Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Peter Bowen interviewed A Single Man co-writer-director Tom Ford for our Winter 2010 issue. A Single Man is nominated for Best Actor (Colin Firth). Although fashion and film have always been closely intertwined, Tom Ford may be the first fashion designer to cross over to the role of filmmaker. To be sure, his debut feature, an adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, reflects his immaculate sense of style. But its […]
As Paul Devlin’s article on his film BLAST! in the current issue of Filmmaker notes, films that touch on issues of faith and religion can be tricky sells in the independent film world — even as filmmakers like the Kendrick Brothers work outside of the independent community and find success with their explicitly faith-based films. Here’s a feature narrative on Kickstarter that caught my eye that explores issues of belief and non-belief. From the page on Faith, by Eli Daughdrill: The film is a personal, independent narrative that takes a sensitive but critical look at at religion in America. FAITH […]
Here’s the trailer for “25 New Face” filmmaker Lena Dunham‘s second feature, Tiny Furniture, which premieres in the narrative Competition at SXSW. From the Vimeo page: 22-year-old Aura returns home after college to her artist mother’s loft with the following: a useless film theory degree, 357 hits on her YouTube page, and no shoulders to cry on. Starring Dunham and her real-life family, Tiny Furniture is tragicomedy about what does and does not happen when you graduate with no skills, no love life, and a lot of free time. Tiny Furniture Trailer from Lena Dunham on Vimeo.
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Damon Smith interviewed The Most Dangerous Man In America directors Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith for our Director Interviews section of the Website. The Most Dangerous Man In America is nominated for Best Documentary. As a history lesson, Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith’s enthralling new documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, is as solid as a textbook, stitching together old broadcast footage, first-person testimony, […]
The Film Society of Lincoln Center and Museum of Modern Art have announced the films selected for this year’s New Directors/New Films. In its 39th year, the series, taking place March 24 – April 4 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center and the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters at MoMA, will screen 38 films from emerging filmmakers. Richard Press‘s documentary Bill Cunningham New York will be the opening film, while acclaimed Canadian writer-director Xavier Dolan will close ND/NF with the New York premiere of I Killed My Mother (J’ai tuĂ© ma mère). For tickets and more on ND/NF, […]
FEBRUARY – shot on the Canon EOS 550D / Rebel T2i (preprod unit) from Nino Leitner on Vimeo. From filmmaker Nino Leitner. This short film, FEBRUARY, was shot on a pre-production unit of the new Canon EOS 550D / Rebel T2i. This is UNGRADED footage straight off the camera (converted to ProRes LT first for easy editing). I used a “flattened” picture style as outlined by Stu Maschwitz on his blog. Check out his blog for a detailed review of the camera, which comes out next month and is priced at $799.
Big news out of Sundance tonight: Keri Putnam, former President of Production at Miramax Films and Executive Vice President at HBO Films, has been named the new Executive Director of the Sundance Institute. The position was previously held by Ken Brecher, who left Sundance last April. Keri is well known to many of us in the independent community for her leadership at Miramax and HBO, where she opened the door to both new directors as well as established veterans looking to explore new ideas that wouldn’t fly in the mainstream studio system. Among the films she has been involved with […]
Of all the people I know — artists, musicians, filmmakers — who make dark, dark things, the French director Philippe Grandrieux is the sunniest. In person, he projects a passionate joy about his filmmaking craft, and the disturbing events contained within his films are not projections of surface-level angst or garden-variety emotional torment but rather philosophical inquiries into our relationship with Nature, our bodies, and our selves. To hear him talk about his work is to realize that he comes from a line that includes De Sade, Blanchot, and Bataille as well as later post-structuralists like Gilles Deleuze. (Grandrieux’s bloody […]
As a theme in Western art, sibling rivalry is as ancient as the Hebrew Bible or the internecine blood feud that shapes the destinies of two sisters in Sophocles’ Antigone. In her utterly absorbing family portrait Prodigal Sons, which won the FIPRESCI prize at the 2009 Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, Kimberly Reed (“25 New Faces of Independent Film,” Summer 2007) revisits this archetype with honesty and courage, grappling with questions of identity as she details how life-changing transformations have affected her relationship with adopted brother Marc McKerrow, a soulful hard-luck character who has long felt he was living in her […]
Here’s the just-released trailer for Elijah Drenner’s American Grindhouse, which plays SXSW next month.