Issues
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Editor’s Letter
Welcome to the fall 2023 edition of Filmmaker—our 31st anniversary issue containing the 26th edition of our 25 New Faces of Film list. Or perhaps I should say, “Welcome to the fall 2023 edition of Filmmaker Magazine” and actually use that final descriptor, one which I often edit out of interview copy when people say it. As I wrote in this space a year ago in a longer-than-usual editor’s letter tied to our silver anniversary, I picked the name “Filmmaker” after being inspired by a magazine called Musician that ran for nearly 25 years in the latter part of the […]
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The Man Machine: On the NPC Streaming Phenomenon
On a hot July afternoon, a friend sent a video, a TikTok livestream, to a group chat, followed by a question: “What is this genre called?” A young man in a Spider-Man suit and hoodie was rhythmically swaying back and forth in a parking garage as he stared into the camera. He frequently broke his silence when he received a “gift” sent by one of the stream’s 2,000 viewers. Depending on the gift type, he repeated one of a few phrases, each with the same delivery: “Hey, thanks for the rose”; “Too much ice cream makes me cold”; “Nothing like […]
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Paradigm Shift: The Current State of Development Labs
When the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) announced in spring 2020 that they would shutter, many in the independent film community were shocked. For 17 years, TFI had supported hundreds of filmmakers and projects, including underrepresented artists, through its Tribeca All Access program, as well as Latin American filmmakers and VR visionaries. At the time, TFI’s closure appeared to be the result of a unique case of pandemic skittishness combined with its parent organization’s increasingly for-profit ambitions. Rather than an outlier, it may have been a sign of things to come. Given the lingering effects of the COVID era and the […]
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Inhabiting the Role: Todd Haynes on May/December
Todd Haynes’s May December, which premiered this year at the Cannes Film Festival and was snatched up by Netflix almost immediately, marks a return to the kind of expressive women’s drama for which the director is arguably most beloved. Think Far from Heaven (2002) or Carol (2015), two films about forbidden romance whose lush, stylized aesthetics both encourage nostalgia and destabilize easy emotional identification. As the title suggests, May December, too, concerns a taboo love affair—one whose throwback elements are anchored to the tabloid frenzies and true-crime obsessions of the 1990s. Written by Samy Burch, a casting director making her […]
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Holiday Misfits: Alexander Payne on The Holdovers
Before The Holdovers, director Alexander Payne and actor Paul Giamatti hadn’t worked together in nearly two decades. After premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2004, their Oscar-winning comedy Sideways went on to garner countless awards and generate profitable spinoffs—a Japanese remake, musical theater adaptation, film-branded bottles of pinot noir. During the 19 years since the film’s release, Payne and Giamatti attempted to team up on new projects, but none came to fruition until a screenplay by David Hemingson arrived on Payne’s desk a few years ago. Envisioning the script as something that could be revised and expanded upon […]
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Playing Politics: Developing the Best-Selling Board Game Shasn
I have made two feature documentaries in my home country of India. The second, While We Watched, came out on the same day as “Barbenheimer” and just finished a month-long run at the IFC Center in New York. The first one, An Insignificant Man, which I co-directed with Khushboo Ranka, ran in theaters across India for nine weeks. However, my most commercially successful project isn’t either of these—it’s a board game, Shasn (“Governance,” created by Zain Memon), that was born out of An Insignificant Man’s impact campaign and has been sold in more than 75 countries across the world today, […]
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Bright Moments: St. Clair Bourne’s Formative Years on Black Journal
St. Clair Bourne was a photographer, journalist, publisher of the newsletter Chamba Notes, founder of Black Documentary Collective and BADWest, mentor, teacher, cameraman, producer and pioneering documentary director. Bourne’s filmmaking career includes work for public television, beginning at Black Journal in 1968 through 1999’s Paul Robeson: Here I Stand, as well as films made through Chamba Mediaworks, his production company, focusing on people and subjects from all aspects of Black social and political life, including Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, John Henrik Clarke, Chicago blues music, Northern Ireland, education and religion, among hundreds of topics. MoMA’s restoration of his 1983 film The Black and the Green, which […]
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25 New Faces of Independent Film 2023
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Risk On: Chloe Domont on Fair Play
With credits on high-profile TV series like Suits, Star Trek: Discovery and Billions, writer-director Chloe Domont had experiences in the entertainment industry where she felt like she had to adapt to the boys club. Those experiences, as well as the fear of all she could lose if she didn’t play along, were front of mind when she was crafting Fair Play, an intense, high-stakes and increasingly nerve-wracking relationship and workplace drama with notes of ’90s erotic thrillers. But in no way did Domont want to use the film industry as a backdrop for her masterful feature directorial debut. “That would […]
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Marathon Training: The Documentary Awards Season Grind
By the time you read this, awards season, that annual ritual of accolades and extroversion, will be full throttle. Mounting and sustaining a campaign is often prohibitive, both as a budgetary line item and as an all-consuming occupation. Contenders live in the air and in hotels, go where their team sends them, agree to hundreds of interviews and participate in just as many Q&As and roundtables. But on the upside, an awards campaign is an opportunity to build a worldwide network of friends and contemporaries. Filmmaker reached out to former Academy Award nominees in the Feature Documentary category to share […]
