Film Independent announced the nominations for this year’s Spirit Awards. The award will be celebrating its 25th anniversary this year when the ceremony takes place on Friday, March 5. Precious and The Last Station lead in nominations with five each, including Best Feature and Best Director. Full list of nominations below. BEST FEATURE (500) Days Of SummerAmreekaPrecious Sin Nombre The Last Station BEST DIRECTOREthan Coen, Joel Coen, A Serious ManLee Daniels, PreciousCary Joji Fukunaga, Sin NombreJames Gray, Two LoversMichael Hoffman, The Last Station BEST FIRST FEATURE A Single Man Crazy Heart Easier With Practice Paranormal Activity The Messenger Awards Guide […]
Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker won Best Ensemble Performance and Best Feature at IFP’s Gotham Independent Film Awards, which was held last night in downtown Manhattan at Cipriani Wall Street. Bigelow was also given one of the evening’s Tribute awards. Also receiving Tributes were Natalie Portman, Stanley Tucci and Working Title Films’ Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner. Other winners include Ry Russo-Young‘s You Wont Miss Me, which received the Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You Award (which is chosen by Filmmaker Magazine); Robert Siegel, director of Big Fan, won Breakthrough Director and Robert Kenner‘s Food, Inc. won […]
Interview by Alicia Van Couvering Filmmaker selected John Maringouin as one of our “25 New Faces of Independent Film” in 2006 after seeing Running Stumbled, the filmmaker’s hilarious and disturbing film documenting his own reconciliation with his estranged father. This year he brought his remarkable film Big River Man to Sundance, a film several years in the making that documents the Amazon River expedition of Slovenian endurance swimmer Martin Strel. Strel’s stated mission is to bring environmental awareness to the rivers he swims, which have included some of the most polluted on Earth. Maringouin sets out to follow Strel’s expedition […]
If you’ve reached the blog through our home page, you will have probably noticed that Filmmakermagazine.com has received a face lift. Gone is the checkerboard of boxes and in its place is a front-page carousel and three-column design that hopefully directs you to our content a lot better. On the home page you’ll now find “The Guide,” in which we point you to interesting things to read, stream or hyperlink to. There are also links to our most popular content of the month as well as regularly updated Editors’ Picks of content we don’t want you to overlook. And, of […]
As we head into the quarter finals, it’s Italy, Russian, Germany, India, China, Iran, Africa and Japan… all competing in the Auteurs World Cup 2009. Combining two of the world’s favorite spectator sports — soccer and arthouse cinema — the good folks at The Auteurs have come up with a fun competition that focuses attention on regions as well as films. It doesn’t cost anything to participate, but you have to have seen the films. So, use this opportunity to see Chantal Akerman’s Toute une Nuit, Tarkovsky’s The Mirror, Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, or Moshen Makhmalbaf’s A Moment of Innocence.
The Sundance selection will be announced this week, and we’ll have it posted here on the blog as soon as it’s released. If you are a filmmaker lucky enough to get in, please keep us at Filmmaker informed of all of your publicity and distribution outreach efforts. Many if not most of you will have publicists, and they will be in direct touch with us. But for those of you doing other things in addition to or perhaps instead of conventional publicity, let us know. Particularly, links to Twitter feeds, blogs, RSS updates, etc. are appreciated. As in previous years […]
From all of us at Filmmaker, Happy Thanksgiving to all of our readers. Hope everyone has a great holiday. The blog will be back over the weekend and next week with the Gotham Awards, the Sundance Selection, the beginnings of our Decade End surveys, and more…
In life and art, John Hillcoat takes the road less traveled. Born in Queensland, Australia and raised in the United States, Hillcoat got a crash course in mid-sixties American music and culture from his parents, who took him to folk festivals where Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, and old-time blues musicians left a distinct impression. “As a young kid, I was thrown into the sixties in America, which was an unbelievable period, and my parents were very swept up in the civil rights movement,” he recalls. “I remember going on marches and seeing the profound upheaval of that time.” […]
As the search for a new IFP executive director continues, indie film producer Joana Vicente (who with her husband Jason Kliot have made independent movies with their labels, Open City Films, Blow Up Pictures and HDNet Films) has been named the interim head of the non-profit organization according to a release sent out today. Vicente, who is a member of the committee looking for a new head of the IFP, will join IFP next week to work on the transition with Michelle Byrd, who has lead the organization for the last 12 years and announced her departure back in June. […]
Ask me my favorite Hitchcock film and I’ll shoot you back the obvious answer: Vertigo, the director’s cinematic and fetishistic embodiment of romantic obsession. Ask me the film I’d be most likely to pop into my DVD player and re-watch for fun and I’ve another obvious answer: North by Northwest, his smart and stylish paranoid thriller, which he made the following year. And while Vertigo inspired a whole rash of erotic thrillers in the ’90s — Basic Instinct and all its imitators — North by Northwest‘s sly take on the American security stake feels perfectly of the moment. The good […]