Filmmaker

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Summer 2020

The Past in the Present: Garrett Bradley on Time, Her Documentary about Activism and the Carceral State

Filmmaker‘s Summer 2020 cover story, Ashley Clark’s interview with Time director Garrett Bradley is being published online today for the first time to mark the film’s New York premiere this coming Sunday (with virtual screenings continuing until September 25th) at the New York Film Festival. For over half a decade, New York-born artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley has been steadily building an impressively diverse yet tonally and stylistically harmonious CV. Bradley’s work has encompassed film, television and the gallery space; short, longform and multi-channel ventures; and ambitious explorations of the porous boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. It has often focused […]

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Features

The Pandemic Diaries: Filmmakers on Art, Life, Filmmaking and Politics in the Age of Coronavirus

In April, as we began to put together the Summer, 2020 issue of Filmmaker, we asked directors, cinematographers, editors and other film workers to send us their thoughts on the quarantine and their own creative lives. The responses printed here were collected from April through mid-June — personal statements that speak variously to individual filmmaking practices, films halted mid-production, politics, art and life. “At Present, Many of Us are Living in the Conditions of My Speculative Fiction…”: Alison Nguyen on Her Isolated, Computer-Simulated Woman, “Andra8” “… Every Night I Dream That I am Shooting a Film”: DP Benoit Delhomme on Life […]

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  • Risk Aware Filmmaking: Devising New Documentary Security Protocols for David France’s Welcome to Chechnya

    Despite its ironically inviting title, Welcome to Chechnya, a new documentary by director David France, depicts a harrowing tale of escape. The film, which is being released by HBO on June 30, follows a group of Russian activists working to rescue LGBTQ people from a vicious anti-gay government campaign in Chechnya. Beginning in 2017, Chechen authorities detained, tortured and, in some cases, forcibly disappeared more than 100 (likely many more) members of the gay community, according to reports by journalists and human rights groups. Paced like a spy thriller, the documentary captures the Chechens’ perilous journey, aided by the Russian […]

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  • Plan of Action: BIPOC Documentary Professionals Respond to the Pandemic and Protest Movement

    As stay-at-home orders are lifted across the world and productions begin to resume, documentary filmmakers and organizations are assessing how to “reopen” their own practices amid urgent ethical and safety considerations. They do this as COVID-19’s first wave continues to make its way across the United States, and protests around Black Lives Matter, DACA and other causes fight to dismantle our society’s structural racism and inequity. Among these filmmakers are members of Brown Girls Doc Mafia, an organization formed in 2015 that advocates for women and nonbinary professionals of color in the nonfiction space. Below, directors, producers, crew members and […]

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  • Let the Future Tell the Truth: Tesla Writer/Director Michael Almereyda and Kelly Reichardt in Conversation

    In Michael Almereyda’s pre-Katrina New Orleans–shot Happy Here and Now, David Arquette’s termite control specialist is preparing to shoot a film about Nikola Tesla in his off-hours. In a delirious rant, Arquette’s character muses about the Serbian-American scientist’s quest to slow the speed of light—enough so that you could go out for a coffee and return in time to see a beam complete its journey from one end of your apartment to another. In the climax of Happy Here and Now, one of Tesla’s signature inventions, the Tesla coil, is responsible for Arquette’s film-within-a-film experiencing the worst kind of production […]

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Other articles

  • Lights Bouncing Off the Ceiling

    COVID has made it so that new films, for the time being, can only be released via streaming platforms, not in movie theaters. We all know this is not optimal, but it’s the way it has to be for now. For most film critics, seeing films before they open is the main part of the job. These days, trying to see new movies before they come out has gotten weird. Not only do I not want to write about films I can only see on my laptop, I don’t want to watch movies on my laptop at all. A TV […]

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  • Shadowplay: The Artistic Benefits and Technical Challenges of Ozark‘s HDR Workflow

    Ozark is a “dark” show in every meaning of the word. The story of a criminal Missouri clan laundering Mexican cartel money through their riverboat casino is literally, metaphorically and photographically bleak. “Ozark is about what happens in the shadows of our society, in the underbelly, and the fear and anxiety that permeates that environment,” said cinematographer Armando Salas, ASC. “Everyone can relate to that feeling on some level—the feeling in the pit of your stomach that comes with knowing you’re doing something wrong. We try to embed that feeling in the look of the show.” Sunlight rarely reaches the […]

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  • Can You Finance an Independent Film During a Pandemic?

    In the middle of the global pandemic and one of the worst economic downturns in a century, Maven Pictures’ Celine Rattray, a producer of Driveways, The Kindergarten Teacher and American Honey, had several projects interrupted. But in early April, a timely new project—in which the crew and cast could work remotely from their own homes—was suddenly greenlit. She spoke to a private equity investor who she believed would be a good fit for the film, budgeted at six figures, and the financier agreed to fully fund it during their phone call. “The deal closed in a couple days,” says Rattray. […]

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  • The Beautiful Stubborn Loneliness of the Filmmaker-Shooter

    Folks who go to artist residencies fall into one of three categories. There are the artists for whom the time and space is more an experiential tool (we’re looking at you, social practitioners), those who strike a healthy balance between socializing and accomplishing an elevated amount of creative work, and those who disappear into an antisocial work bunker, popping up only for communal feedings, knowing upon exiting into the real world they’ll be back in the trenches of freelance gigs, copyediting, teaching work and the reply-all emails that accompany them. I fall into the latter category. Not long ago, I […]

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  • Survival in Crisis

    The challenges faced by a global film industry attempting to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic are often described, like so many things in this new reality, as “unprecedented.” Filmmakers must find approaches to working under conditions that can feel insurmountable—restricted movement, the digitization of film festivals and filmmaking communities and stunted distribution channels, among others. Strategies for staying productive, connected and solvent in a time of isolation and uncertainty are newly forming. But for a Chinese independent filmmaker like Zeng Jinyan, who works outside state systems of censorship and distribution, filmmaking under adverse circumstances is nothing new. The producer of […]

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  • Quarantines and Future Dreams

    Contact—yes, the 1997 Robert Zemeckis blockbuster—isn’t about a pandemic. It’s not celebrating an anniversary year or set for rerelease, nor is it a stone classic like Alien. But this moment of quarantines and uncertainty makes for an excellent time to revisit it. What feels rare about the movie is its depiction of solitude rather than loneliness. I suppose this is true of many astronauts on the screen, but this one is unique because Ellie Arroway—the main character—experiences solitude continuously; it is more than just her journey in the third act. Actor Jodie Foster is routinely alone in the film, in […]

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  • “The Starting Point is Authenticity… Would This Happen in Real Life?”: The Sophisticated Location Work of HBO’s Succession

    A show like HBO’s Succession risks being either tone-deaf or ineffectual, especially at a moment of heightened sensitivity toward income inequality and billionaires’ amoral business practices. Armstrong’s background in unsparing British cringe/political comedy, namely acclaimed sitcoms Peep Show and The Thick of It, helped him adopt an intimately satirical approach to the story of the dysfunctional Roy family, nouveau riche owners of the fictional media/hospitality empire Waystar Royco (a la the Murdochs and News Corp or the Redstones and ViacomCBS). Armstrong filters Shakespearean and Grecian tragedy into the series’ premise—patriarch Logan Roy (Brian Cox) fights to preserve his empire from the […]

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