In Dogtooth, an authoritarian father’s carefully constructed sham world falls apart after one of his sheltered daughters watches Rocky IV and Jaws. In Electrick Children (above), a 15-year-old Mormon girl (played by “25 New Face” Julia Garner) gets pregnant after listening to a rock ‘n’ roll song on an unmarked blue cassette tape. The narrative similarities essentially end there but, given their equally unorthodox takes on coming of age in cloistered environments, the two are oddly complementary. Split between rural Utah and fabulous Las Vegas, Electrick Children‘s visual world is entirely at odds with what its doe-eyed protagonist is used to on her big-sky homestead: neon lights, dingy […]
Matt Ross’s directorial debut is an inventive look at an affair between a married account (Marin Ireland) and a novelist (Chris Messina) that unfurls within the walls of 28 hotel rooms across the country. Dictated by checkout times and the call of the “real world,” their truncated encounters are marked by a growing sense of urgency, as their physical connection turns emotional. Ireland and Messina shoulder the challenge of being the sole recipients of Doug Emmett’s lens with magnetic grace, crafting their characters’ dimensions in varying increments of restraint and ebullition. 28 Hotel Rooms, currently streaming on iTunes and VOD, […]
In diagnosing a cultural affliction without so much as mentioning a possible cure or even treatment, Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral coldly suggests that it’ll only continue to spread. The outlandish-but-believable premise – involving a high-end clinic that harvests and sells celebrities’ infections to their obsessed fans – brings to mind both Children of Men and, of all things, Idiocracy for how depressingly realistic its vision of the near future ends up being. We want to think that something like this could never happen, but there’s more than a little evidence to the contrary. The fact that nearly every element of the […]
What do you get when you hand RZA the keys to his own film project? As fans of the multi-tasking Wu-Tang Clan leader will be thrilled to know, you get a balls-out, rap-infused martial arts spectacle, filled with the mad love of a lifelong kung fu fan. A project nine years in the making, RZA’s directorial debut, The Man with the Iron Fists, sees the 43-year-old artist star alongside Lucy Liu and Russell Crowe, bringing to life a mashed-up actioner that blends Chinese mysticism with the U.S. slave trade and more. The impetus for the film’s production came when RZA […]
With their Stranger than Fiction series at New York City’s IFC Center, Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen have been curating, programming and advocating for documentary film going on eight years now. Their Tuesday-night events are typically packed, drawing audiences with not only great films but human interaction — Q&A’s with directors, collaborators, and even the film’s subjects. Three years ago, when Powers and Neihausen wondered why there wasn’t a major, all-doc festival in New York, they realized that the challenge of launching one was a natural fit for them. The resulting DOC NYC is now in its third year (November […]
As indie makers know all too well, movie distribution is undergoing a major restructuring. The shift from analog media to digital production, post-production and distribution technologies not only changes how movies are made and distributed, but how people view them. Theatrical moviegoing is declining; since 2002, ticket sales have declined by nearly 20 percent. Making matters worse, DVD sales are shrinking. And video streaming revenues, while growing, are doing so at a rate insufficient to make up the difference. Readers of Filmmaker are urged to check out a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, “Now playing at a living […]
Nara Garber & Betsy Nagler’s Flat Daddy is released on VOD on November 6. The following was originally published on the eve of its Doc NYC premiere in 2011. In the corpus of documentaries that have come out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve seen a gradual progression from the outward to the inward — immersive forays into the battlefield giving way to subtler studies of the wartime psyche. Yet the majority of them have focused on the soldier’s experience of war. Flat Daddy sets itself apart by focusing on the people who feel war perhaps the deepest: military families put on […]
At an event hosted by the AFI Film Festival today, Cinema Eye Honors announced its Honors for Nonfiction Filmmaking. Bart Layton’s The Imposter (pictured) and Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man led the pack, with five nominations each. Both films were nominated the group’s Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction Filmmaking Award, joining fellow nominees Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s 5 Broken Cameras; Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s Detropia; Matthew Akers’ Marina Abramovic The Artist is Present, and Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims’ Only the Young. Tippet and Mims, who Filmmaker selected for our 25 New Faces of 2012, had the most […]
John has graciously given me a chance to tell people why I do 3D, why I ACTUALLY do 3D, to write something beyond the technical babble that typically highlights any in-depth discussion of 3D or the snark that informs any “3D, ugh” diatribe or the relative silence from my peers in the indie community. I’ll do my best to talk about 3D in a way that I haven’t heard often… less a technical piece (or 3D ugh-fest), more an honest ramble on independent artistic creation. An ode, if you will. It’s a shame to start like this, but to get […]
Game Changers is an indie film currently being shot in Buffalo, New York. In this second part of the interview with filmmakers Rob Imbs (director) and Benjamin Eckstein (cinematographer), they discuss funding a low-budget movie, how the budget effects the production, as well as casting and location scouting. Filmmaker: So you had a script, but then you had to fund the movie. How did you go about doing that? Imbs: Funding was always an Indiegogo thing. Just as I fell in love with Twitter, I also fell in love with the idea of Indiegogo. I really believe in supporting artists, […]