(Electrick Children world premiered at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival and was picked up for distribution by Phase 4 Films. It opens theatrically on Friday, March 8, 2013. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) Oh, to read the description of a movie and go into it with one’s thickest guard up, anticipating some exercise in “indie quirk,” only to realize within seconds that, shame on you, that assumption couldn’t have been further from the truth. Rebecca Thomas’s debut feature, Electrick Children, shut me up right quick, for it becomes immediately evident that this is one of those lovely […]
The first our series of interviews with digital storytellers, realized in collaboration with Filmmaker, here are the team behind the interactive storytelling platform Zeega. From the group’s mission statement: Zeega is revolutionizing web publishing and interactive storytelling for a future beyond blogs. With Zeega, you can use any media in the cloud, transform the entire screen into your playground, and share your interactive creations with the world. We’re living in a unique moment. More media than ever is recorded and shared. But the web today is dominated by a few platforms – all stories start to feel the same, trapped […]
SXSW is a festival of contradictions. (Or, “Spring Break for filmmakers,” as Ti West posted on his Twitter stream last night.) Its film program feels homey, intimate, with Janet Pierson and her team evincing a real sense of enthusiasm as well as curatorial play. There are, of course, types of films that are expected and do well at SXSW: cutting-edge genre titles, hip mainstream features, music- and technology-themed documentaries, and low-budget, youth-oriented relationship tales. But within and even outside of those categories, SXSW always turns up some real discoveries. (Last year there were several — Sean Baker’s Starlet, Andrew Neel’s […]
If Food, Inc. freaked you out, prepare to be galvanized by A Place at the Table, another hot-button food doc being released by Participant Media and Magnolia Pictures. The film, which boasts the involvement of celebrity advocates Jeff Bridges and chef Tom Colicchio, fixes its curious eye on America’s hunger crisis, whose staggering stats add up to the distressing fact that 50 million folks in this country, many of them kids, don’t know when or how they’re getting their next meal. It’s a monster of a topic, with arms that stretch to the realms of politics, medicine, and agriculture, and […]
Stoker, South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s long-awaited English-language debut, has already proven divisive, its moral murkiness and arguable cynicism as beguiling to some as they are troubling for others. But however one feels when walking away from this Gothic, slow-burning psycho-thriller, which explores the curious workings of its titular family (the surname’s an intended nod to a certain vampire-loving author), it’s hard to deny that it’s the work of a master stylist, whose obsessive attention to detail is intoxicating, and, these days, far too rare. A parade of pristine compositions, technical flourishes, and production design that’s adamantly era-nonspecific, Stoker plays […]
Two weeks ago RED announced that they were suing Sony for patent infringement for technology used in Sony’s PMW-F5, PMW-F55, and F65 cameras. Last week Sony posted a response on their Pro video website. First noting that the F65 has been commercially available for over a year, and that the F5/F55 were announced in October, they go on to say: Sony has now had an opportunity to study Red’s complaint and the asserted patents, and categorically denies Red’s allegations. Sony intends to defend itself vigorously in the Red lawsuit. Sony looks forward to prevailing in court, thus vindicating the Sony […]
I stopped collecting comic books years ago, and I was never much of a vinyl person. Do you know anyone who truly fetishizes out-of-print books, because I don’t. Who needs rare DVDs anyway? Not suckers with Netflix streaming or HuluPlus accounts. The DVD has only been around 17, 18 years — what could possibly count as rare, even? Is there such a thing? Perhaps that DVD of an oddly artful B horror film from the ’70s that went out of print in 1996 and has never returned, but piracy has gotten so advanced now, surely you can find a stream […]
One of our favorite recent films at Filmmaker and IFP is Tim Sutton’s dreamy and at times disquieting evocation of youth, Pavilion. The film went through the IFP Labs, and its d.p., Chris Dapkins, made our 25 New Faces list last year. And, just this year, Sutton took part in the Venice Biennale College Cinema, which is partnered with IFP, and because of its support, is set to make his new feature, Memphis, this Spring. As Sutton enters pre-production, Pavilion hits the theaters from Factory 25. It opens at IFC Center in New York tomorrow, and is recommended to all […]
Thelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese. Walter Murch and Francis Ford Coppola. Tim Squyres and Ang Lee. For many an editor, these longtime creative partnerships represent the most alluring and elusive of career ideals. For editor Andrew Weisblum, that ideal is well on the way to becoming a reality — twice over. Since 2007, Weisblum has cut all of both Wes Anderson’s and Darren Aronofsky’s feature films, ranging in style from the witty charm of Fantastic Mr. Fox to the demented psychodrama of Black Swan (for which Weisblum was Oscar nominated). Kicking off this year’s Manhattan Edit Workshop series “Inside the […]
If you are a first-time filmmaker and have a narrative or documentary project in the final stages of post-production, here’s a heads up that the deadline for submission to the Independent Filmmaker Labs is upcoming. Run by IFP, which publishes Filmmaker, the labs help movies with a budget under $1 million, providing each film’s team with in-depth assistance on everything from editing to marketing to festival strategy. The IFP Labs select 10 documentary and 10 narrative projects, assembling filmmakers for three separate sessions throughout the year, during which the individuals are helped to discern the best way for their movies to stand […]