70 Results for “Poland Progress”
-
Trailer Watch: Alex Lehmann’s Acidman
Watch the trailer for Acidman, Alex Lehmann‘s most recent directorial effort. Co-written by Lehmann and Chris Dowling, the film was produced in part by Liz Cardenas, who won the 2022 Film Independent Spirit Award for producing the Duplass Brothers’ 7 Days. This year, she was nominated for the Independent Spirit Producers Award. The film stars Dianna Agron as Maggie, a woman who decides to track down her long-estranged father Lloyd (Thomas Hayden Church), a recluse who’s been given the nickname “Acidman” by locals. Part of their reunion entails attempting to make contact with UFOs, a search that reveals difficult truths about Lloyd’s […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 21, 2023 -
“… A Means of Creating a Fulfilling Life, Rather Than Just About Creating a Film”: Morrisa Maltz on Her Lily Gladstone-Starring The Unknown Country
This interview with the director of the recommended The Unknown Country was originally posted during the 2022 SXSW Film Festival and is being reposted today as the film opens in New York, Los Angeles and other markets via Music Box Films. — Editor From the plains of the Dakotas to the Mexican-American border, landscape — seen through rain-streaked windshields at night, from overhead drone shots, and from the point-of-view of a single woman moving across a country that’s both reassuring and suddenly alien — is both subject and setting in The Unknown Country, the debut dramatic feature from artist and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 27, 2022 -
Truly Micro: Pete Ohs and Tzvi Friedman on Their Ultra-Low-Budget Features, Jethica and Man
While most producers these days are worried about the latest CPI number—that’s the Cinematic Price Index—one group of filmmakers is, somewhat paradoxically, not: those working on the lower end of the microbudget, or “no-budget,” continuum, producing finished features for the very low five figures. For them, production is retrofitted from whatever money can be raised, and if the price of gas goes up, well, the shoot just has to make do with less in another area. Among such filmmakers, there’s perhaps no one whose model is as stripped-down as Pete Ohs, who recently premiered his latest work, the well-received Jethica, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 14, 2022 -
Tribeca Critic’s Notebook: My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, Roaring ’20s, Italian Studies
Blood’s thicker than the mud in the family affair that is My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To, a contemporary vampire tale utterly stripped of the genre’s romance. In place of mythic hoohah, writer-director Jonathan Cuartas focuses on the grim, quotidian details of day-to-day caregiving for an extremely pale invalid named Thomas (Owen Campbell), a frail wisp of a young man who is wholly dependent on older siblings Dwight (Patrick Fugit) and Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram) for survival, sheltered inside a drab house on the forgotten edge of an anonymous city, its every window blanketed from fatal sunlight. […]
by Steve Dollar on Jun 23, 2021 -
The Feeling of a “Doomed, Endless Scroll on Your Phone”: Marnie Ellen Hertzler on Crestone
Deep in the desert of Crestone, Colorado live a group of Soundcloud rappers who live carefree off the land, growing marijuana, recording music, and posting goofy videos to Instagram? Crestone, Marnie Ellen Hertzler’s debut feature, journeys deep into the isolated, sandy abyss, placing her camera amongst an eccentric group of lost boys who have no use for the outside world, even as it steadily burns around them. If influential TikTokers can erect a California-based Hype House to stock up on “content creators,” Crestone is as appropriate a place as any to discover where these wild things are. Hertzler, a 25 […]
by Erik Luers on Feb 17, 2021 -
“What Does It Mean When We’re Working in 360?”: Kornél Mundruczó and Kata Wéber on Pieces of a Woman
While the arrival of a newborn child can strengthen a couple’s relationship, the loss of one can accentuate fissures that were already there. Hungarian filmmaker Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman is an emotionally high-pitched study of the PTSD that results from a home birth gone fatally wrong. Based on a stage play by Mundruczó’s partner, Kata Wéber, this film adaptation moves the action to Boston and casts as its two leads Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf. Following its world premiere at last fall’s Venice International Film Festival (where Kirby was awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actress), press coverage for […]
by Erik Luers on Jan 5, 2021 -
Slamdance Announces 132 Features, Shorts and Episodics; Fest Passes Free Until December 31
The Slamdance Film Festival announced today the 132 features, shorts and episodic programs that will comprise its hybrid 2021 edition. Running February 12-25, the festival is billing the program “its most accessible festival ever,” and with good reason. All films, Q&A’s and panels will be available on Slamdance.com, AppleTV, Roku, Firestick and YouTube; “early adopter” passes will be free until December 31; and regular passes are only $10. Additionally, there’s a new section, Unstoppable, showcasing creators with disabilities. The festival’s live component will consist of a two-night drive-in presentation in Joshua Tree open to the public on February 13th and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 30, 2020 -
Joseph Sackett
Writer/director Joseph Sackett had won some free film stock at a film festival and decided to “write something short and simple.” In a day, he wrote a draft of a story about a young boy who falls in love with his babysitter—and then dreams that he’s actually coursing through her veins, inhabiting her lungs. Shot by Jomo Fray two-and-a-half weeks later, and starring Colby Minifie and Tre Ryder, the short, I Was in Your Blood, elegantly moves from a tender series of stolen moments as the boy crushes on his babysitter to the trippy animated finale of his dream. “I […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 19, 2020 -
Outside of the “Business-Oriented U.S.,” A Showcase for U.S. Independent Films: the 2019 American Film Festival in Wroclaw
Cinephiles looking to cook up a zesty decade recap of the best in American indie film could have taken a Polish holiday this fall and landed in the eastern European cultural capital of Wroclaw for the 10th annual American Film Festival. The intensive marathon nods to red-white-and-blue archetypes in branding, which makes festival avatars of such staples of American mythology as motorcycle cops, 18-wheelers, Afro-sporting disco queens, football running backs, astronauts and desperadoes. Its mission, however, is at once more incisive and expansive than all that apple-pie iconography, distilling highlights and discoveries from the year’s major U.S. film gatherings, sprinkled […]
by Steve Dollar on Dec 30, 2019 -
“If You Can Do a Scene in One or Two Shots, What’s Better than That?”: DP Conor Murphy on Shooting Mickey and the Bear
Director of photography Conor Murphy flew directly from Kazakhstan, where he was finishing a project, to Anaconda, Montana, the location for Mickey and the Bear, currently in release from Utopia. He had four weeks prep with writer and director Annabelle Attanasio before shooting her debut feature. Based on Attanasio’s research into the residents of Anaconda, a mining town fallen on hard times, Mickey and the Bear follows high school senior Mickey Peck (played by newcomer Camila Morrone) as she tries to figure out her future. Caring for her father Hank (James Badge Dale), an armed forces veteran suffering from drug dependency, could […]
by Daniel Eagan on Dec 8, 2019
