Okay, this looks pretty great.
Over at Indiewire, Eugene Hernandez has an excellent report from Berlin on the premiere of Ryan Eslinger’s When a Tree Falls in the Forest. Eslinger, who was one of our 25 New Faces in 2004, is one of the youngest directors to premiere a film in Berlin’s Competition. If you read the industry papers, it’s been a mixed blessing as the film received several negative trade reviews and star Sharon Stone didn’t show for the post-screening Q and A. Hernandez offers a more balanced view, noting fest head Dieter Kosslick’s support for Eslinger and quoting Raj Roy, the American member […]
For those of you excited about the March 2 release of David Fincher’s latest, Zodiac, IESB.net has posted nine clips from the film. And, if you haven’t read it yet, check out Jamie Stuart’s “Are We there Yet?”, an article on HD cinematography that talks with d.p. Harris Savides about his work on the film.
I was surprised how purely lovely I found Doug Aitken’s Sleepwalkers, currently on display through tomorrow (Monday) night outside the Museum of Modern Art. Using multiple projectors to beam images onto walls and screens affixed outside the museum, Aitken’s public art film has an appealingly simple concept: the synchronous, small-scale moments that echo between a group of otherwise disparate New Yorkers going about their daily lives. With actors like Tilda Swinton, Chan Marshall (aka Cat Power), Seu Jorge and Donald Sutherland and carefully composed images that alternate between shallow focus portraits and geometric abstraction, Aitken’s silent city cinema does what […]
It’s late at night in Europe, and I’m not quite sure what to make of this article I’ve just read in Variey by William Triplett entitled “IRS strips indie film tax breaks.” The thrust of the article: the IRS has ennacted onerous restrictions on the film financing tax break contained in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004. This tax break has incentivized private investors to invest in independent film by allowing them to deduct the full amount of their investment in the first year rather than amortizing it over multiple years. According to the Variety article, the IRS is […]
Mike Mohan, who some of you may know from his work at the Sundance Institute, is also a director, and he’s just launched a new web series at Atom Films called “Casual Encounters.” It’s a sort of mockumentary spoof on the whole phenomenon of finding a one night stand on internet sites like Craig’s List. Two episodes are already posted, with more promised for the coming weeks. Here’s episode one (and it’s, as they say, NSFW — “not safe for work”).
Over at his Wild Diner Films blog, Sujewa Ekanayake is asking what should be more than a rhetorical question: “So, self-distribution in 2006: how did it go?” He’s requesting that DIY distributing filmmakers share some of their experiences and to start it off, he’s posted the numbers on his own Date Number One.
I’m in Paris for a few days, and there are posters up everywhere for Jonathan Liebesman’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning., but the director’s name can’t be seen on the poster. There is, however, an outside-the-billing-block “Un production de” credit for producer Michael Bay, whose powerful film brand is now validated by this most auteur-centric of film cultures. As recognition, here (via Defamer) is “Bay’s Touch,” a totally nuts tribute to Bay (and be sure to click on the link for the lyrics).
For those who thought the Internet’s grasp on the creative side of filmmaking ended with the nosedive Snakes on a Plane took, think again. Variety reported yesterday about MySpace Movie MashUp, a competition to choose the director of a movie the site has teamed up to finance with U.K. based Film 4 and Vertigo Films. According to the Variety story, the film is set to begin shooting in October and has a $1.96 million budget. Vertigo will release the film theatrically while MySpace handles the online release and Film 4 will show it on their video-on-demand service. Beginning Wednesday, any […]
Two issues ago Chris Campion profiled for Filmmaker the Dutch director Cyrus Frisch, who was in post on his latest feature at the time. Now, that film, Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Me it Would Become this Bad in Afghanistan?, has premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival, and Campion has written another piece on Frisch, this time in The Observer. The film, shot entirely with a mobile phone, is a first-person POV movie about a Dutch soldier returning from Afghanistan who finds his own daily life inflected with the violence he witnessed there. From Campion’s piece: A huge plume of black […]