One of the biggest premieres at Sundance this year doesn’t involve a star-studded premiere party or the unspooling of a glossy 35mm print: it’s an entirely new section of programming: , pronounced “Next” by those not brave enough to type or say the symbol. Director of programming Trevor Groth has been involved with the festival for 25 years, and points out that the symbol actually means “Less Than Equals Greater Than,” which alludes to the fact that all Next films were made for very small budgets — at least under $500,000 but in most cases much, much less than that. […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 8:00 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] The shooting of this movie was insane. We shot three different times over the course of almost two years. The first time we worked with an outline and the actors completely improvising from that outline. The second time we had some scripted scenes, and the third time we went in completely scripted. With all that shooting I had a crazy amount of material to work with, and it was really hard to cut certain scenes that I loved. The hardest decision was because we shot so much, I […]
This is Anthony Kaufman’s Industry Beat column from our 2010 Winter issue. Old distribution models die hard. Everyone knows about the passing of that once-established indie film paradigm: Make a movie, show it at a festival, sell it to a distributor, get it booked in theaters, watch it find a home on DVD and cable — and then somewhere down the line, after all the release expenses are recovered, maybe even rake in a few bucks. And yet, when talking to filmmakers and sales reps heading into this year’s Sundance, it’s shocking how few are following new distribution strategies. Submarine […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 2:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] Do I need permission to film that person? In my previous documentaries, the answer was always clear: get a signed release form. But this film was set in a different world: a virtual world called Second Life, populated solely by digital avatars. Was this a game or a place governed by the laws of the real world? To make things more complicated, most “residents” (as the users call themselves) fiercely guard their real identities, adopting fanciful new names, ethnicities, nationalities, genders, even species. Asking for a resident’s […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, Jan. 21, 9:30 pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] Our goal in making Restrepo, a documentary about soldiers at a remote outpost in Afghanistan, was to give viewers the experience of a 90-minute deployment. We had no difficult decisions, per se, but we did have important ones. First and foremost, we decided that our cameras would never leave the soldiers. We would not interview generals or diplomats; we would not return to the United States to talk to the families. We would limit ourselves to what the soldiers had access to and nothing more. Finally our film […]
New Frontier Performances and Installations [PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, Jan. 21, 3:00 pm — New Frontier on Main, Park City] Not filming anything, I developed software that breaks down film as video into its basic primitives — the building blocks of media. I take body signals and sound to reanimate and dematerialize existing media and create film objects and “dream anatomies” of our familiar media body. These computational cinema works are not recorded; they are generated as the viewer experiences the work in real time. The works synchronize with your own body to create new synesthetic experiences.
Here’s the great director of photography Ed Lachman on the roots of his career and the making of Sundance’s Opening Night film, Howl.
One independent film I’m especially looking forward to in 2010 is Braden King’s Here, shot in Armenia by Ballast‘s Lol Crawley and starring Ben Foster and Lubna Azabal. Braden’s film is ambitiously conceived, a story of a romance between a cartographer sent to map the Eastern European country and a local art photographer that will blend King’s striking images and moody drama with interstitial material by a number of great experimental filmmakers. Braden has launched a blog about the making of his film. Here’s an excerpt: It was an adventure. It was magnificent. It was terrible. It was hard. We […]
One of the most creative and fascinating young filmmakers working today is Brent Green, the Pennsylvania-based animator whose work we first brought to our readers’ attention in 2005 when we selected him as one of our “25 New Faces.” His new film, Gravity, a feature, is his most ambitious film yet, and at the Andrew Edlin Gallery site he has posted a preview that makes me psyched to see the whole film. You can check it out here. Gravity promises to be an amazing blend of live action, narrative, and puppet stop-motion animation in a fantastically constructed set built on […]
I’ll post a bit later about all the stuff in the new Filmmaker magazine that’s not online. It’s a particularly good issue, I think, and one of the things which is print-only is Alicia Van Couvering’s look at five films that found their money and went into production in 2010. We decided to do a financing-oriented corrective to all the doom-and-gloom stories out there, and this one is full of practical tips for filmmakers looking to crowdsource and raise money through other unconventional means. One of the films she writes about is Kentucker Audley’s Open Five, which is our 25 […]