Howard Feinstein will be covering Toronto for Filmmaker this year. Below, he jots down a few of the things he’s looking forward to. Question: How to group the films at Toronto I am most eager to see, by section or by geographical programming (a major plus for the festival)? Answer: Both. Here goes, but frankly, the titles are hardly exhaustive. “Visions,” with only 12 titles, could turn out to be the hot strand. I’m eager to see Trash Humpers (above left), by the poet of the most ignored among the marginalized, Harmony Korine. Ditto To Die Like a Man, by […]
This has been a festival of surprises, beginning with higher attendance than anticipated in view of the world-wide economic crisis, and the emergence of unexpected stars: how about Michael Moore and President Hugo Chavez as media darlings? Moore, who apparently is better known in Europe than one would imagine, brought Capitalism: A Love Story (right), drawing an overflow crowd to his press conference and enthusiastic audiences to the screenings. Moore’s is one of the six U.S. films competing for the Golden Lion. The real coup, however, was an international stage for Chavez in Oliver Stone’s South of the Border, signing […]
Here’s the way it used to be. You made an edgy, well-received independent film, one that showed your facility to tell a story and work with actors, and the smart Hollywood scripts — quality writing that required the touch of someone outside the system — would arrive in those expensively-printed agency binders. And that’s the way it seemed to be playing out for Karyn Kusama, who made an excellent debut with her gritty, low-budget Girlfight, a female boxing movie that launched the movie career of Michelle Rodriguez. But then a couple of things happened. First, her follow-up, Aeon Flux, was […]
Sometimes people ask me how I went from living in Los Angeles, writing a studio film like 40 Days & 40 Nights, to living in Minneapolis, directing an independent comedy like nobody. It’s a fair question but it seems there’s a subtext here, too. Many people think independent film is a step down from the studio system. And I’m sure it is — for some people. But let’s go back. 40 Days & 40 Nights is about a guy who gives up sex for lent and then meets the perfect girl. The short version of how it was made goes […]
Toronto Life lists the 51 hotspots that you should be aware of if you want to survive TIFF 09. From where to get coffee to where you can see the celebs this is an essential guide. They also have a list of bars that have received licenses to stay open past last call during the fest.
A STILL FROM DIRECTOR JOE BERLINGER’S CRUDE. COURTESY FIRST RUN FEATURES. Joe Berlinger is a filmmaker who makes documentaries that tell important stories with integrity, while still always entertaining his audiences. Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1961, Berlinger studied English and German at Colgate University, and got his first taste of the movie business while working on TV commercials at an advertising agency in Frankfurt. After deciding he wanted to make films, he moved to New York City, where he got a job working for the Maysles brothers. Berlinger’s first foray into directing was the documentary short Outrageous Taxi Stories […]
Here’s the teaser for Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, premiering this week in Toronto and then heading to the New York Film Festival.
Ted Hope has an essential post this morning, “Ten Steps (Plus One) for how to Survive the Current Indie Producer Hell.” Reading it I almost thought of it as a sequel to his 1995 Filmmaker piece, “Indie Film is Dead,” which remains one of the best things we’ve published. (Reading that earlier piece is both fascinating and depressing. The more things change….) There’s a tiny bit of tongue-in-cheek in this post because, frankly, these steps are virtually unattainable for the vast majority of producers out there, as some of the commenters in Hope’s comments thread argue. Here are the first […]
Over at Movie City Indie, Ray Pride posts a two minute clip of Guy Maddin’s short film Night Mayor which will have public screenings at TIFF on Saturday, Sept. 12 @ 4:00PM (ISABEL BADER THEATRE) & Sunday, Sept. 13 @ 1:15PM (JACKMAN HALL – AGO). Looks like vintage Maddin to me. A description of the short reads: The filmmaker whose cinematic style inspired the term “Maddinesque” delivers a fantastical film about the night mayor of Winnipeg, an inventor of Bosnian descent who harnesses the power of the aurora borealis to transmit distinctly Canadian images across the Great White North. Guy […]
With their latest film, How to Fold a Flag, documentary filmmakers Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein have come full circle. Their first feature was 2004’s Gunner Palace, which told the story of soldiers in the Army’s 2/3 Field Artillery as they patroled the streets of Baghdad in late 2003 and early 2004. Told in a gritty style that threw viewers right into the midst of conflict, the film resisted an overt political agenda, focusing instead on the daily lives of the troops. The Prisoner: Or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair followed, a chillingly Kafkaesque story of an Iraqi […]