Announced today, IFP‘s 30th annual Independent Film Week (formerly the IFP Market) will include Kevin Smith, filmmaker/activist Robert Greenwald and SnagFilms CEO Rich Allen as the headliners for this year’s festivities. Read full release below. KEVIN SMITH, ROBERT GREENWALD AND RICK ALLEN TO HEADLINE IFP’S 30th ANNUAL INDEPENDENT FILM WEEK SEPT. 14-19 Film Screenings, Panel Discussions, and Networking Highlight Six-Day Event www.independentfilmweek.com New York, NY (August 5, 2008) – IFP announced today that IFP alumnus Kevin Smith (Clerks), filmmaker and activist Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism), and SnagFilms.com CEO Rick Allen will headline public events during the […]
Producer Noah Harlan of 2.1 Films just came back from the Sundance Producer’s Lab and forwarded these comments about some of the topics discussed there. Like every producer, Harlan is trying to figure out what the new digital distribution landscape will look like for independents. I particularly responded here to his attempt to parse the revenue possibilities for the streaming and ad-supported models — a topic you’ve read about on this blog previously. For now, though, here’s Harlan. I just got back from the Sundance Producer’s Conference and had a few thoughts that I wanted to share with some of […]
Since stories about declining staff opportunities for professional film critics seem to appearing all over, I thought I’d post this notice from Creative Capital and the Warhol Foundation announcing grants ranging up to $50,000 to arts writers. Although the focus is on the visual arts, the site says, “By ‘contemporary visual art,’ we mean visual art made since World War II. We will also consider projects on post-War work in adjacent fields – architecture, design, film, theater/performance, sound, etc.- if they significantly engage the discourses and concerns of contemporary visual art.” Take special note: this round of proposals specifically excludes […]
The analysts over at Tech Ticker have posted a short video conversation about the current state and future direction of internet video and the ad market. The discussion is kicked off by a mention of Disney’s recent earnings statement and the profitability of its fairly conservative and unsexy online video division. The Tech Ticker guys go on to talking about Hulu and YouTube, particularly how the latter is struggling for the moment to sell advertising against user-generated video. The analysts say that, with the exception of entertainment companies, which will advertise on user-generated spots, most mainstream advertisers don’t want to […]
Short End Magazine uses the occasion of our “25 New Faces” list to recap three conversations between Noralil Ryan Fores and filmmakers from this year’s edition. You can read an interview with the Zellner Brothers and also this interview with My Olympic Summer‘s Daniel Robin, an excerpt of which is below. SM: Given four words to describe your style and four words to describe the purpose of your work, which eight words total do you chose? DR: You’re killing me. Style: personal, atmospheric, rhythm, process. Purpose: cathartic, engage, communicate, new cinema. SM: Why? DR: Well, I think for a film […]
Over at The Workbook Project Lisa Salem has launched a new section of the site entitled “How to Build and Audience and Keep it.” It’s a multi-faceted section, containing both a blog as well as more organized content areas covering different aspects of audience-building and retention. Here, in a Preamble, she explains what led her to this area of specialization: I speak from a particular form of experience. In 2005 I set out to walk the whole of Los Angeles – I’d lived there for most of ten years. I pushed a baby-stroller with a video camera attached to the […]
Here’s the third of our catch-ups with previous “25 New Faces” filmmakers. If you’ve been on the list and haven’t sent us an update, you can still email one to editor.filmmakermagazine AT gmail.com. Marshall Curry, director, 2005: Since releasing Street Fight, I have been working on two docs– one about the radical environmental group, the Earth Liberation Front, and the other about three 12-year old kids who aspire to be NASCAR drivers (they race gokarts that go 60 mph in a nationally competitive circuit that’s sort of the little leagues for NASCAR.) Both films are in post now, and the […]
A true independent, documentarian Dorothy Fadiman has resolutely worked outside the system for more than 30 years. Pittsburgh native Fadiman was a Stanford speech pathology graduate with a husband and two kids when, in 1976, an LSD trip inspired her to become a filmmaker. The resulting short, Radiance, took a religious, poetic and academic look at light in the universe, and motivated Fadiman to continue to make films driven by her passions and interests. A grassroots activist since the early 60s, Fadiman has predominantly focused on social and political issues in her documentaries, and she had tremendous success with the […]
I just finished writing the letter for this week’s Filmmaker newsletter and discussed a few thoughts prompted by my trip this past weekend to the Creative Capital retreat at Williams College. I used some discussions I had with both artists and filmmakers to think further about our need to come up with new economic (and patronage) models that can support media work in that hybrid space between the art world and conventional theatrical distribution. (By the way, if you don’t subscribe to our newsletter, you can do so here on the main page. Each week I’ve been using the space […]
I’m late to the linkfest on this one, but I just caught up with John Anderson’s piece in The New York Times on self-distributing indie films. It’s positioned as a trend piece, and the hook is this week’s release of Randall Miller’s Bottle Shock, which the filmmaker is getting in theaters himself with the help of Freestyle Releasing and former Picturehouse exec Dennis O’Conner. Filmmakers, of course, have been self-distributing for years — the difference now is that the specialty distribution circuit seems like such a bleak place that fewer are questioning the decision to do so. What I found […]