable” books, with the author’s dispassionate meditations on disassociation, inner and outer space, and the psychologies and paraphilias unleashed by 20th-century life encased within the sturdy confines of a modern apartment building and a class-based tale of survival. Nonetheless, High Rise has taken decades to reach the screen, despite the attachments of numerous directors, including Vincenzo Natali, Bruce Robinson and, revealed producer Jeremy Thomas at a talk at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, interest from Nicolas Roeg. Premiering at the festival in Platform, […]
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A Hole in the Heart
Ever since her work on 2008’s Sundance award-winner Frozen River, cinematographer Reed Morano has been a prominent voice in American independent film, with credits including Little Birds, Kill Your Darlings and The Skeleton Twins. Her method of creating what she calls “elegant naturalism” has made her Rob Reiner’s go-to director of photography on his recent films (The Magic of Belle Isle, And So it Goes), and has graced television screens via HBO’s Looking last year and its upcoming rock-and-roll series, Vinyl. Aside from her work in film, Morano is also an articulate commentator on film, and has given numerous interviews […]
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With an Eye on the Finish Line
We shot most of Channel B over a weekend, but it was only two weeks later, during an evening of pickups, that the aesthetic of the movie really started to come together. This probably happens a lot, especially on little rinky-dink shoots like ours. We were about to do a third take of one of our last setups, shooting in a public park, a few benches down from some drunks. I asked Cory Popp, our director of photography, to shift the first part of a camera movement just a little bit, and when I watched the playback on our one […]
