At a luncheon celebrating the end of the IFP Market and Filmmaker Conference at NoHo’s Chinatown restaurant this Thursday, a number of awards were given to films and filmmakers who were part of the IFP’s various programs. The winners are: The Fledgling Fund Award for Emerging Latino Filmmakers ($10,000): Vivian Lesnik Weisman. IFP Market Emerging Narrative Screenplay Award ($5,000, presented by Artists Public Domain): I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, Scott Teems. IFP Market Documentary Completion Award ($5,000, presented by Artists Public Domain, and $25,000 in-kind support from Alpha Cine, Analog Digital International, Mercer Media, Showbiz Software/Media […]
If you’re in the habit of just bookmarking this blog page, check out the main page for two new online features of films opening this weekend: American Hardcore and Jesus Camp.
Director Paul Rachman retraces the history of punk rock. Paul Rachman’s American Hardcore is a salute to the U.S. underground punk scene that exploded in 1980. Inspired by Steven Blush’s 2001 book American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Feral House), Rachman’s blunt documentary was culled from over 120 hours of interview footage, as well as a stack of archival concert videos compiled from closets, shoeboxes and fan memorabilia stashes. The film also documents a phenomenon that Rachman and Blush observed firsthand, before the scene fizzled in the mid-’80s. “The scene burned out before anybody came to capitalize on it, so it’s […]
The team behind the award-winning documentary Boys of Baraka are back with a new film that focuses on Evangelical children training to be “soldiers in God’s Army.” Early on in Jesus Camp, Pentecostal minister Becky Fischer asks an auditorium full of children and parents: “Do you believe God can do anything?” A young mother grabs her child’s arm and raises it. LEVI IN HEIDI EWING AND RACHEL GRADY’S JESUS CAMP. This is just one of many provocative moments that give Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s latest documentary its haunting power. As enthralling as the religious rallies it reveals, Jesus Camp […]
Filmmaker Jamie Stuart, who is working on an article upcoming for Filmmaker, met Michel Gondry recently at New York’s Regency Hotel. The picture at left is the result of that meeting, which Stuart explains below: “I thought this was one of those ideas so obvious and so attuned to the subject that I became paranoid somebody was going to beat me to it. Photo Booth is basically gimmick software that comes with all new Macs — and it seems everybody plays around with it for maybe 5 minutes, then they forget about it. When I met Michel recently to discuss […]
Over at The Daily Reel I’ve been following the online mystery of Lonelygirl15. Today, Virginia Heffernan of the New York Times has near the final word on the subject. Homeschooler Bree is actually a “twentyish” actress named Jessica Rose and “the masterminds of the Lonelygirl15 videos are Ramesh Flinders, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Marin County, Calif., and Miles Beckett, a doctor turned filmmaker.” The real mystery now is whether Bree’s fanatical cyber audience will love her as much as she morphs into a purely fictional character in whatever future projects her creators have planned for her.
If you’re in NYC tomorrow night, here’s news of a panel event sponsored by the IFP which is free to readers of the Filmmaker blog. And also take note of next week’s Independent Film Week promotion, in which tickets to a bunch of NYC independent theaters are discounted to only $6. IFP and The New York Times present a Special TimesTalks Panel with Independent Filmmakers FREE for Friends of Filmmaker Magazine! “COMING OF AGE ON SCREEN” Don’t miss this conversation with independent filmmakers whose own rites of passage inspired their films and captured an era. Moderated by David Carr, New […]
The Paris Review has scored the first published interview with Laura Albert, the “woman who was JT LeRoy.” There’s only a small excerpt on the website from Nathaniel Rich’s interview with Albert, which I’ve quoted in its entirety below. To read the rest, we’ll have to pick up the magazine. The quote below details that “Eureka!” moment in which a young Albert developed a strategy that she would finetune in later years. From the interview: INTERVIEWER: Did you have many friends at school—kids your own age? LAURA ALBERT: I was friends with all the nerd guys. And the popular kids […]
I’ve vowed not to link to James Ponsoldt’s blog too much since I produced his feature Off the Black, but he’s a prolific writer who is frequently posting pieces that are interesting and useful enough to other filmmakers. So, here I’m busting my conflict-of-interest self-censorship to note his comments on shrinking Tim Orr’s widescreen compositions to 1:1.35 for our video transfer: On Tim’s off-days, he and I met at Technicolor to begin the color-timing process (for video/DVD) with the brilliant MIKE UNDERWOOD. Mike’s a colorist, and worked with Tim on both “All the Real Girls” and “Undertow.” The two of […]
Via Brian Newman’s blog this movie trailer timed to the release of Chris Anderson’s new book, The Long Tail. Historical point of reference: Richard Serra and Carlotta Schoolman’s 1973 video, Television Delivers People.