Hi! My name is Joshua Z Weinstein and I am the director of a new film titled Off Duty which will be released in 2011. The film focuses on how the recession effects a taxi garage in Queens and is a real life version of the 1970’s series Taxi, complete with the character that formed the basis for Danny DeVito’s Louie DePalma. All you need to know about me is that I work as a cinematographer and I am finishing up my second film as a director. I will be blogging during IFP Film Week and each post will contain […]
It’s Independent Film Week and the IFP’s Independent Filmmaker Conference, so I thought I’d bring up Radiohead before some panelist does. A couple of years ago I remember sitting at a panel (not at the IFP, actually) at which a young filmmaker was asking how to jumpstart his own business model. A guy onstage in a suit who probably billed at $600 an hour looked at him and said, “The answer is Radiohead,” referring to the band’s strategy of releasing their In Rainbows digitally over the internet for whatever price fans were willing to pay. (The band subsequently released a […]
“If my life coincides with the life of film, I’ll be very happy,” said Nathaniel Dorsky at the Q&A following the screening of his three short experimental films in the Wavelengths 4 program at the Toronto Film Festival. That Dorsky’s work is bound to the materiality of its medium, to the poetry of light processed by the photographic process, was something I needed reminding of the night I saw his work. It’s easy to forget about things like film at a film festival. Most of the films at Toronto were projected digitally, their origins increasingly inscrutable in this age of […]
Hello everyone! We’re Roja Gashtili & Julia Lerman, NY-based writing partners about to attend the 2010 Independent Film Week with our screenplay, Pretty To Think So. The script follows awkward 8th-grader, Mina Lehsani, as she uncovers the secrets of her mother’s revolutionary past in Iran… but as we like to say, it’s a lot funnier than you think it is! We wanted to tackle the tragic ramifications of modern-day Iran’s tumultuous history, and the subsequent mass immigration it sparked, in a way not seen on screen before. Enter… the Lehsanis, a quirkily accessible Persian family whose hopes, dreams, flaws will resonate […]
Hello there. My name is Marc Maurino, as the byline indicates, and close watchers of this blog might remember that a few days ago there was a post entitled “Why I’m Looking For a Producer at Independent Film Week.” That post just dove into what I’m looking for in a producer and was scant on background information about myself, because it actually started life as a letter I wrote to Filmmaker magazine editor Scott Macaulay a few weeks ago, in response to his query in one of his editor’s letters about an upcoming article for the magazine (yes, I sometimes […]
Here’s the interactive version of the trailer for David Fincher’s upcoming The Social Network.
I am Sandy Jaffe, a Boston area filmmaker, and I will be reporting my experience bringing Our Mockingbird to Independent Film Week/Spotlight on Documentaries. This is my first time at Independent Film Week and I am thrilled to get the opportunity to share my work with this community. Our Mockingbird is a story about To Kill A Mockingbird, and why it still resonates in our national discourse about race, class, and justice. And believe me, it does. Even before all the hoopla about the fiftieth anniversary, barely a day passed where my Google alert wasn’t vibrating with stories that touched […]
So I’m writing in 3 parts about my experiences at IFP’s Independent Film Week. Of course I’m writing this first dispatch before I get there, if only to shed some light on my general mental state as I prepare for this event and on what the hell I think I’ll be doing during the week. Officially, I’m attending as part of the IFP’s Filmmaker Labs, where back in June, my feature film directorial debut, Melvin, was 1 of 10 works-in-progress selected to be workshopped and taken under the IFP’s loving wing for 12 months. That experience, in June, was STELLAR […]
Below is the second blog post from Katie Holly, producer of One Hundred Mornings, winner of the Workbook Project’s Discovery and Distribution Award. It begins a one-week run today at L.A.’s Downtown Independent. As I mentioned in my last post One Hundred Mornings was made as part of the Catalyst scheme, which was established to give writers, directors and producers a chance to make their first feature. Essentially it was a competition, and three winning films were given a chance to make a movie, fully financed and with additional production support provided in the form of mentorship. The mentorship element […]