Set during Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship in Chile during the 1970s, director Pablo Larrain mixes social commentary and the love for cinema to create a horrific (and darkly humors) tale with a tour-de-force performance by lead actor Alfredo Castro. We meet Raul (Castro) as he shows up to a popular talent show prepared to take the crown as the Chilean Tony Manero. Yes, John Travolta’s legendary character from Saturday Night Fever. Unfortunately for Raul he shows up on the wrong week (they’re currently finding the Chilean Chuck Norris). A small man with little to say, we almost feel sorry for […]
Director (The Look) and producer (the upcoming Valerie Plame story pic, Fair Game) David Sigal has made a documentary about Florent, the legendary and now shuttered New York meatpacking district restaurant. Scheduled to premiere at the New York Food Film Festival in June, Florent: Queen of the Meat Market is previewed at Nowness, which writes: Until its closure in June 2008, New York bistro Florent was that rare place where you could simultaneously eat a burger, catch a drag act and—if you were lucky—glimpse Calvin Klein. Named after its owner, the indefatigably flamboyant Florent Morellet, during its 23-year existence the […]
Filmmaker and Webby Founder Tiffany Shlain gave this year’s UC Berkeley commencement address in front of 11,500 people at the Haas Pavilion. Her speech mixes a tale of her personal journey with a call to make the most of the connected world the Internet has offered us. The speech ends with a short film and then Shlain dispatched her film crews to interview graduates about their hopes for the future. “I believe if you can name it, you are that much closer to making it happen,” she said. Her speech is below.
As the conversation regarding M.I.A. shifts to a debate over who ordered the truffle fries, I thought I should post her latest video, “Born Free,” directed by Romain Gavras, in case you haven’t seen it. M.I.A, Born Free from ROMAIN-GAVRAS on Vimeo.
Actor and director Dennis Hopper died today at 74. When I heard the news I started searching on YouTube for some of my favorite Hopper moments — not just Blue Velvet, Easy Rider and Apocalypse Now but also that scene from True Romance, his supporting work in Rebel without a Cause and Giant, the experimental abandon of his underrated The Last Movie, his haunted addition to River’s Edge, and the incredible, Linda Manz-starring Out of the Blue. But then I came across this video essay by Matt Zoller Seitz which is an excellent flashback to not only many of Hopper’s […]
Since part of the mission of Stranger Than Fiction is to promote “lost gems,” it should come as no surprise that programmer Thom Powers would choose to screen Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera, a little seen (outside of film schools) Soviet classic that has had a profound influence on everything from Jean-Luc Godard to car commercials. A mish-mash of documentary material and visual effects, Man With a Movie Camera is a rapidly edited documentary experiment — and perhaps the world’s first music video. Last night’s screening featured a modern score arranged by John Walter, an editor and filmmaker […]
As a teenager, 29-year-old writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve was plucked from theater classes at her Paris lycée and cast in Late August, Early September (1998) by Olivier Assayas, a heady experience that would come to shape her future endeavors. After a brief detour into academia, she made a few short films and, like Assayas (to whom she’s now married), briefly contributed to Cahiers du cinéma before embarking more seriously on the path of becoming a film director. Early on, the late producer Humbert Balsan (champion of Elia Suleiman and Claire Denis, among others) took an interest in Hansen-Løve and helped finance […]
Legend has it when John Ford read the short story that would be the inspiration behind his first Western with sound, he immediately took it to his boss David O. Selznick, who, just as quickly as it was pitched to him, tossed it aside as a forgettable picture. Lucky for us, Ford didn’t move on. He dug into his own pocket, made the film himself (and later sold it to United Artists), packed up the production and went out to Utah’s picturesque Monument Valley (which would be the site for many of his Westerns to come) — far from the […]
On June 5 and 6 IFP will present a weekend-long workshop with Bomb It director Jon Reiss on DIY hybrid distribution and marketing in New York City. Reiss has highlighted his journey releasing and marketing Bomb It in the pages of Filmmaker, and went into greater detail in his book Think Outside the Box Office. In the workshop Reiss will go over everything from creating a distribution strategy to advertising campaigns to transmedia platforms. And you also get into a networking happy hour. Lean more about the event and how to get tickets below. IFP PRESENTS THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX […]
What happens when you take an independent American filmmaker, a fetish for Communist memorabilia, and subtract all irony? Pretty much the films of Jim Finn. From May 27-June 2, the Anthology Film Archives will be playing the shorts and features of Jim Finn. Disclaimer: I have shown his films at film festivals I work for and commissioned Finn to make a Lunchfilm. The Busby Berkeley of propaganda, Finn has made three features with a lo-fi indie style that mixes larger Hollywood genre trappings in a big bowl. The results are funny, but also packed with socio-political commentary. Seems hard to […]