Sundance
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Benson Lee on Returning to His Independent Roots with the Sundance Comedy, Seoul Searching
Korean-American filmmaker Benson Lee won the Jury Prize at Sundance with his Competition Drama, Miss Monday, in 1998. A decade later he returned with Planet B-Boy, a critically-acclaimed, commercially-successful doc about breakdancing crews competing in an international competition. Lee’s success with Planet B-Boy led to both a studio deal and a career setback. Battle of the Year, a Sony production based on B-Boy, was as critically derided as the doc was praised, and it was a commercial failure to boot. This year, Lee returned to the site of his Miss Monday success — the Sundance Film Festival — with an […]
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Quyen Tran on Shooting Frankie Shaw’s Sundance-Winning SMILF
Frankie Shaw’s short film SMILF won the Short Film Jury Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. It’s a funny and revealing comedy about a young mom struggling to connect to her old sexual self while being homebound caring for her young son. L.A.-based cinematographer Quyen Tran shot the film, and below she discusses shooting coverage with only one actor, working with one light and filming while nearly nine months pregnant. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? […]
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Cinematographers Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk on Shooting the Sundance-Winning Doc, Meru
Over a period of years, three climbers — Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin, and Renan Ozturk — make repeated efforts to scale a 21,000 foot peak in Northern India, Mount Meru. Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Meru is the chronicle of that quest, a story of not just mountain-climbing athleticism but also friendship and camaraderie. The winner of the U.S. Documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Meru, strikingly, was lensed by two of the film’s three climbers, with one of them suffering severe injuries on the climb — an accident that is part of the film’s story. Below, […]
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Cinematographer Catherine Lutes on Shooting the Pop-Up Porno Series
An unlikely combination of elements — the children’s pop-up book and X-rated adult relationship stories — collide in one of the more unusual series of shorts at this year’s Sundance Film Festival: Pop-Up Porno. Toronto-based director Stephen Dunn was inspired by friends’ tales of online dating, and he worked with various graphic designers to come up with actual book illustrations. The resulting three films premiered in Park City, where the books were also exhibited. Bringing the turning pages to life is cinematographer Catherine Lutes, who below talks about the Canon C300, realizing the film on a tiny budget and accenting […]
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Six Women Directors Discuss Filmmaking, Their Countries and Their Sundance Premieres
In and out of movie theaters, buses, cafes, after-parties, and the crowds of Main Street, the conversations at Sundance Film Festival are exclusively about movies. The fact that the cinematographer of the film you are trash-talking is probably standing behind you is negligible. There is an unrestrained and unforgiving buzz of reviews in Park City, Utah. It’s less that everyone is acting like a critic and more that everyone is just obsessed with talking about film. If you’ve been to theater camp, that’s the vibe. It’s not that I wasn’t excited to see movies and flaunt my personal ratings like […]
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“That’s a Wrap!” The 414s Director with a Sundance Post-Mortem
Well, that’s a wrap! The Sundance Film Festival came to a close this weekend, and my filmmaking partner, Chris James Thompson and I are already back with our families in Milwaukee. We attended three of the five scheduled screenings for our film, The 414s: The Original Teenage Hackers. The week was sometimes intense, sometimes boring and often enlightening. By our second day it became clear why people love the Sundance Film Festival; the film screening portion of the fest is pure cinema. The hot and sweaty pop-up theaters are always full as volunteers pack in human bodies like Tetris pieces, […]
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Cinematographer Martijn van Broekhuizen on Shooting Sundance Horror Drama, The Hallow
Among the positive qualities cited by Variety in their review of the Sundance-premiering horror film The Hallow was the cinematography of Marijn van Broekhuizen, with Geoff Berkshire writing that it “plays with shadow and light in eerie, evocative ways and beautifully embellishes the script’s fairy-tale quality.” Below, van Broekhuizen answers questions about being hired by director Corin Hardy, basing his lighting schemes around backlight and the challenges of night shooting. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Van […]
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Cinematographer Adam Hobbs on Shooting Sundance Competition Doc, Finders Keepers
Premiering this past week at the Sundance Film Festival was Finders Keepers, the tale of an eccentric Southern feud pitting two social outsiders against each other for the possession of a severed foot. Here, cinematographer Adam Hobbs discusses the challenges of mixed camera formats, long days and natural lighting, and choosing to shoot with prime lenses. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Hobbs: In 2010 I was working in commercial production, A close friend told me about […]
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Sundance 2015, Dispatch 5: The Chinese Mayor, Cartel Land and City of Gold
The vast world of Chinese independent documentaries was finally acknowledged by Sundance with the inclusion of Zhou Hao’s The Chinese Mayor. That’s not to bag on the festival for an anomalous oversight: this exciting and politically urgent strain of films has been happening for 15 years or so but not often acknowledged by U.S. festivals at large. This is a very good starting point. The mayor of Datong, Geng Yanbo, confesses that he’s happiest with communing with China’s past, so it makes sense that he plans to revitalize the country’s most polluted city by restoring its ancient wall, part of […]
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“Ideas Just Disappeared”: Cloro | Director Lamberto Sanfelice
What fear — whether it’s personal, or one related to the development, financing, production or distribution of your film — did you have to confront and conquer in the making of your movie? The day before the first day of shooting I went with part of the crew to the location were we would start shooting the following day. It was in a rather desolated area with just a few big old trees, which in normal circumstances I would find fascinating. But on that day as I was looking around all of a sudden I could find nothing interesting to shoot there. […]
