A year ago, I brought the preview copies of Think Outside the Box Office to sell at Independent Film Week, straight off the press. This week in addition to being a lab leader and mentor of the new IFP Filmmaker Labs, I have the honor of being paired in a Cage Match on Thursday with Michael Tully from Hammer to Nail, and Michelle Satter from the Sundance Labs on the subject: “Am I A Filmmaker or Brand”. I thought I would throw down some thoughts on the subject. I don’t think that “filmmaker” and “brand” are exclusive of one another. […]
Here’s the last of our guest blog posts by the makers of One Hundred Mornings, currently running at Los Angeles’s Downtown Independent Theater. This one is by writer/director Conor Horgan on the genre possibilities of his movie. When I finished writing the script for One Hundred Mornings, I wasn’t overly concerned about which genre the film would be — I just wanted to get it made. But most filmmakers have to specify their project’s genre at an early stage — it makes everything nice and neat, and life is a little easier for all involved, except maybe for the writer/director […]
As I wrote about on our newsletter a few weeks ago (and if you don’t get the weekly newsletter, why not? It’s free), we’ll be adding more new columns and original web content in the days ahead. On Friday we launched “Into the Splice,” Nicholas Rombes’s column on the pleasures of moviegoing. Every two weeks he’ll be going to a movie and writing an essay about the experiences and thoughts it triggers. And today we have the first of a three-part essay by Zachary Wigon on the multiple meanings of Catfish (pictured), examining it within the context of other movies […]
Every blog post I write during IFP will include a profile of a cab driver talking about their favorite film. This profile is about my mother, who drove a cab after she graduated college in 1971… I would stand in the front of my mirror singing, “I feel pretty. Oh, so pretty. I feel pretty and witty and gay. And I pity any girl who isn’t me today.” It was my own special passion that I kept secret. West Side Story, as old people say, “they don’t make them like they used to.” It was so sad. She was so in […]
Editor’s Note: The following essay contains major spoilers about the film Catfish. Part One: Catfish and Reality In the movie, the 14-year-old boy tells the school therapist that he likes to watch “little clips” on the computer, little videos. He describes them as “little clips of things that seem real.” Earlier in the film, we saw a montage of YouTube clips, from a cat playing piano to Saddam Hussein being hung to a baby laughing. Later in the film, the boy sees two girls die from a drug overdose right in front of him. How real that event does — […]
Hi again, Marc here with a report from opening day and the first day of meetings in the Emerging Narrative section for my character driven crime drama “Inside the Machine.” Yesterday started with an orientation with IFP folks, in a room full of other writer/directors looking for producers. Before they got started we all introduced ourselves, and afterwards started trading cards and contact information right away. I know how I felt, and informal chats revealed that I was not alone: having written a script, been selected to Project Forum, and maybe practiced pitching a bit, we didn’t really know what […]
Along with Labor Day, IFP’s Independent Film Week marks the end of Summer for me. It is a time to get back into the work groove and make plans for the year ahead. In this vein, the Independent Filmmaker Conference started yesterday with a day of panels dedicated to the future of film. Joana Vincente, Executive Director of IFP, opened the conference by noting a flurry of acquisitions at the recently completed Toronto International Film Festival and suggesting that things may be starting to look a little rosier for the independent film business. There were certainly some notes of optimism […]
It’s September, and after a long, scorching summer, the festival season has finally gotten under way; Telluride, Venice, Toronto are in the books, the New York Film Festival is just on the horizon and my job as a film programmer and artistic director has kicked off in earnest. The screenings begin, the landscape starts to take shape; acquisitions are tracked, release schedules scrutinized, and submissions and new films begin to make their way to us. So often, I read articles about film festivals as if they were these mysterious, unknowable institutions that make random, arbitrary decisions about which films they […]
Wavelengths, the Toronto International Film Festival program that ferries viewers deep into the world of contemporary experimental film, celebrated its tenth birthday in 2010 and received a sweet birthday gift: A completely sold out first show. Even enthusiasts who had lined up more than thirty minutes early were turned away from the 200-seat theatre at the Art Gallery of Ontario (along with your loyal scribe and similarly surprised colleagues from The Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Pacific Film Archive and the Walker Art Center). It was an auspicious start to curator Andréa Picard’s extensive program of more than thirty individual […]
Here’s the trailer for Todd Haynes’s five-part HBO miniseries, “Mildred Pierce,” that played tonight in front of the premiere of Boardwalk Empire. (Click on the headline if the trailer does not appear.)