Highlighted in The New York Times as well as our magazine during it’s impressive run through the festival circuit that included Toronto, Berlin and SXSW, Eddy Moretti and Vice magazine creator Suroosh Alvi‘s documentary on the only heavy metal band in Iraq is a gripping account of survival and the escape that music can bring. The band, Acrassicauda (English translation: Black Scorpion), is comprised of a group of twentysomethings who learned how to speak English through watching Hollywood movies and listening to bootleg tapes of Metallica and Slayer. Moretti and Alvi first heard of the band soon after the fall […]
If you are a regular — like, hourly — reader of this blog, you know something about In Spring, the short Jamie Stuart piece which was posted on his own site and linked here only to be taken down shortly thereafter. Some (including, I’ll admit, me) wondered if Stuart had, in his continual skirmishing with the confines of publicity in the service of artmaking, crossed some kind of line with this piece, which incorporated a real interview with a misidentified Werner Herzog (who Stuart painted in 2005, shown here) in the THINKfilm office within a fictional mock documentary on the […]
Here’s writer/director John Magary’s (pictured here with Robert Redford and Vilmos Zsigmond) second dispatch from the Sundance Directors’ Lab: This is my first stab at blogging, okay? I’ve never been a self-starting chronicler, never had a personal essay phase, or a journal, or a sketchbook. I’m not wired that way. I don’t really know how to steal away time in bars or cafes, to reflect on my day in an endearingly scruffy little notebook—even a grocery list is a chore. Long story short, I’m finishing up my second week here, and I have no notes. It’s blurs on top of […]
If you are in Chicago this next month — or, perhaps, if you’ve got frequent flier miles or simple wanderlust — then I highly recommend checking out Enter Dream, a photo show by writer, photographer and critic Ray Pride, whose work is well known to readers of Filmmaker as well as those of his own Movie City Indie blog. Ray’s evocative photos are visually stunning and haunted by the idea of cinema — they contain potent traces of storytelling, whiffs of dramatic atmosphere, and suggestions of character. Here’s the official spam: The photographs in “Enter Dream” anatomize the geography of […]
WERNER HERZOG AND D.P. PETER ZEITLINGER CAPTURE ANTARCTICA IN ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD. COURTESY THINKFILM. For more than 40 years, Werner Herzog has been redrawing the map, both cinematically and geographically. He started making short films in the mid-1960s, and made an impact internationally with Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972), the tale of a mad conquistador’s doomed jungle quest, the first of five collaborations with actor Klaus Kinski. Herzog and Kinski’s relationship was often turbulent and violent, but the ambitious, outlandish and usually unhinged films they made together over the course of the 70s and 80s […]
Over at Stream, Eric Kohn has a good write-up of the “Where Film and Internet Collide” event we hosted at the IFC Center last week with the IFP and IndieGoGo. He does a great job of summarizing the interviews with the creators of the various works we screened. Another good report is by the Film Panel Notetaker. Click on the links and read — between the two of them you’ll feel like you were there.
FilmInFocus is running a four-part series on exhibition, from the ultra-small-scale screenings of the microcinema movement to the shape of things to come for blockbuster moviegoing. The first part, Ed Halter’s take on microcinema, is up now.
The Sundance Director’s Lab is underway, and one of the participants, John Magary (pictured at right with Sundance Lab advisor Gyula Gazdag), has agreed to blog it for Filmmaker. Here’s the first of his posts. SUNDANCE, EPOCH 1 Day One smelled like chicken. Day Three smells like farts. I’m not talking about the Lab — haven’t gotten there yet. One can be coaxed out of a crippling fear of flying—it is irrational, after all—but heights is another matter. With heights, all you can say is, “Oh, stop being so scared.” (Hot tip: saying things like that to a phobic isn’t […]
LOU TAYLOR PUCCI IN DIRECTOR MARTIN HYNES’S THE GO-GETTER. COURTESY PEACE ARCH RELEASING. Though best known for playing a legendary director on screen, Martin Hynes seems destined to become an auteur in reality as well. A native of Eugene, Oregon, Hynes studied history at Columbia before embarking on a career as an actor and sketch comedian. He then enrolled in the graduate film program at USC where he not only made the highly-regarded short Al As In Al (1995) but played the eponymous lead in Joe Nussbaum’s cult favorite George Lucas in Love (1999). He made his feature debut with […]
A couple of new writers have been added to the Spout Blog, and one, Lauren Wissot, has her first post up today. Wissot is a filmmaker and writer who has written for her own blog, Beyond the Green Door, as well as The House Next Door. Her debut piece for Spout is entitled “Dial S/M for Marnie” and it looks at Hitchcock’s film through the lens of kink: An excerpt: What neither the feminists nor cinephiles seem to appreciate is that Marnie is one of the greatest bondage and discipline (B&D in sadomasochistic parlance) pics of all time. Artfully disguised […]