Sundance
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“INCENDIES” | co-writer-director, Denis Villeneuve
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 21, 2:15 pm — Prospector Square Theatre] Each film experience brings is own demon. Time was something I couldn’t afford on Incendies. I had the strong impression to destroy the script each shooting day. I was so angry one morning that I began to sabotage a sequence. Suddenly, on that precise moment, I realized, astonished, that I was making a film about how to stop anger’s cycles while being angry like a grizzly. I remember then, laughing a lot about myself, alone, on the Abu Zaytoun Hills, finding myself so childish. And I reshot the sequence. About filmmaking, […]
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“TERRI” DIRECTOR AZAZEL JACOBS
Azazel Jacobs’ profile has grown steadily since he made his striking, black-and-white debut feature, Nobody Needs to Know, in 2003. He followed it in 2005 with the delightfully quirky and inventive The GoodTimesKid, a film which found a devoted audience on the film festival circuit and was eventually released theatrically in 2007. Jacobs’ third feature, Momma’s Man, a poignant tale of adult regression into childhood, had its world premiere at Sundance. It became one of the hits of the 2008 festival, and played in theaters later that year to universal acclaim. Jacobs, the son of experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, grew […]
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“HOT COFFEE” DIRECTOR SUSAN SALADOFF
No political season is complete without politicians taking up the case of tort reform. Greedy litigants are blamed for everything from clogging up our justice system to running up our medical bills as tort reform advocates take advantage of the fact that everyone hates a lawyer until they need one. With so much misinformation out there, what’s a lawyer to do? Well, if you’re Susan Saladoff, longtime lawyer, first-time filmmaker, you pick up a camera. Using the infamous “McDonald’s coffee case” as her prime example, her debut feature, Hot Coffee, investigates how and why corporations spend millions of dollars drumming […]
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“THE GUARD” | writer-director, John Michael McDonagh
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, Jan. 20, 6:30 pm — Egyptian Theatre] The biggest surprise for me occurred during preproduction. There was a scene in the screenplay where the three villains rendezvous at an amusement park and discuss the day’s events while waiting to ride on a rollercoaster. The scene with the screwball nature of the film was set in an actual amusement park in a seaside town in County Galway, Ireland, our location for the shoot. However little did I know that when the rollercoaster is out of use (during the non-summer months) it is packed up and shipped off to […]
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“PROJECT NIM” | director, James Marsh
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, Jan. 20, 9:30 pm — Egyptian Theatre] When you embark on any historical documentary or film about events that have already run their course, the biggest prize you’re after is visual images and archive [materials] showing elements of your story. On Project Nim, which is the life story of a chimpanzee who was brought up like a human child, we knew from various contributors that there was going to be sufficient archive of the chimp to embark on the film but we didn’t know the extent of it. Often the biggest surprise on a film project is […]
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SUNDANCE PREVIEW: INTERVIEW WITH SENIOR PROGRAMMER DAVID COURIER
For the independent film industry, January isn’t just the start of a New Year, it’s also exam season. At this very moment, documentary filmmakers around the world are in edit rooms deep into the night, hoping to ace the Sundance finals. The reward for those late night cram sessions is certainly worth it: the most gifted alumni of previous festival’s have been awarded the best graduation gift of all — a career as a working filmmaker. To find out more about this year’s class, I spoke to David Courier, Senior Film Programmer at the Sundance Institute. Filmmaker: I noticed a lot […]
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“PARIAH” | writer-director, Dee Rees
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, Jan. 20, 9:30 pm — Eccles Theatre] The biggest surprise associated with making Pariah came after watching the first rough cut when we discovered that this was not a “black lesbian” movie. We had fought this BRUTAL uphill battle in funding the film with financiers and investors balking at the story because it was “too small and specific” (which is code for “too black and too gay”). After we screened the first cut, one of our early advisors went so far as to describe it as “commercial.” We didn’t know whether to slap them or celebrate. After […]
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CULTURE HACKER: A STORYTELLING PANDEMIC
Originally printed in our Winter 2011 issue, grab a free issue of Filmmaker at Sundance to be a part of Pandemic 1.o. When the phone rings I’m feeling a bit nervous. The voice on the other end is slow and calculated. “We can do 30,000 but it will take 10 weeks. In order to get it in time for Sundance we need to order 500,000 and ship from China… We’re going to have to find another way.” Not quite your normal Sundance prep conversation, especially when the items in question are bottles of water. But these are not regular bottles […]
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Sundance 2011 Competition Lineup Announced
The Sundance Institute announced today the competition films for its 2011 edition of the Sundance Film Festival. At first glance, it looks like an exciting list with quite a few filmmakers we follow here at the magazine premiering their work, including Rashaad Ernesto Green’s Gun Hill Road, Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, Andrew Okpeaha MacLean’s On the Ice, Dee Rees’ Pariah, Azazel Jacobs’ Terri and Marshall Curry’s If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front to name just a few. In the release sent out today, festival director John Cooper commented, ““The Festival is a challenge […]
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“THE RED CHAPEL”‘S MADS BRUGGER | By Alicia Van Couvering
When Danish Zentropa director Mads Brugger decided to take himself and two Korean-Danish comedians to North Korea under the guise of a fake comedy project, he employed what he thought might be the magic word for repressive regimes seeking international image burnishing: “cultural exchange.” The film opens with a shot of Brugger, lying on a hotel bed, calmly reading Kim Jong-Il’s official Instruction Manual for Film Directing. The secret police who watched this footage every night apparently had no objection. What they somehow did not expect or anticipate was that Brugger would one day turn this footage into a feature […]
