At its live awards ceremony SXSW announced tonight the jury and special award winners of the 29th annual SXSW Film Festival. James Morosini’s I Love My Dad — starring the writer/director along with Patton Oswald — won the Narrative Feature Competition, and Rosa Ruth Boesten’s documentary about painter George Anthony Morton, Master of Light, won the Documentary Feature Competition. Other notable winners include Iliana Sosa, a Filmmaker 25 New Face whose What We Leave Behind won two awards: The Fandor New Voices Award and the Louis Black Lone Star Award. Films will continue to be available on the SXSW platform […]
“I really love to embrace limitations,” says cinematographer Drew Daniels. “I try to limit some of my choices on any film I do.” With Red Rocket, the opportunities to welcome constraints were plentiful. The latest from Tangerine and The Florida Project filmmaker Sean Baker, Red Rocket was shot in 23 days entirely on practical Texas locations with a supporting cast largely populated by local first-time actors. The crew boasted 10 members, including producers doing double duty as assistant directors or costume designers. The grip/electric department was a literal one man band, armed with Digital Sputniks, a few Astera tubes and […]
After 2016’s Western, In the Valley of Violence, and several years directing episodic TV, Ti West (The House of the Devil, The Inkeepers, The Sacrament) makes a very welcome return to the world of feature horror with X, a ’70s-set picture in which the sort of ambition that has characterized West’s impressive filmography is both evident on screen as well as the subtext driving the film’s characters. The set-up: a ragtag group of filmmakers ensconce themselves in a rented barn outside a foreboding farmhouse straight out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to make a porno feature, The Farmer’s Daughter. Mia […]
As more and more human activity — personal, social, economic, political — happens online, a challenge is posed to practitioners of that legacy art form, the feature film. To wit: how to tell an 80-minute-plus story whose symbolic meanings were created in part by interactions and juxtapositions occurring in virtual spaces, a story that’s possibly inseparable from a rich visual culture that is most accurately parsed in portrait mode and not in a theater or on a flat screen? Providing one answer are filmmakers Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari, whose latest feature documentary, the SXSW-premiering Diamond Hands: The Legend of […]
Filmmaker Brent Renaud, who, with his brother Craig, made films in conflict zones around the world, was killed while filming in Ukraine today. He was also co-founder of the Arkansas Motion Picture Institute and executive and artistic director of the Little Rock Film Festival. Here — originally published December 17, 2013 — is our profile of the two brothers and their extraordinary filmmaking practice. R.I.P. Brent Renaud. — Editor From NYC drug addicts to Mexican drug cartels, from today’s soldiers to yesterday’s civil rights pioneers, from Chicago gang members to Afghan warlords, Craig and Brent Renaud have made a career […]
When Casey Neistat, along with his brother Van, made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2006, he had already made over 300 shorts that had played at film festivals, museums and online. Three years later he launched an HBO series. But Google Neistat now and the information panel for the 40-year filmmaker offers a single blunt ID: “American YouTuber.” It was only in 2010 that Neistat began posting his work on YouTube and in 2015 that these postings became daily, a profusion of content (and subscribers — 12 million) that have made him a progenitor of a newer generation of […]
A stunning work of cinematic nonfiction, Rosa Ruth Boesten’s Master of Light follows the classical painter George Anthony Morton, a fan of Rembrandt who conjures exquisite portraits of his own family members in the style of the Old Masters. Never formally trained, Morton nonetheless managed to land a spot at the New York branch of The Florence Academy of Art, eventually going on to study in Europe and win awards abroad. Which would be a remarkable feat for any American, let alone a Black man from Kansas City who spent a decade behind bars for dealing drugs. But likewise remarkable […]
Filmmaker‘s once-a-year subscription sale launches today, with 40% discounts on our print and digital subscriptions. Filmmaker will be raising its cover price next issue, so this will be the last chance to lock in our old (and very reasonable!) pricing. All subscribers during this sale will receive Filmmaker‘s upcoming Spring issue and will be eligible for a selection of bonus gifts — Blu-rays, box sets and swag from a number of top distributors. In addition, all new and returning subscribers will receive a free three-month subscription to Metrograph, which includes discounts to its New York theater as well as access […]
Two women, each fleeing unspecified trauma, holed up in an aluminum-sided mobile home in the middle of a desolate patch of New Mexico flatlands is an apt set-up for a microbudget horror film, but the pleasures and originality of Pete Ohs SXSW-premiering Jethica are in the ways in which it avoids all the more obvious narrative pathways it might have taken. (Indeed, it’s an exemplar of George Saunders’s dictum of “ritual banality avoidance” — rejecting the “crappo version” of a story.) There are no screams or shaky-cam chases, no woman-in-jeopardy jump scares. Instead, Ohs has worked with his actors to […]
As I’m editing my print-edition interview with Gaspar Noe about his new feature, Vortex (to my mind, at this moment, his best film), this new trailer from Utopia is a nice refresher. From the Francoise Hardy soundtrack to the Edgar Allen Poe-quoting tagline to the consoling gesture rendered uncanny by Noe’s split screen, this trailer captures the film’s melancholy heartbreak and unsentimental philosophy. The film is an astringent yet not uncompassionate look at the final days of two aging leftists, a married couple played by director Dario Argento (portraying a film critic, which Argento once was) and actress Francoise Lebrun […]