Long before she became an Oscar-winning filmmaker, Dartford native Andrea Arnold settled on a path that was anything but conventional. After moving to London in the late ’70s, she worked as a dancer on Top of the Pops, and later became a TV presenter in Britain for Saturday-morning kids’ programs like No. 73, Motormouth, and the enviro-awareness series A Beetle Called Derek. Never entirely comfortable in front of the cameras, Arnold was always writing, logging story ideas and character sketches. She left television in the early ’90s, went to film school, and made two shorts that screened at Cannes. In […]
I received the following email from Jon Reiss detailing an offer he’s making to filmmakers. Jon is a wealth of knowledge about all matters related to DIY and hybrid distribution, and I hope folks decide to take him up on the below. As some of you might know, one of the reasons that I wrote Think Outside the Box Office was after those first Filmmaker articles I wrote in Fall ‘08 about my experiences distributing my graffiti doc Bomb It, many filmmakers contacted me to help them with their films. However they were all broke, as most filmmakers are. The […]
Eric Rohmer, the New Wave filmmaker who made intimate, conversational films exploring deep moral and ethical themes with a simple elegance, died today in Paris at the age of 89. Like many of his colleagues in the French film movement, Rohmer began his career as a film critic, eventually becoming the editor of Cahiers du Cinema. Although he made his first feature in 1959, he became more widely known to international audiences in the late ’60s and ’70s, beginning with his Six Moral Tales, a series of six films which included his acclaimed My Night at Maude’s, Claire’s Knee, and […]
I’ve been hearing about Zachary Oberzan’s no-budget unauthorized adaptation of David Morrell’s First Blood (the basis for the Rambo movie series) from one of our writers, Lauren Wissot, for some time. Staged entirely in Oberzan’s apartment and featuring the director in every part, the film was called by Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice as “the best movie of 2010.” And, over at Hammer to Nail, Brandon Harris has praised the film too. He writes: David Cronenberg once said that as long as you have good sound, movie audiences can be compelled to watch anything. Zachary Oberzan’s Flooding With Love […]
The online video of the moment is Alex Roman’s The Third & the Seventh — so much so that Roman’s own site, which I was going to link to, is down due to bandwidth excess. (It redirects to the Vimeo video below, but rather than watching here, go to Vimeo and resize to HD and see it full-screen.) The video is described by Roman as “a FULL-CG animated piece that tries to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal.” In other words, what you are […]
Mike Johnston, who wrote the article here on the site about the indie film Ink and piracy, has started an online video series about indie film. His first episode consists of a phone interview with the makers of The Red Tail, a documentary about job loss and outsourcing. From the film’s website: While 4,400 aircraft mechanics wage a seemingly endless strike to keep their jobs from being outsourced – Mechanic Roy Koch and his daughter Melissa (Director of The Red Tail in collaboration with Dawn Mikkelson) follow the trail of outsourcing to China. The Koch’s journey is a search for […]
Speaking of the new DSLR cameras, Canon and Vimeo have launched a contest in which filmmakers are being inspired to create episodes of an eight-part narrative based on the old La Ronde structure: each episode starts by following the image that ends the previous episode. Details from PDN Gear Gude: Canon gave Laforet a still image of a cab and then asked him to interpret it into a 2-3 minute short film. Laforet’s film, which was shot with a Canon EOS 7D digital SLR, ends on a still image. Contestants are then asked to take that image and interpret it […]
Out of all the films associated with The Film Movement Formerly Known as Mumblecore, Aaron Katz’s Quiet City was perhaps the most visually assured. There was a real poetry and sensitivity to light and locations in that film, and his follow-up, Cold Weather, looks to take his filmmaking to a new level. The film will premiere at SXSW ’10, and the trailer is below.
In a press release sent out this week, director Robinson Devor (Police Beat, Zoo, which scored on Filmmaker’s Top 25 of the Decade list) is currently underway in San Francisco on a documentary on Sara Jane Moore, who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in September 1975 outside the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Written by Devor, Charles Mudede and shot by d.p. Sean Kirby, Moore (pictured), now 80 and currently on parole after thirty years in prison, returns to San Francisco for the first time since the assassination attempt to be interviewed. The film also chronicles the lead […]
Jon Reiss has an excellent two-parter up at Ted Hope’s Truly Free Film blog. Titled “25 Points to Consider in Approaching Your Festival Premiere,” it’s broken down in a list of things you should consider in general before arriving at, really, any festival with your film, and then those other things you should think about if you are planning to make the festival premiere some part of your distribution launch. The latter piece in particular hit home as I’ve spoken to a number of filmmakers recently who have asked for DIY distribution advice. They want to know who to partner […]