D.A. Pennebaker is a legend in the world of documentary filmmaking. A pioneer in the art of cinema verite, he first made his mark with the 1967 classic Don’t Look Back, chronicling Bob Dylan’s final acoustic tour in the U.K. He met his partner (in directing and matrimony) Chris Hegedus in the 1970s, and they have co-directed nearly 30 films together since 1977, including the Oscar-nominated The War Room and the Sundance entry Startup.com. Their latest collaboration is Kings of Pastry, a whirlwind peek into the M.O.F. competition, a French pastry chef contest in which 16 of the world’s best […]
I was one of the judges for this year’s Wookbook Project Discovery and Distribution Award, which grants one lucky film a week-long theatrical run in L.A. with social media, street team and PR support. That run begins this week, September 16, at the Downtown Independent Theater, and the film is Connor Horgan’s character-based post-apocalyptic drama, One Hundred Mornings. All this week we’ll have blog posts from producer Katie Holly and Horgan here at Filmmakermagazine.com. Below is Holly’s first post on the producing of the film. — Scott Macaulay One Hundred Mornings was made for a tenth of the budget that […]
“It’s so strange we remain friends,” said Errol Morris at one point in his dialogue with fellow director Werner Herzog at the Toronto International Film Festival Monday. During their hour-long conversation at the new Bell Lightbox, the two men spoke of many things — filmmaking, of course, but also reading, music, the Warren Commission report, and actors vs. non-actors (Morris: “In my more spurious moments I’ve said that the main difference between SAG actors and real people is that real people can act”). But mostly they engaged in a kind of digressive contemplation inflected by occasional bouts of one-upmanship — […]
More than any filmmaker in recent memory, the Danish director Susanne Bier examines familial breakdown with an eye toward rupture in the larger social order. In After the Wedding (2006), the protagonist operated a charity in India but his domestic life was in complete disarray. Now, in the powerful In a Better World, written by her longtime collaborator Anders Thomas Jensen, and which just had its world premiere in Toronto, the main adult character, Anton (the sensational Swedish actor Mikael Persbrandt), is a doctor who spends much of his time in Africa (it could be Darfur) treating the maltreated in […]
Have you ever seen an elephant lie down? This question provoked Scottish artist Douglas Gordon to create Play Dead; Real Time, a giant, startling multiple projection depicting just that. Timeline, a beautiful Gordon exhibition the Museum of Modern Art in 2007 that included the piece, was a triumph not only with art enthusiasts but with cinephiles as well, and Gordon regularly walks the line between these two worlds. In addition to his successful art career and installation pieces, he has made two feature films: Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (2006) and a new work, k.364 A Journey by Train (2010). […]
According to Michael Fleming at Deadline, Sony Pictures Classics has acquired Denis Villeneuve‘s Incendies, which follows twins who travel to the Middle East to investigate their mother’s past and find a shocking revelation. See the trailer here.
It’s day four here at the Toronto Film Festival—although based on the post-midnight criteria rather than the 8-hours-of-sleep criteria, I suppose it’s technically day six. The distinctions between days, between periods of lights and darks, have a tendency to become blurry after one’s tenth—or is it the fifteenth?—festival film has come and gone. Already an appalling quantity of fast food has been eaten, numerous cups of coffee have been gratefully slurped, and at least one trusty steno pad, blank as driven snow just moments ago, is nearly full of hieroglyphics that must have meant something when I was scribbling in […]
The first weekend of the Toronto International Film Festival comes to a close with two films finding distribution deals. Earlier today IFC landed the first major deal of the fest with a seven-figure deal for the James Gunn-directed wannabe superhero dark comedy Super, starring Rainn Wilson, Ellen Page, Kevin Bacon and Liv Tyler. And just announced moments ago, The Weinstein Company inked a U.S. deal (and some foreign territories) north of $3 million for Dirty Girl. Starring Juno Temple, Dwight Yoakam, Milla Jovovich and Willam H. Macy, the film, directed by Abe Sylvia, follows a young girl through her journey […]
After reading a few small articles on wind energy in the Delaware County Times, the New York City-based video and commercials editor Laura Israel, who retreats to a 16’ by 16’ cabin outside the town of Meredith in said county, thought she might do something for the green movement and get a wind turbine—and not have to pay for electricity in the bargain. “I went on the internet and realized, ‘Wind energy is not what I thought.’ I was editing at a place where a guy was doing a tv segment on it as part of green. I told him […]
Toronto, the IFP Filmmaker Conference hot on its heels, the New York Film Festival, and, for us, the close of our Fall issue — the season has begun. We’ve already begun work on the magazine, and I’m getting ready to go Toronto, where I’ll join Howard Feinstein and Livia Bloom contributing to the magazine and blog. Of course, the best part of any festival experience is the serendipitous discovery, the word-of-mouth gem you were tipped to or the film you randomly walked into that turned out to be great. I hope to be telling you about some of those over […]