Sundance Features
-
Jim Cummings’ Thunder Road Takes Sundance, Part Two
In part one of this video series, Jim Cummings and his team got ready to go to Sundance with their short. In this installment, they’re on the ground and feeling shaky. Actor PJ McCabe practices his networking skills in front of a mirror, there are arguments about who was supposed to get tickets to the premiere, and of course there are parties. Funny stuff.
-
Five Questions for Southside with You Writer/Director Richard Tanne
Intriguing for its logline alone, Southside with You raised considerable interest when it was announced as a Sundance selection. Telling the true story of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Robinson’s first date in Chicago in 1989, the film features the leader of the free world at a moment in time where things were perhaps not as high-stakes for him as they are now. Bonding over ice-cream and shared interests, that fateful date would prove to be a more important outing than the lovers could have initially realized. As the film prepared to make its world premiere, director Richard Tanne discussed the […]
-
Sundance Dispatch 4: Certain Women, Love & Friendship and Indignation
Even by Kelly Reichardt’s disciplined standards, Certain Women brings the rigor. Opening credits are laid over a overhead static shot of a train making its way from the frame’s upper right corner to the bottom left; not quite James Benning’s RR, but that gives some idea of Reichardt’s patience. The “certain women” of Montana have their stories told in three basically discrete segments (there are overlapping characters between each, but no greater cohesion as far as I could tell at first pass). Lawyer Laura (Laura Dern) represents an injured construction worker; unable to get the settlement he deserves, he takes a hostage for leverage. Laura’s sleeping with Ryan Lewis […]
-
What a Documentary DP Does: Kirsten Johnson on Cameraperson
Documentary DP Kirsten Johnson is probably best known for her work with Laura Poitras (The Oath, Citizenfour), but she’s been shooting for years. Out of her experience comes Cameraperson, an essay film assembled from mostly unused footage shot for many projects. Each segment is labeled by place rather than the project it came from. In eschewing voiceover, the chain of argumentation can be a little heavy-handed for my taste — i.e., cutting from someone talking about death to someone giving birth in a hospital — but the overall effect is constantly surprising and stimulating. The film begins by reminding us that even the […]
-
Structuring Uncle Howard in Production and Post using William Burroughs’s The Western Lands and Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru
One of the earliest challenges in making Uncle Howard was figuring out how to tell a story around a main character who is essentially absent. My uncle, Howard Brookner, was a fairly obscure director, whose work went missing to varying degrees, and who had died some 25 years ago. Yet, to me and others around him, he left a very strong memory and spirit. How to show this? For inspiration, my producer, Paula Vaccaro, and I turned to Howard’s friend and former film subject, William S. Burroughs (Burroughs: The Movie, 1983), whose book, The Western Lands, was the last he wrote before dedicating himself […]
-
Sundance Dispatch 3: Kate Plays Christine, Christine 7 The Land of the Enlightened
Sarasota TV journalist Christine Chubbuck shot herself live on-air in 1974 and died 14 hours later. The suicide footage exists on one two-inch tape, which is inaccessibly locked up in the vault of the former president of the Florida station (now part of ABC) Chubbuck worked at, so there are shades of Grizzly Man in Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine. The premise is that Kate Lyn Sheil’s preparing to play Chubbuck in a movie that will conclude with a recreation of the suicide, and the climactic question is whether the actress can go through with it. Scenes from this ostensible biopic (a fiction Greene uses to instigate the entire film; […]
-
5 Questions for Dark Night Director Tim Sutton
After essaying lost teenagers in his poetic debut picture, Pavilion, and a creatively-blocked soul singer in his compelling follow-up, Memphis, New York-based independent filmmaker Tim Sutton ventures into considerably darker terrain with Dark Night, which premiered yesterday at Sundance in its NEXT section. Loosely based on the Aurora theater shootings of 2012, in which a gunman killed 12 and wounded 70 moviegoers attending a screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, Dark Night depicts the moments around such an event, using suspense and foreshadowing to meditate on American violence and spectatorship. Below, Sutton answers five questions about his intention […]
-
Five Questions with The Birth of a Nation Director Nate Parker
For his debut as a feature film writer and director, Nate Parker has told the story of a personal hero: Nat Turner. The Birth of a Nation is also the first major fiction film about Turner, the leader of an infamous 1831 slave rebellion. Parker himself stars as Turner, having appeared in more than 20 films to date, including Red Hook Summer, The Great Debaters and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. Below, Parker speaks with Filmmaker about his film’s eye-catching title, Turner’s legacy and what he hopes modern audiences take away from this story. The Birth of a Nation premieres in the U.S Dramatic Competition at […]
-
Sundance Dispatch 2: Manchester by the Sea, Lo and Behold and All These Sleepless Nights
The hype machine has gone well into overdrive on Manchester by the Sea, to the point that many not here but monitoring Twitter are already properly irritable/skeptical. I’ll keep it brief: now past the tribulations of Margaret‘s legal travails, attenuated release and masterpiece status (it’s true!), Kenneth Lonergan has made a very, very strong film. Margaret spun out the complications of a moment’s carelessness and tragedy in multiple directions — legally, personally, professionally — from a single starting point. Manchester processes twin strands of tragedy, both immediate and long-term. Immediate: surly drunk Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) is yanked out of his Boston handyman routine by his brother’s sudden […]
-
Street Magic, Bad Robot and Crime: J.D. Dillard Talks His Sundance Debut, Sleight
Premiering in Sundance’s NEXT section is, Sleight, the debut feature of Los Angeles-based screenwriter and music video director J.D. Dillard. A street-wise crime caper about a bustling magician who moves from sleight-of-hand card magic to drug dealing on the boulevards of L.A., Sleight combines a raft of interests, including hip hop and sci-fi, from its young director and his writing partner Alex Theurer. The two have been kicking around the Los Angeles script development scene for several year, with Dillard working at production outfits like Bad Robot while keeping up with his passion for sleight-of-hand, which began as a teenager […]
