In the 1910s, movie moguls built the major Hollywood studios to control every aspect of film production. Rather than succumbing to unpredictable weather and transporting an army of workers across the globe, they built massive sets, stages and large backlot settings like Western streets and jungles. Hundreds of employees churned out movies with near assembly-line efficiency. These studios created strong barriers to entry for independent filmmakers, who made do with inferior rental studio lots. However, a dramatic location, creatively captured, could rival any Hollywood construction. On location, low-budget and independent filmmakers sought production value on the cheap. Westerns proved to […]
In 2010, Eric Austin made a bold choice. The Texas-based father of three quit his day job as a sales rep to focus solely on his side hustle, flying unmanned aircraft systems (UAS)—commonly known as drones. He had a three-month job lined up on a Disney-produced show in Hawaii piloting his single-rotor helicopter adorned with a Canon 7D. In those few months, he would earn more than in a year at his old job. But before Austin ever spun his blades, he was grounded. Inundated by aerial permit requests and unable to get definitive guidance from the Federal Aviation Administration […]
There are conflicting opinions regarding the budget cutoff for the category commonly referred to as “microbudget filmmaking.” Sometimes referred to as “no-budget,” “ultra-low-budget” or “nano-budget,” the term refers to an increasingly popular level of filmmaking below “low-budget” that emerging filmmakers as well as, in some cases, veterans engage in. When Venice’s Biennale College Cinema was started eight years ago, the budgets of €150,000 (about $162,000) awarded to each filmmaker seemed low. And indeed, while makers of films—ambitious pictures such as The Fits, H., Memphis and This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection—produced through that program struggled with the budget […]
“We have a solution to Hollywood’s ‘development hell’ which I am pleased to share with everyone.” This was how Dallas Sonnier, or at least his marketing department, announced the introduction of “the original audiostate,” the neologism Cinestate (Sonnier’s Dallas-based indie production company) coined to avoid the dread word “podcast.” Through marrying the “grandiosity of Hollywood films with the intimacy of audio,” the audiostate is meant to transform that most beloved of objects, the unproduced screenplay, into multi-platform pitchable content. Since Sonnier’s 2017 statement, only one audiostate has been produced: the same year’s The Narrow Caves, a story of eldritch horror, […]
The lineup is out for this year’s True/False Film Fest, running March 5 to 9. Find the full list below (including this year’s Neither/Nor retrospective sidebar, focusing on Missouri born and raised filmmakers, and a retrospective for True Vision honorees Bill and Turner Ross) along with links to trailers and some previous coverage of a few directors from our end. All descriptions from the festival. 45365 Dir. Bill & Turner Ross; 2009; 94 min. An ode to the colors and characters of small-town Americana, True Vision honorees Bill and Turner Ross’ debut is a sweeping portrait of their birthplace, Sidney, […]
At a festival as big as the International Film Festival Rotterdam, early screenings are essentially shots in the dark. There is no buzz yet, and most films have little written about them or are by filmmakers whose previous works have received relatively little exposure. I opted on the second day to give Luis López Carrasco’s El Año del Descubrimiento a shot partly because I had heard of his previous feature, El Futuro, but mostly because its 200-minute runtime helped it to stand out amid a slate of films I knew next to nothing about. From the very beginning, its use […]
On August 10, 2017, journalist Kim Wall accompanied Peter Madsen on his homemade submarine in order to report a story about the charismatic inventor—but she never emerged to write the story, as Madsen murdered her while the submarine was submerged in the waters outside of Copenhagen. The murder shocked the global community, prompting discussions about protections for journalists and the underlying cruelty of Madsen. Director Emma Sullivan had actually began documenting Madsen the year before he murdered Wall, eventually culminating into the documentary Into the Deep about the culture surrounding Madsen and what led to Wall’s murder. Editor Joe Beshenkovsky […]
For the last several years, the very first film I’ve seen in Park City has been among the festival’s best, launching my Sundance with a bang. The lucky title this year is Dick Johnson is Dead, a documentary—whatever that label means in this case—directed and photographed by Dick’s daughter, cinematographer Kirsten Johnson (Cameraperson), whose cinematic imagination couldn’t be more alive and kicking. The imminent death, or what’s worse, the gradual ravaging by Alzheimer’s, of an aging parent is a personal and emotional minefield few are ever equipped to traverse, no less understand, when the time comes. Alzheimer’s is also a […]
Based off of the book written by 13-year-old Naoki Higashida, Jerry Rothwell’s The Reason I Jump aims to translate the experiences of non-verbal autistic people in a way that is honest and multifaceted. Choosing not to simply concede to the opinions of parents and specialists, the documentary aims to break the assumption that divergent ways of experiencing the world are not abnormal, and communication can transcend language and actions. Editor David Charap speaks to the unique experience of having a nonverbal group of individuals explain the intricacies of their everyday lives to an audience through imagery and imagination. Filmmaker: How […]
Whether capturing or creating a world, the objects onscreen tell as much of a story as the people within it. Whether sourced or accidental, insert shot or background detail, what prop or piece of set decoration do you find particularly integral to your film? What story does it tell? Untitled Pizza Movie is a six-part series that revolves around objects. On many levels, this is a work about people and their things, an archive of images that I built, rather than one which pre-existed. I’m interested in how objects hold history and stories and remember people. I cobbled together over […]