Some good, or at least interesting, films surfaced at Tribeca this year—I’ll get to a few a couple of paragraphs down, and I wrote about others here last week—almost in spite of the umbrella organization itself. You can’t help but wonder: What is the template for this festival, which has been struggling to find its identity since its inception? Toronto, Sundance, Cannes, Berlin? San Francisco, Denver? Answer: It’s not cast from a festival mold at all, in spite of the invaluable input of former artistic director Peter Scarlet and David Kwok, as far as I can tell the only current […]
Today the Sundance Institute announced the 13 projects selected for this year’s Director and Screenwriting Labs. Talking place in Park City, Utah June 1-25, the Labs will be filled with many familiar names to Filmmaker readers. 2008 25 New Faces alum Myna Joseph will be attending; as will Ondi Timoner, whose doc We Live In Public won the doc Grand Prize at Sundance in 2009; Ry Russo-Young, who was awarded our Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You award for You Wont Miss Me at last year’s Gothams, will be attending with her latest screenplay; and ’09 25 […]
Artist Jesper Just, who Shari Roman wrote about for Filmmaker in 2007, directed this video, “Sycamore Feeling,” for the band Trentemøller. It was produced by Lucas Joaquin, Jay Van Hoy, Lars Knudsen and shot by Kasper Tuxen. (Hat tip: Antville.)
Via Twitter, Errol Morris called this the best commercial of all time. He may have a point. (Hat tip: HTML Giant.)
YouTube illusions are becoming a genre all their own. This one is kinda gorgeous. (Hat tip: iTricks.)
For a while AMC has been an approachable theater chain for independent filmmakers seeking a direct way to get their films in front of theatrical audiences. Now, the company has announced AMC Independent (“AMCi”), a program that commits screens in 60 AMC venues to independent fare. Most of the films upcoming on the initial AMCi slate are mini-major titles (Please Give, Babies) that I’m sure would have wound up on AMC screens anyway, but the fact that the company has positioned the program they way it has — and the noises they are making about future programming — are encouraging […]
Premiering in the documentary competition at the Tribeca Film Festival this week, Alex Mar’s American Mystic is a poem of a film, following three young people in America who have chosen to make their spiritual practice the center of their lives. A pagan priestess who proudly defines herself as a witch, Morpheus has moved to the outskirts of rural California to create a pagan sanctuary on a small plot of land. Kublai, a Spiritualist medium, works on a farm in upstate New York but spends his off hours with his head in the hands of elderly women, learning to channel […]
In Michele and Kieran Mulroney’s debut feature Paper Man, Richard (Jeff Daniels) is a sweet natured, struggling author who’s unlikely friendship with an alienated teenager named Abby (Emma Stone) grows increasingly tender and strange during an extended stay in Sag Harbor to work on his latest book. Although his marriage to Claire (Lisa Kundrow) is fading, his imaginary interlocutor, a caped superhero named Captain Excellent (Ryan Reynolds) keeps him plenty busy when he’s not trying to avoid working on his book or inventing new ways to keep Abby dropping by. The married writing and directing duo, having long toiled as […]
Last night’s Stranger Than Fiction screening of Doug Block’s The Kids Grow Up was a homecoming of sorts. Block’s previous foray into personal documentary 51 Birch Street was actually the first ever film to be screened in the series, a fact announced by its organizer, Thom Powers, when he introduced it (and his new baby) to the audience. In 51 Birch Street, Block recounted how his mother’s death and his father’s subsequent remarriage crystallized doubts he’d always had about his parent’s marriage. Block’s latest outing, The Kids Grow Up, is similarly a family affair — it weaves archival footage of […]
Yesterday, in an 8-1 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a statute that would have infringed on certain documentary makers’ First Amendment rights. Relating to the depiction of animal cruelty and killing on screen, the statute, by criminalizing such depictions, would have limited filmmakers’ abilities to cover any number of subjects ranging from hunting to our food industry to, ironically, animal abuse itself. The IFP New York was one of several organizations filing an amicus brief in support of the filmmaker filing the case, a documentarian named Robert Stevens who was sentenced to 37 months in Federal prison for […]