Select stories from our Summer issue are now available, including this year’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. (Read the press release here.) You can now read online our interviews with Amir Bar-Lev on his new doc, The Tillman Story; Gaspar Noe talks about his psychedelic look at the afterlife in Enter the Void; we look at the latest innovations in DSLR cameras; and some of our friends give their favorite apps, program and Web services. Plus, Lance Weiler’s Culture Hacker column focuses on transmedia while Anthony Kaufman’s Industry Beat looks at the realities of the Do It With Others […]
It’s tempting to get distracted. It happens to filmmakers all the time. Concern over gear, building audiences, developing social media strategies, new tools, new services. The promise of transmedia (the ability for a story to live beyond a single screen, device or medium) offers such rich storytelling potential. But for some it will become yet another distraction. Case in point: After a recent speaking engagement I was approached by a group of filmmakers. Some were trying to figure out the value of transmedia while others said with a sense of pride that they’d designed the perfect transmedia experience, as if […]
Beginning with the dying moments of a young drug dealer in Tokyo, Gaspar Noé travels deep into our subconscious to explore what happens after we Enter the Void.
In his gripping documentary, The Tillman Story, Amir Bar-Lev investigates the cover-up of the death of football star turned Army Ranger Pat Tillman.
Filmmaker and its friends recommend our favorite apps, programs and Web services.
It’s been nearly two years since Canon, Nikon and Panasonic started putting high-definition video technology into some of their medium-priced DSLR cameras. They did this without realizing how useful these new cameras could be to the professional filmmaking community. Tim Smith of Canon USA recently joked in an interview that most of the filmmakers he’d met did not know where to find the still-photograph function on their new cameras. In a way he’s right, but at this year’s NAB it was apparent that it is camera manufacturers who need to figure out how to make videography an even more efficient function on […]
Susan Youssef SUSAN YOUSSEF. At the IFP Narrative Lab, a mentor said of Susan Youssef’s first feature, Habibi Rasak Kharban (literally, “Darling, Something’s Wrong with Your Head”): “It’s a classic story, like Romeo and Juliet.” True, but the roots of Youssef’s story go back far further. The film is an adaptation of the 12th-century Sufi parable Majnun Layla, which was itself based on a 7th-century Arabic story. Over the years, the tragic tale of undying love between a woman and the wandering poet her family forbids her to marry has formed the basis for countless works of art, from Shakespeare’s […]
Jason Byrne When we caught up with filmmaker Jason Byrne to include him in this year’s “25,” it was via e-mail from Tanzania. At the sa me time Byrne’s hypnotic experimental documentary Scrap Vessel winds its way along the festival circuit, he is working as an audio/visual archivist for the United Nations Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. “Living in East Africa for the last two years has been a deeply rich experience, and this job has been fascinating but psychologically difficult at times, especially when listening to the many graphically explained testimonies from witnesses to the genocide,” he writes. Byrne has […]
Brent Stewart When you live next to Harmony Korine some unconventional ideas can creep into your head. So when Brent Stewart was thinking about making a chamber-piece drama on 35mm and shooting the whole thing with little to no camera movement he went to his famous filmmaking neighbor for some advice. “I knew it would be a challenge to pull off because even Harmony said to me, ‘Man, that’s risky.’” But, The Colonel’s Bride, Stewart’s debut feature, is an intimate look at loneliness, old age and death with striking photography, a haunting score and a stirring lead performance that shouldn’t […]