A number of new talents have come from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts in recent years, and one recurring theme has been the face of Trieste Kelly Dunn. Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather and Brett Haley’s The New Year made significant festival splashes this year, and beach-party styled Vacation!, by Zach Clark, seems positioned to do the same. Despite very different tones and directing styles, Dunn is each film’s center, and she makes perfect sense in every movie. “In college, the professors used to talk about knowing what play you’re in,” says Dunn. “You do Ibsen, French […]
When we caught up with filmmaker Jason Byrne to include him in this year’s “25,” it was via e-mail from Tanzania. At the same time Byrne’s hypnotic experimental documentary Scrap Vessel winds its way along the festival circuit, he is working as an audio/visual archivist for the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. “Living in East Africa for the last two years has been a deeply rich experience, and this job has been fascinating but psychologically difficult at times, especially when listening to the many graphically explained testimonies from witnesses to the genocide,” he writes. Byrne has worked previously as […]
When they met as undergrads at CSU Monterey Bay, Robert Machoian and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck had different styles but found a third when working together. “A lot of my early work was pushing what people can process with quick cuts and juxtaposition of image,” Ojeda-Beck says. And “I was really exploring duration,” Machoian adds — “what can be done in a single shot and really raw, raw sound, mainly straight off the mic.” Their short films together display a handle on classic arthouse film style. Visuals are the key, along with luscious colorful imagery and solitary characters in simple situations, with […]
Sara Colangelo’s Little Accidents is one of the more arresting shorts on the festival circuit at the moment, both immediate and restrained in its tale of a woman working in a Massachusetts soda drink factory who fears that she’s become pregnant. She recruits her mentally disabled ex-boyfriend to shoplift a pregnancy test for her and bonds again with him as she struggles with what to do. “I was interested in the juxtaposition of two people, one of whom is recently disabled and trying to reintegrate himself into society and who is the stable one, and the other a woman who […]
Possessor of a sneaky sort of charm that hides his utter tenaciousness, Rashaad Ernesto Green, a promising directorial talent from the Bronx, makes movies that get under your skin with what, upon reflection, seems like relative ease. His pictures, a trio of shorts and a forthcoming feature, openly seek to reveal the humanity within the taboos and faux pas of people of color. Green is clearly out to surprise us with his unusual depictions of equally unusual milieus, and he isn’t much for asking permission. “I was in a black box theater in St. Louis, reading The Seven Habits of […]
“This project has been like what musicians call ‘woodshedding,’” says Alex Jablonski about his collaborative venture with Michael Totten, Sparrow Songs. “We are finding our voice, trying out different styles, and learning so much.” Adds Totten, “In the past I’ve let this idea of ‘I don’t have the right money or equipment or subject matter’ prevent me from moving forward. Sparrow Songs has taught me to get rid of the idea of perfection because it doesn’t exist.” What is Sparrow Songs? Simply, it’s a year-long filmmaking project in which director-editor Jablonski and d.p. Totten make and upload one short doc […]
Writer-director Victoria Mahoney began her artistic career as an actress in theater and then film. “Shelly Winters was my teacher,” Mahoney says. “If you touched your hair too many times in her class, she’d come over and cut off your bangs. She taught me the gift of stillness.” After working off-off Broadway, Mahoney went to L.A., did a number of pilots, a few European films, and a season of Seinfeld (she played Gladys Mayo, owner of the clothing store Putumayo). But then there were all those “ridiculous films I did to sustain myself. And that’s when I began to feel […]
In New York City at least, it is unbearably horrible outside. Whatever you do you will be suffering. So why not shoot some footage for Sundance’s “Life in a Day” project? Today, July 24, is the day during which you must shoot, and you have a few days after to send it in. You will definitely be in good company. Joe Berlinger, Marianna Palka, Peter Sollett, Caleb Deschanel, So Yong Kim, and Brad and Todd Barnes have all agreed to participate. Here’s Sundance’s John Cooper with more details. And before shooting, go here for more guidelines, the questions you must […]
Any new New York independent movie theater, one showing not mini-major studio moveovers but recently premiered festival films that don’t have formal distribution, is cause for celebration. But we at Filmmaker are hailing the new reRun for one other reason: it’s in our building. That’s right, after a long day solving the crises of the current indie scene, we can head downstairs and enjoy not only movies but pretzels filled with garlic mashed potatoes, popcorn with duck fat, and microbrews. That’s right, you can eat and drink inside this theater, which is down the hall from reBar. (Menu preview courtesy […]
I’m finding Flipboard, a new app/web reader that launched this week, kind of cool, but I can’t tell how much I really like it yet. What Flipboard does is create on your iPad a “personal magazine,” displaying an aggregation of different feeds and channels in a design-y format. What makes it more than an aestheticized RSS reader is that it pulls in social as well, turning your Facebook and Twitter feeds into channels that you read like flipbooks. So, open the Flipboard version of your Facebook and the cover image might be a collage of Japanese movie posters that a […]