Sundance Institute has selected 12 projects for its 2013 January Screenwriters Lab, an immersive, five-day (January 11-16) writers’ workshop at the Sundance Resort in Utah. Participating independent screenwriters will have the opportunity to work intensely on their feature film scripts with the support of established writers including Marcos Bernstein, D.V. DeVincentis, Michael Goldenberg and Erin Cressida Wilson. The 2013 Lab is dedicated to the memory of Frank Pierson (1925-2012), a founding creative advisor of the Feature Film Program. Keri Putnam, Executive Director of Sundance Institute, said, “Across all Sundance Institute Labs, which include offerings for various forms of artistic expression, […]
“What does it mean to make a film about a marginalized community?” asks Wu Tsang via Skype from China as he discusses his non-fiction feature Wildness. “So often, the director becomes seen as a representative, an authority on ‘these people’ in the story. With Wildness I had to deal with a lot of stereotypes around trans people, people of color in general, queer communities and nightlife — subject matters that the mainstream has stereotyped views of — and these concerns went into the making of the film. I wanted to be really transparent about the process, and to find a […]
With his features Modern Love is Automatic and Vacation!, filmmaker Zach Clark has caught our eye at Filmmaker. In this interview with Lauren Wissot, he discusses his refreshing aesthetic, which looks towards the stylized melodramas of Douglas Sirk and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ’60s beach party flicks, and ’80s new-wave porn like Cafe Flesh. And, he does this on a tiny budgets. In Wissot’s interview he explains: Luckily, I have talented friends who have been willing to work for no money. I also like making movies in places that aren’t big hubs of film production, which keeps costs down, so a […]
One of Europe’s preeminent film directors for more than three decades, Margarethe von Trotta (Rosa Luxemburg, The Promise) was born in Berlin 1942 and relocated to Düsseldorf with her mother after the war. In Paris, where she moved after high school, Von Trotta immersed herself in film culture and became a major fixture of the New German Cinema, acting in early films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Gods of the Plague, Beware of a Holy Whore) and collaborating closely with her ex-husband Volker Schlöndorff, with whom she co-directed the 1975 political drama The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, before helming […]
Toronto, the IFP Filmmaker Conference hot on its heels, the New York Film Festival, and, for us, the close of our Fall issue — the season has begun. We’ve already begun work on the magazine, and I’m getting ready to go Toronto, where I’ll join Howard Feinstein and Livia Bloom contributing to the magazine and blog. Of course, the best part of any festival experience is the serendipitous discovery, the word-of-mouth gem you were tipped to or the film you randomly walked into that turned out to be great. I hope to be telling you about some of those over […]
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 classic to several Indian […]
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 […]
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 classic to several Indian […]
This piece by filmmaker Barbara Schock appeared in our Summer, 2005 issue. The phenomenal painter, teacher and film critic Manny Farber called his film class “A Hard Look at the Movies.” It was the first upper-division college class I took. I’d transferred from a small college in the Midwest to the University of California at San Diego, and I’d never seen a foreign film, unless you count the Sergio Leone westerns. We watched the following films in a 10-week period, and it turned the way I looked at movies upside down: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Max […]
In Summer, 2005, the filmmaker Barbara Schock wrote a spirited piece for Filmmaker about studying film with critic and artist Manny Farber, who died on Tuesday. Mirroring Farber’s rapid-fire thinking, Schock makes you feel like you’re in his classroom as she writes about the man, his syllabus, and his teaching style. We’ve posted it in our Web Exclusives. Here’s the intro: The phenomenal painter, teacher and film critic Manny Farber called his film class “A Hard Look at the Movies.” It was the first upper-division college class I took. I’d transferred from a small college in the Midwest to the […]