Sundance
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Five Questions for Directors Bryan Carberry & Clay Tweel of Finders Keepers
An eccentric Southern tale that feels like a Harry Crews-scripted edition of Storage Wars, Finders Keepers tells the story of two men battling — in courts of law and public opinion — over the ownership of a severed foot. The foot belonged once to John Wood, amputated following a small plane crash that also killed Wood’s father. When Wood failed to make payments to his storage unit, it became the property of local North Carolina huckster Shannon Whisnant, who parlays his contested ownership of the foot into a roadside tourist attraction. Directed by Bryan Carberry and Clay Tweel, collaborating for […]
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Sundance Announces Groundbreaking Transparency Project at #ArtistServices Workshop
Data — it’s the most coveted property in independent film. While studios base their greenlight decisions on finely-honed models derived from the financial performance of numerous other pictures, many independent filmmakers perilously based investor pitches and distribution decisions on anecdotes and hearsay. What used to be simple extrapolation (“If that film grossed X, it probably did Y on home video”) has become a near impossible exercise in the age of digital distribution, in which paltry box-office returns hide “the real numbers” — a dizzying matrix of VOD stats, download figures, Netflix license fees and more and more obscure sub-categories of […]
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Sundance 2015, Dispatch 3: The Wolfpack, Western and Dreamcatcher
I stopped taking notes after a while during The Wolfpack; I was feeling a bit too disturbed to keep at it and it seemed somewhat besides the point. Crystal Moselle’s first feature follows the Angulo brothers: six siblings, born to father Oscar, who for something like 15 years never left their LES apartment, save sporadic supervised summer walks. Oscar named them all Hare Krishna style — Govinda, Bhagavan, etc. — and amassed a collection of some 5,000 films, their sole meaningful connection to the outside world. They were homeschooled and lived in a state of fear — Oscar’s past/present (?) […]
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Five Questions for Welcome to Leith Directors Michael Beach Nichols & Christopher K. Walker
Documentary has a rich history of films by filmmakers who must honestly engage subjects with odious views. Directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher Walker stumbled across one such fellow in Craig Cobb, a white supremacist with a devious and possibly quite legal plan to produce a white power enclave in the American heartland. Premiering at Sundance in the Documentary Competition, their Welcome to Leith chronicles the story of the town of Leith against Cobb but also, implicitly, their own story of engaging their subject — who says he’s available for Skype interviews after the premiere. Welcome to Leith premieres Monday, […]
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At Sundance Producers Brunch, Mark and Jay Duplass Offer Ten Pieces of Advice for Making Movies Today
Keynote speakers at today’s Producers Brunch at the Sundance Film Festival, independent powerhouses Jay and Mark Duplass issued a passionate and witty call to all the producers in the jam-packed house: keep making small movies. At an event that saw their own producing partner, Stephanie Langhoff, receive the Sundance Institute Red Crown Producers Award, they told producers to learn from their own decision to stay invested in the independent sector after receiving a measure of larger Hollywood success. Along with Sundance Dramatic Competition entry The Bronze, which Langhoff produced, the Duplass Brothers have, as executive producers,two other productions at the […]
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“My First Feature Film Since My Children were Born”: How to Dance in Ohio | Director Alexandra Shiva
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? How to Dance in Ohio is my first feature film since my children were born, so I originally set out to make it in NYC where I live with my family. Then my research led me to Columbus, Ohio and to this incredible community and story that I could not possibly pass up telling. I would say that the largest sacrifice I made in the making of this film […]
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“You Can Make Films with No Money, No Support, No Talent”: Chorus | Director Francois Delisle
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? What’s the fear of not ending up with the film you really wanted to make compared with the fear of losing your freedom to express yourself? Chorus was made instinctively, with no constraints and with a great deal of freedom. Freedom that was built up and acquired over years, over many films and through good times and bad. I’ve often made mistakes, I’ve surrounded myself with the wrong people, […]
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Five Questions for Director Crystal Moselle of the Sundance Doc Competition Premiere, The Wolfpack
We all grow up with our own peculiar “kid logic,” a warped worldview shaped by the limits of our childhoods. We think our parents are normal. We think everyone is like us. But we know there are things beyond our own experience — countries we’ve never visited, people we’ve never met — and we build images of those places in our minds. Then, we grow up, and if we’re lucky, we get to go somewhere. We visit those countries, and meet those people. Gradually, the reality of new experience replaces the pictures we had painted with our imagination. We learn […]
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Sundance 2015, Dispatch 2: Tangerine, Z For Zachariah and Pervert Park
Sin-Dee (Kiki Kitana Rodriguez) sits on one side of a donut shop booth, her best friend Alexandra (Mya Taylor) on the other. The camera’s on the table, restricted to shot-countershot looking up, with large windows setting both in sharp urban relief against different halves of a large L.A. intersection. With rapid cutting back and forth reminiscent of the dashboard cams in Kiarostami’s 10, Tangerine‘s opening is both intimate and epic, and it’s exciting to see all this space so clearly laid out behind the two. There’s a micro story being established and simultaneously the introduction of a landscape to be explored: an instant […]
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Five Questions for Rick Alverson of Sundance NEXT Premiere, Entertainment
Let’s all be inspired by Rick Alverson and agree to ban the very concept of “sympathetic character” from our movie-viewing brain. We’re all fixated on this idea, that we have to “like” characters and “connect” to them. Instead, let’s just decide to be interested in watching what is put before us, and let’s let ourselves enjoy having our expectations for how we want to feel while we’re sitting in a movie theatre get subverted once in a while. Alverson — a musician as well as a filmmaker — has made three feature films before this, his latest, Entertainment. Each one […]
