Today, the Slamdance Film Festival announces its 2023 feature lineup, including programming for the Narrative Features Competition, Documentary Features Competition, Breakouts, Unstoppable, and Spotlight Screenings. The 29th annual edition of the festival will adhere to a hybrid model, with events taking place in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah from January 20-26 and online via the Slamdance Channel from January 23-29. “From the streets of Seattle to the psychedelic skies of a unicorn-run dystopia, our filmmakers are transporting audiences to new dimensions with stories that explore the nuance of disability, immigration and gender,” said Festival Manager Lily Yasuda in […]
Richard Davis achieved redneck nirvana. The crude and quotable subject of 2nd Chance, Davis transformed in the 1970s from bankrupt pizzeria owner to small-town kingpin after inventing the bulletproof vest. The phrase “redneck nirvana” had a particular meaning for him: It meant he could suddenly afford to buy anything at the local KMart. Success soon unleashed his inner manchild. Davis devoted his leisure time to blowing shit up, burning through wives and producing straight-to-VHS movies that valorized police violence. “Redneck Nirvana,” it turns out, could serve as an alternate title for a film about Davis, a larger-than-life figure whose story […]
22 years after the release of their debut album, the Baltimore-bred quartet Animal Collective is as prolific as ever. Members Avey Tare (Dave Portner), Panda Bear (Noah Lennox), Deakin (Josh Dibb) and Geologist (Brian Weitz) released their 11th studio album this year—the delectably jammy Time Skiffs—to a wave of acclaim the band arguably hasn’t received since their indie-tronica staple Merriweather Post Pavilion in 2009. On the heels of Time Skiffs’ success, the band has already hit the studio to record their forthcoming release, rumored to hit shelves and streamers from the band’s longtime label Domino Records in 2023. This year has […]
Dances With Films (DWF), the Los Angeles-based independent film festival, continues to celebrate its 25th anniversary by expanding to New York City. While the LA edition of the festival took place in June, today marks the beginning of DWF’s inaugural NYC iteration, with festival screenings to be hosted at Regal Union Square from December 1 through 4. The lineup features over 70 feature, documentary and short film premieres. “Dances With Films champions independent voices throughout the world, so it was a natural fit to bring our unique brand of festival to the cultural capital of the United States,” festival founders […]
In making my Watergate historical fiction film 18½, I always knew that coming up with a consistent musical soundtrack was going to be essential for balancing the tone of a film that swings from comedy to thriller to drama at breakneck speed. One genre of music, and indeed one song, “Brasília Bella,” is the key to unlocking not only how our team navigated the tones and themes of the film, but also reflects the scale and scope of making an indie film at the high point of a global pandemic. Around 2018, I started working on the script for 18½ […]
Your first feature film credit is a memorable experience for anyone who grew up loving movies, but for editor Mike Sale, ACE, that inaugural gig was particularly indelible. Sale made his cinematic debut on the infamous trading card-to-movie adaptation of The Garbage Pail Kids. “It was like a film school—the Garbage Pail Kids film school,” laughed Sale. “It was a fascinating learning experience and I had a lot to learn back then. Just seeing that kind of movie come together was incredible for a young person who had never made a movie before.” Sale graduated from Garbage Pail Kids film […]
In their latest short film, The Last Days of August, which depicts the slow-motion desolation of a Nebraska town economically denuded by online retail, prolific filmmakers Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck create a haunted visual poetry — a blend of formally arresting, incisively spare images and heightened sound design. The two filmmakers, who appeared on our 25 New Faces list in 2010, began as shorts filmmakers and in recent years have directed arresting character-based, documentary-tinged features (God Bless the Child, When She Runs, and, for Machoian solo, The Killing of Two Lovers and The Integrity of Joseph Chambers). But throughout their […]
I came to production design as someone who has always loved movies. I also loved art, design, architecture and photography, so discovering that I could have a career that combined all my loves was one of the greatest moments of my life. I have a realism-based approach to filmmaking — most of the worlds I create are fictional, but within the context of the film my goal is to make them feel real, grounded, worn, authentic. If a director wants a stylized or surreal approach I would need to find a way to dirty it up and add imperfections to […]
When choosing a project, cinematographer Matthew Libatique says, “My first priority is that whatever I’m doing next is different than what I did last.” That guiding principle is how one bounces from Requiem for a Dream to Josie and the Pussycats, Noah to Straight Outta Compton. The two-time Oscar nominee’s quest for variety found him wrapping the Netflix musical The Prom, the Stepford Wives-esque thriller Don’t Worry Darling and the Darren Aronofsky-directed drama The Whale in the span of a calendar year. In Darling, Florence Pugh and Harry Styles star as a young couple that relocates to an almost too […]
Svetislav Dragomirovic’s debut feature I’m People, I Am Nobody is a film I wasn’t prepared to watch. From its coy DOC NYC synopsis, we learn it’s the story of a 60-year-old retired porn performer from Serbia named Stevan who’s found himself stuck, Kafka-style, in a Maltese jail, accused of indecent exposure. What we don’t learn from that brief description is that Stevan is actually Dragomirovic’s father-in-law, and that the filmmaker received a series of “audio-letters” that Stevan had sent from prison, which form the basis of I’m People, I Am Nobody, an experimental collage that takes us on a shocking […]