I first heard the term “southern circuit” while talking to former New York Times film critic, The Treatment radio host and venerated international playboy Elvis Mitchell. Over lunch in Krakow several years ago, he described the series of spring and fall film festivals throughout the American south. After a relatively quiet summer, come late August a festival seems to unfurl almost every week somewhere below the Mason-Dixon line, starting with the Sidewalk Moving Pictures Festival in Birmingham, Alabama. While high-profile southern fests such as SXSW, Atlanta, Oxford, Little Rock and Nashville take place during the spring, an even larger share […]
From Cinelicious Pics comes this trailer for Adam Rifkin’s Giuseppe Makes a Movie, a portrait of the Ventura, CA-based no-budget cult filmmaker Guiseppe Andrews. Rifkin has known Andrews for 15 years, back from the days of Detroit Rock City, Said Rifkin to Filmmaker‘s Lauren Wissot, “This shy and respectful kid started cranking out no-budget films one after another, and every one of them was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I’m really hard to shock and these were crazy. Insane. But not a forced, ‘hipster trying to be weird for weird sake,’ kind of insane – these were genuine […]
“Kentucker Audley, the Richmond International Film Festival and A Checklist for Avoiding Bad Publicity,” by Lauren Wissot, an article based around contributing editor Wissot’s trip to the Richmond International Film Festival, drew the following response from Heather Waters, the festival’s founder and producer. Aside from editing out email signatures and footers, we are reprinting it in full. Dear Scott, When Lauren Wissot contacted us about covering the Richmond International Film Festival (RIFF) for your magazine, we were excited about the national press (“Kentucker Audley, the Richmond International Film Festival and A Checklist for Avoiding Bad Publicity,” published May 7). However, […]
Lauren Wissot’s report from Little Rock last year was titled “Kicking Ass in Clintonland,” and certainly when it comes to varied programming and festival fun, this year was no different. I may have lacked the requisite dexterousness to tackle the über-fresh crawfish, and have yet to unwrap the talking action figure of Bill Clinton in my gift bag, but my schedule was quickly filled with activities from partying on one of Little Rock’s scenic bridges to popping into a workshop on the applications of Google Glass and 3D printing in film. Under the helm of brothers Brent and Craig Renaud […]
Top L to R: Lauren Wissot, Michael Tully, Laura Blum; Bottom L to R: Mark Bell, Dusty Wright Part I. Five Film Reviewers on Screening Films Part II. Five Film Reviewers Advise Filmmakers In Baal – the BBC’s 1982 cinematic adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s 1918/1923 dramatic play – Ekart is broke and unable to pay his bar bill. In a grimy tavern, he explains: “If I had money to pay, it would undermine my sense of self.” Paying a bar bill can be a bitch, but living as a drunken-pauper doesn’t sound better. Unlike Ekart in Baal*, I doubt today’s bohemians would be […]
Top L to R: Michael Tully, Marshall Fine, Lauren Wissot; Bottom L to R: Mark Bell, Dusty Wright With prices dropping and technology increasing and audiences expanding, the indie community is whacking out films at a hectic pace — but it’s even more prolific at whacking out words on films. Websites and magazines broadcast a stream of articles on the work of emerging filmmakers. For years, info-packed pieces on distribution and funding have been ubiquitous. Tacky scribblers suck up to celebrities, arty ones profile auteurs, bloggers are all over the turf — latest craze, lists of the best and the worst […]
A number of our favorite independent films of the year are screening this week at the Northside Festival, a Brooklyn-based film and music event that gathers a number of film organizations, includuing Filmmaker, to guest curate some of its programming. Filmmaker‘s night is Wednesday, when we screen in its New York premiere Andrew Neel’s wickedly funny King Kelly (pictured) and Jeremiah Zagar & Nathan Caswell’s haunting short, Remains, but there are a number of other favorites dotted throughout the schedule. For example, tonight there’s one of the best documentaries of the year, Ashley Sabin and David Redmon’s Girl Model (presented […]
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 […]
While traveling today I heard the very sad news that photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Tim Hetherington, winner of the Sundance Documentary Grand Jury Prize, with Sebastian Junger, for their documentary, Restrepo, was killed while covering the conflict in Libya. Lauren Wissot interviewed Hetherington and Junger earlier this year for Filmmaker, and she began her piece like this: “Most documentary filmmakers attempt to see the world through the lens of the subjects they’re shooting, but few put their lives on the line to do so.” Of the film, which looked at the conflict in Afghanistan through the viewpoints of U.S. soldiers […]
Our favorite NYC-based low-budget horror mega-studio, Glass Eye Pix, celebrates its 25th anniversary with a two-week retrospective series of screenings at reRun in New York that begins today. They include founder Larry Fessenden’s first picture, No Telling, his excellent and quite movie Wendigo, and films by its roster of artists including Ti West and James McKenney, whose Satan Hates You, says Fessenden in the New York Times video below, is an “oddly serene and pious Christian scare film.” In Fall, 2009, Filmmaker celebrated Glass Eye Pix’s 24th anniversary with an article and interview of Fessenden by Lauren Wissot. From her […]