Issues
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Load & Play
Blue Caprice Sundance Selects – January 14 The title character in Alexandre Moors’ stunning debut Blue Caprice was, like so many of that make and model, a police car. That is until it was retrofitted for terror by John Allen Muhammad, who drilled a hole in the trunk from which the 17-year-old John Lee Malvo, at the ex-U.S. Army marksman Muhammad’s urging, shot 10 people to death during the 2002 Beltway sniper attacks. Brought to terrifying life by the remarkable Isaiah Washington as Muhammad and Tequan Richmond (TV’s Everybody Hates Chris) as Malvo, Caprice’s menacing, built-for-maximum-glide vibe, all stark blues, […]
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The How-Tos of Grant Writing: A Manifesto of Sorts
The instructions are easy enough: Communicate your project idea in three pages. I think, “Great, I can bang this out in a day or two.” I sit at my desk and wait for the words to pour forth. And this is when my brain likes to take vacation. As 2014 rolls in and I am applying for grants for my new documentary project, I wish I could tell you that it gets easier to pen grant proposals each time I do it. Let me be honest: grant writing is tedious. It’s as much fun as writing a manual on video […]
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Hits & Misses
By the end of 2013, the most pressing question facing Hollywood was already old news for indies: multiplatform viewing is here, and particularly for independents, it’s here to stay. A significant source of revenue, in most cases, and a crucial method of finding an audience, the iTunes-Cable VOD and direct-to-consumer release has increasingly become an integral, if not principal, part of filmmakers’ distribution strategies. And yet, the irony of the past year in indie film is that much of the business was reliant on that hoary, old-fashioned, windowed release. For every VOD breakout surprise such as Drinking Buddies or Only […]
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CPH:DOX 2013
“Mission accomplished.” That might have been the motto of the 2013 edition of CPH:DOX. If, at one point, this doc festival’s liberal definition of “reality” roiled nonfiction traditionalists (it was the fest, after all, that gave its 2009 top award to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers), those days are long since gone. As BBC Storyville’s commissioning editor Nick Fraser commented at a panel on hybrid journalism, there’s almost an expectation by contemporary audiences that documentaries today — not just at CPH:DOX but everywhere — will play with concepts of truth and fiction. “Is there anything left of the tradition of objective […]
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The Women of Sundance 2014
Women, this is our year. I don’t say this because I’ve got numbers to back me up (because I don’t), or because I’m generally an overly optimistic cheerleader of life (though I am). I say this because it’s our only choice. This has to be our year. As Sundance kicks off in Park City, a large handful of women are about to debut their new films and fresh voices to the world. And after interviewing almost all of them myself I can say, in my most eloquent terms, that this year’s slate of Sundance female filmmakers is absolutely badass. The […]
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Plug and Play
We are in the middle of a hardware revolution. Inexpensive processors, memory and sensor technologies are now accessible to the masses. Long gone are the days of expensive fabrication and manufacturing processes. Maker culture and crowdfunding have ushered in a new cottage industry of manufacturing, one that enables entrepreneurs to go direct to consumers. As a result, innovation is pouring out of garages, basements, bedrooms and makerspaces around the world. My favorite hardware innovation of the last year is a latecomer. Just last month, a startup named Kano launched a crowdfunding campaign for a $99 computer aimed at teaching kids […]
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Eyes Wide Shut
French director Alain Guiraudie’s first feature, the 2003 coming-of-age film No Rest for the Brave, opens in a nondescript bar in a sleepy town where Basile, the agitated protagonist, is recounting a strange dream to his friend Igor. The disturbed young man believes the dream carries a fatal warning: if he falls asleep again, he will die. What follows is a Buñuelian picaresque that is shot in the style of social realism but structured as a series of narrative ruptures creating the filmic equivalent of the surrealist game of exquisite corpse. Guiraudie has, over the past decade, continued to probe […]
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Down in the Valley
Trespassing tire tracks. Binoculars slightly out of place. Gun gone missing. Multiple clues confirming Mike Rust’s worst fears — someone had violated his home, a sanctuary nestled on 80 acres of wild land deep in south central Colorado’s remote San Luis Valley. Suddenly, two shadows buzz along the horizon. One man sets off alone in hot pursuit. It is the last thing he will do?? That was March 31, 2009, the last time anyone heard from this beloved 56-year-old hall-of-fame mountain biker. Evidence found, including a blood-stained gun butt and vest, suggests that Rust caught the perpetrators, a violent confrontation […]
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Act Break: Director Denis Villeneuve Talks His “Jaw-Droppingly Weird” Enemy
In his newest film Enemy, French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve immediately springs on us an omnipotent sense of dread. The chiaroscuro-tinged opening — a dynamo dream sequence in a film that feels like one long, unending hallucination — takes us inside an invitation-only sex club, populated by hard-looking, well-dressed men, one of whom is Jake Gyllenhaal. What are they watching? Scantily clad women doing seemingly erotic things that involve tarantulas. Bear with me. Soon we meet a pregnant blonde (Sarah Gadon) who’s waiting at home for her husband. Is it Gyllenhaal whom she’s waiting for? The next time he’s glimpsed, he […]
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Set Smarts
Gadgets, now more than ever, are the enablers of DIY filmmaking. For the tech-savvy, even the most common of tools can play a pivotal role in elevating a project beyond its modest means. I’m not speaking solely of camera equipment and assorted gizmos, but rather the toolkit in your pocket: a smartphone. The following reports section highlights filmmaking-related apparatuses that are available with the click of a button to facilitate production. 1. MixBit (free) The brainchild of YouTube co-founders, MixBit allows you to record multiple clips as long as 16 seconds each and stitch them together for up to an […]
