I normally try to post my links-fests on Sundays, but here’s a one-day late compendium of articles in my Instapaper. If you read our newsletter, you’ll have seen my link to novelist Stacy D’Erasmo’s essay on the writer’s life, “The Long Haul,” over at The Rumpus. For any artist struggling to figure out not how to make work, but how to live a life that involves the perpetual making of work, including films, this is an essential read. In its clarity and wisdom I found it inspiring. An excerpt: Over the long haul, whether you ever intended to or not, […]
Leading up to our 18th birthday, I’ll be revisiting on the blog one issue of Filmmaker a day. Today’s is Summer, 1993. Summer, 1993 is another issue whose content didn’t make it over to WordPress. Our cover story was Alison Maclean’s Crush. Sande Zeig interviewed Sally Potter about her Orlando, which was just reissued by Sony Pictures Classics. John Woo, John Greyson, and Ross McElwee were all in the book along with an article tracking the development status of several beloved cult novels’ film adaptations. We also ran a great how-to by Strand Releasing’s Marcus Hu on guerilla marketing your […]
Susan Youssef SUSAN YOUSSEF. At the IFP Narrative Lab, a mentor said of Susan Youssef’s first feature, Habibi Rasak Kharban (literally, “Darling, Something’s Wrong with Your Head”): “It’s a classic story, like Romeo and Juliet.” True, but the roots of Youssef’s story go back far further. The film is an adaptation of the 12th-century Sufi parable Majnun Layla, which was itself based on a 7th-century Arabic story. Over the years, the tragic tale of undying love between a woman and the wandering poet her family forbids her to marry has formed the basis for countless works of art, from Shakespeare’s […]
Jason Byrne When we caught up with filmmaker Jason Byrne to include him in this year’s “25,” it was via e-mail from Tanzania. At the sa me time Byrne’s hypnotic experimental documentary Scrap Vessel winds its way along the festival circuit, he is working as an audio/visual archivist for the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. “Living in East Africa for the last two years has been a deeply rich experience, and this job has been fascinating but psychologically difficult at times, especially when listening to the many graphically explained testimonies from witnesses to the genocide,” he writes. Byrne has […]
Brent Stewart When you live next to Harmony Korine some unconventional ideas can creep into your head. So when Brent Stewart was thinking about making a chamber-piece drama on 35mm and shooting the whole thing with little to no camera movement he went to his famous filmmaking neighbor for some advice. “I knew it would be a challenge to pull off because even Harmony said to me, ‘Man, that’s risky.’” But, The Colonel’s Bride, Stewart’s debut feature, is an intimate look at loneliness, old age and death with striking photography, a haunting score and a stirring lead performance that shouldn’t […]
Zac Stuart-Pontier If you go to the website of Zac Stuart-Pontier (zac-edits.com), your browser heading will display the following: “Zac edits really, really, really well.” This cheeky claim was earned in early 2010 when the three feature documentaries that Zac had been working on since he graduated NYU in 2006 premiered within a month of each other: Jody Lee Lipes and Henry Joost’s NY Export: Opus Jazz, which premiered on PBS and took to the festival circuit with gusto in March, via SXSW; James Rasin’s biographical doc Beautiful Darling,about the Warhol superstar Candy Darling and the loves she left behind, […]
By Jamie Stuart
Premiering below is the first of a seven-part series entitled “New Breed Los Angeles” presented by Filmmaker and the Workbook Project. Produced and directed by SABI Pictures, the series was shot at the Los Angeles Film Festival and features festival participants talking about their creative process. From the filmmakers: For the community of working-class filmmakers at New Breed a constantly evolving creative process of telling our stories is the one thing we can count on in these changing times. Embarking on journeys through deeper methods of collaboration & engaging with fans across various platforms is certainly exciting – but one […]
When I was sent a link to this video today I was initially sure it was a bad-taste put-on. It’s not. “I Will Survive: Dancing Auschwitz” is apparently exactly what it purports to be: a Holocaust survivor and his family dancing at several concentration camps to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive.” Reaction to the clip has been mixed. Buzzfeed calls it “the most heartwarming Holocaust memorial ever displayed.” At Haaretz, the filmmaker defends her clip. From their piece: Australian Jewish artist Jane Korman filmed her three children and her father, 89-year-old Holocaust survivor Adolk, in the video clip “I Will […]
Tuesday on the blog we asked what films inspired young viewers (in their 20s or below) to identify with the independent film movement. Here are responses from filmmaker Lena Dunham (Tiny Furniture). I was raised on independent film — spent hours every afternoon in Tower Video and Kim’s. My parents always encouraged me to rent more obscure titles and Disney seemed like an exotic treat. I had a John Waters-themed 3rd grade birthday party that many children left crying (I think the choice to show Pink Flamingos was a flawed one. the blame falls to my mom…) In terms of […]