When Danny Madden was a kid, he messed around with his dad’s video camera, making movies with his younger brother Will. But it was only when Madden was in his late teens that, along with school friend Jonathan Silva, he began taking films seriously. Thus was born Ornana. The name and logo came from a fake smoothie company Silva invented (Ornana = orange + banana); “it helped us not take ourselves too seriously,” Madden says. After high school, director Madden and d.p. Silva left their hometown of Peachtree City, Ga., to attend Emerson College in Boston, where they met Jim […]
For cinematographer and filmmaker Chris Dapkins, both his desire to make images and how he goes about doing so are inspired by the natural beauty of his childhood home in the civilized wilds of Oneonta, New York. “My closest friend and I, Carlo Mirabella-Davis, spent a great deal of time in the woods,” Dapkins explains. “We came up with a game which we called the ‘Talk Game’…one of us would spend hours and hours creating these fantastic dreams and then the other person would inhabit them and make choices within them. That’s how my interest in imagination and making stories […]
A.G. Rojas has more energy and ideas than he can fit in his music videos. The rising star is increasingly sought after for his bold, story-driven clips, but sometimes he doesn’t get the gigs. “The music video and commercial business is all about how you handle rejection,” he says. For Rojas, that has meant picking up a camera anyway and making something else. For example: “I’d lose a job, have nothing to do for a few weeks and find a kid in Venice who will take me whatever weird places. And then I’d do an interview with him at the […]
For years, people misjudged Julie Delpy. A screen actress since the age of nine, by her late teens Delpy was a gorgeous, willowy blonde who perfectly fit the mold of the French cinematic ingénue. After standout performances in films by Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa), Volker Schlöndorff (Voyager) and Krzysztof Kieslowski (Three Colors: White), Delpy decamped from Europe to America, where she worked both in mainstream Hollywood fare and in more distinguished indie productions, playing muse to directors such as Alan Rudolph, Jim Jarmusch and, most notably, Richard Linklater. But Delpy was far from just a muse. In addition to inspiring […]
Independent film has long been considered the farm leagues for Hollywood’s majors. But with fewer specialized distributors and a risk-averse studio system, do up-and-comers still have the opportunities they once did during the ecstatic exuberance of the sector’s heyday? The crossover success of former DIY filmmakers Lena Dunham (with HBO’s Girls), Sean Durkin (who is developing The Exorcist TV series) and the Duplass brothers (with their studio-indies Cyrus and Jeff, Who Lives at Home), suggests that breakthroughs are still very possible. And yet, for every Jeff Nichols (Mud) or Zal Batmanglij (The East), there are numerous filmmakers who have made […]
“It’s not actually that different from early independent cinema,” Elaine Chin, President of Production of Justin Lin’s production company, Barnstorm Pictures, says of the new YouTube network, You Offend Me You Offend My Family, Lin has co-founded. “There’s no preconceived idea of what it should look like. YouTube is giving us free reign to go and try anything, and we don’t want to take that for granted. If anything, we want to surprise ourselves and be even more crazy.” Launched this June as part of YouTube’s move into original programming, YOMYOMF features short-form scripted and reality programs by new creators […]
In early May, with much hoopla, Columbia University’s graduate Film Program celebrated the 25th anniversary of its annual Film Festival at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. The auditorium was nearly packed as tuxedo-attired Ira Deutchman, Columbia Film Program chair, took the podium to introduce both the evening, a weeklong series of events and screenings honoring Columbia’s film school, and, more particularly, the school’s maturation over the past quarter century. The opening night featured some of the best student films to come out of Columbia, including Adam Davidson’s superbly paced Academy Award-winning short The Lunch Date, and Greg Mottola’s charming Swingin’ […]
Ganja & Hess: The Complete Edition Kino International – available now A bona fide cult film, the anti-Blacula, defiantly difficult and parochial, a vampire film in which the word itself is never used and its tropes mostly discarded, Bill Gunn’s miraculous Ganja & Hess is jolting and jagged, lyrical and mythic, as utterly unclassifiable today as it was at the time of its initial unveiling. Long lost following the rapturous reception at Critic’s Week at Cannes in 1973, where it received a seven-minute standing ovation before being butchered by its distributor into a sexploitation film and boxed up under six […]
Normally the spotlight at the Cannes film festival is stolen by attractive young celebrities and hip, hot films (Tarantino’s, for example). This Cannes was a little bit different. The most interesting films addressed Big Issues and, perhaps coincidentally, were awarded the top prizes. They are mature films, for the mature. Two provocative topics stood out. CONFRONTING OLD AGE Very different takes on living out the geriatric years are apparent in Austrian director Michael Haneke’s French production Amour, which took the Palme d’Or, and Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s Japanese film, Like Someone in Love (no prize, because, even if it […]