Issues
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Family Plot: David Lowery Interviews Krisha Writer/Director Trey Edward Shults
One of the most impressive debuts of this year, Trey Edward Shults’s Krisha — the story of a recovering alcoholic thoroughly derailed by the pressure-cooker of her sister’s Thanksgiving Day dinner — is a work of astonishing performances, formal control, filmmaking ambition and, finally, deep emotional wisdom. It’s a movie that has all the dramatic pyrotechnics one expects from the “home for the holidays” sub-genre, but, loosely based on a true story about one of Shults’s actual relatives, is suffused with a real understanding about issues of addiction and recovery, regret, and the difficulties of being and feeling accepted. Winner […]
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Indie Housewarming
When IFP Minnesota was deciding whose name to place above the exhibition galleries in its new space in St. Paul’s Vandalia Tower, executive director Andrew Peterson and its board of directors didn’t go the obvious route. There’s not a corporate sponsor logo in sight. Instead, the organization named the gallery after two local photographers, Ann Marsden and Gus Gustafson, both of whom were avid chroniclers of the Minneapolis/St. Paul arts community before they each passed away in recent years. Along with IFP Minnesota’s offices, four classrooms and two editing suites, the Marsden/Gustafson gallery opened to the public and members this […]
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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, […]
