Indiewire has posted the writers and directors participating in the Sundance June Labs. Here’s the list and the descriptions of the projects: “A Breath Away”/Kit Hui (writer/director), U.S.A./ChinaAs a typhoon approaches Hong Kong, the residents of a high-rise apartment explore their need for human connection, family, and cultural identity in their increasingly isolated worlds.Born and raised in Hong Kong, Kit Hui immigrated to the United States at age 16. She received her MFA from Columbia University’s Graduate Film Program. Her short film “Missing” screened at the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival and the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, and she was recently […]
A few posts below I linked to a short video clip that is something of a primer on Net Neutrality. Here, via Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly begins what in this post is the grad school version — read up ’cause you’ll be tested on this tomorrow. First off , Drum offers a long discussion of the problems inherent in the Barton-Rush bill currently working its way through Congress. Drum starts off a little bit dubious that the issue is as big as some are saying, but he works his way through the pros and cons. He starts by […]
Over at his blog,, Anthony Kaufman cuts loose on what he calls the “woefully underpublicized” Indiewire/Emerging Pictures Undiscovered Gems series, which I blogged about a few posts below. The series opens tonight with a 9:30 screening (repeated tomorrow) of Jem Cohen’s debut fiction feature, Chain. He writes: I wouldn’t have even known of the showing myself had I not received an email directly from the director. Emerging Pictures’ web address http://www.emergingpictures.com/undiscovered_gems.htm doesn’t even work; indieWIRE has no mention of the showing on its website, and the Sundance Channel, another sponsor, gives it no props. Maybe it’s just the crowded New […]
Over at his blog, 40 Years in the Desert, Daniel Nemet-Nejat interviews Green Cine’s Jonathan Marlow. We all know Green Cine for its incredible daily blog, but Marlow is the company’s director of content acquisitions and business development and he discusses Green Cine’s distribution activities, including their VOD efforts. Check it out.
The Wall Street Journal has a piece up by John Jurgensen about declining budgets in the music video industry, a development that has something to do with both music business economics as well as new modes of viewing and distribution. From the article: But music executives also say the big video budgets of the 1990s are generally unnecessary, now that videos are most often watched on small screens like laptops and video iPods. Reality TV programming and the success of amateur “viral” videos that viewers watch and email to friends have changed the expectations of young viewers, says Monte Lipman, […]
In a time in which plans for building a nuclear bomb or engineering a bio-terrorism attack are scarily available on the internet, let’s take a moment to note the closing of Loompanics, the Washington state publisher run by Mike Hoy whose titles were once deemed downright dangerous. Now, however, as the company announces a going out of business sale, Loompanics’s books seem, paradoxically, like quaint mementos of a more innocent time. I say “paradoxically” because there’s no doubt that the publisher, which experienced its share of First Amendment battles, suffered after passage of the Patriot Act when people reading books […]
Alex Curtis at Public Knowledge created a short two-minute clip explaining just some of what’s at stake in the upcoming battle for “net neutrality.” And here’s from Save the Internet, a new website launched by a coalition supporting net neutrality. From the site: Congress is pushing a law that would abandon Network Neutrality, the Internet’s First Amendment. Network neutrality prevents companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast from deciding which Web sites work best for you — based on what site pays them the most. Your local library shouldn’t have to outbid Barnes & Noble for the right to have its […]
Over at Caveh Zahedi’s blog, the director of I Am a Sex Addict ponders the downside of posting one’s daily thoughts as a way of promoting a film: One of the interesting things about having a blog is that anyone can attack you anytime and can do so anonymously. At least with film critics, their names are on their reviews. But with a blog, anyone can post a hostile comment, without any kind of accountability. In short, a blog, like a personal film, can serve as a lightning-rod for free-floating cyberspace aggression. I’m not sure what to do with these […]
The distribution panel I moderated last week is now a podcast. (If I had known this was to be archived on all of your hard drives, I probably would have been more concise in my questions…) Click on the link above to hear Caveh Zahedi, Jay Duplass, Susan Leber and me discuss the treacherous shoals of DIY distribution and offer some hard-earned advice to all of you aspiring directors and producers out there. For a print preview, here’s what Indiewire’s Eugene Hernandez had to say about it.
The Cannes lineup is in a bunch of places: here’s the link to Indiewire’s piece. Quick take: Inarritu’s Babel, Linklater’s Fast Food Nation, new films by Bruno Dumont, Pedro Almodovar, Ken Loach and Aki Kaurismaki, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales (which we have a tiny preview of in the new issue — more when it comes out), and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s follow-up to Distant all in Competition. Andrea Arnold’s Red Road the sole first feature in Competition. (I’m wondering what happened to Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain — Variety reported that it would be the festival “somewhere” just […]