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Forbidden Truths, the Symmetry of Myth, and a Friendship Uninterrupted by Death: Werner Herzog on Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
“Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.” — Jim Harrison For anyone — show of hands now — locked in an all too familiar, selfsame cycle of recurrent dread, it’s no great mystery that cinema can (and maybe even should) offer familiar, welcome respite. Allowing a sense of escape while borders are closed, cinema’s palliative possibilities also remind us of our unsteady balance, as we strive to outlast whatever this current period is. In this mode, patience is currency. Yet, confined to our spaces and neighborhoods, we are all prone to a sense of restlessness. In the course of […]
by Evan Louison on Aug 28, 2020 -
“Cinema is Prophecy — It Creates Truth”: Hubert Sauper on his Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, Epicentro
“What kind of future does tourism portend?” wonders a Cuban character rhetorically in Epicentro, the latest work of cinematic nonfiction from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Hubert Sauper (Darwin’s Nightmare, We Come as Friends). “None! It is only devouring the future,” the Havana man declares. Indeed, it devours the “past and the culture,” rendering everything “superficial.” But then comes the real multimillion-dollar question, “How much does cinema resemble tourism?” Winner of the Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema Documentary at this year’s Sundance, Epicentro — an allusion to the northern Caribbean island’s place at the epicenter of the Americas, both geographically and politically — is […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 28, 2020 -
Watch: Producers and Executives Discuss the Reality of Production During the Coronavirus Pandemic
People are shooting again. And as film production lurches forward amidst a mass of new protocols and restrictions, Film Finances has brought together members of their own working group — both company executives and producers — as well as producers who have been working in the field to discuss shooting in the age of coronavirus. Among the topics discussed in this very informative webinar are: * What percentage of a film’s budget should be allocated towards Covid-19 compliance? * What’s the job of the Health Safety Supervisor, and what should their team look like? * The use of apps to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 27, 2020 -
In Opposition to “A Very Particular Mode of Transness”: Isabel Sandoval On Lingua Franca
The struggles of outer borough working class folks is nothing new to NYC-set dramas. But, in the outsider eyes and busy hands of director/writer/producer/editor/actress Isabel Sandoval, one of the newest auteurs of Filipino cinema—who makes her English-language debut in her adopted city with her third narrative feature Lingua Franca—classic tropes are updated to reflect our current intersectional reality. The Venice International Film Festival 2019-premiering movie follows live-in caregiver Olivia (Sandoval), who, in the course of looking after an elderly Russian resident of Brighton Beach (Lynn Cohen), becomes romantically entwined with the woman’s ne’er-do-well grandson Alex (Eamon Farren), who labors under […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 27, 2020 -
Watch: Experimental Filmmakers Imaginatively Respond to the Pandemic in Cinema-19
In the brisk, 43-minute anthology film, Cinema-19, a group of experimental filmmakers respond to the coronavirus pandemic with diverse and imaginative results. The films are all 190 seconds long and, say the curator/organizers, filmmakers Usama Alshaibi and Adam Sekuler, “do not attempt to summarize the pandemic, but instead focus on the personal, the political, the sensual, the distant, the abstract, and the absurd.” Highlights include Courtney Stephen‘s poetic essay film on irises, hundreds of which she encountered on walks in the five-mile radius she and her mother were confined to during quarantine. (“This is a trick,” she says in voiceover. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 25, 2020 -
Back to One, Episode 123: Ramy Youssef
Ramy Youssef won the Golden Globe for lead actor in a comedy series for his work in Ramy, the Hulu series he co-created. The second season came out in May, and the struggles of being a devout young Muslim man in America that fueled the first season, deepen, grow and expand out to peripheral characters in the second, highlighted by the addition of Mahershala Ali as Ramy’s wise and loving sheikh. Youssef directed more episodes this season (he’s nominated for an Emmy for directing as well as acting). We talk about that and the overall collaborative effort at work behind […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Aug 25, 2020 -
IFP Announces Public Programming Slate for 42nd Virtual IFP Week
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker’s parent organization, announced today the virtual public programming for the 42nd IFP Week, taking place virtually Sunday, September 20th to Friday, September 25th. The first four days of the week will be film and TV related programming with the final two days dedicated to audio programming to support creators working in the audio space through the introduction of the first-ever IFP Week Audio Hub. Additional details on audio programming will be shared in the coming weeks. Kicking off Sunday, September 20th, IFP Week will feature a series of panel conversations exploring the future of the […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Aug 24, 2020 -
FIDMarseille 2020 (2): Zaho Zay, Forensickness
Each FIDMarseille 2020 movie came with a video introduction from the filmmakers, who were given seemingly complete freedom in deciding how, and at what length, to approach this; eschewing the standard-issue speech-to-webcam, Zaho Zay’s had to be the best one. In a living room, a woman (presumably co-director Maéva Ranaïvojaona) paces along to an audio clip from Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? of Jean-Marie Straub ranting about the indissolubility of form and ideology. “Form, form, your infamous form,” he snarls, the woman roughly lip-syncing to a rant she seems to have heard and contemplated many times before. This intro is […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 21, 2020 -
“There is No Expiration Date on Your Sexuality”: Josie Hess and Isabel Peppard on Their Fantasia Festival-Debuting Doc Morgana
The bored and lonely housewife embarking on a life of erotic pleasure has been a porn-movie trope since at least the days of the 8mm-stag film. But the Belle de Jour-style protagonist is never an unhappy Australian mom who goes from planning suicide, to radically reclaiming agency by hiring a male escort, to soaring to international fame as an award-winning feminist pornographer. Until now. Meet Morgana Muses, the unlikely star of Josie Hess and Isabel Peppard’s Fantasia Film Festival-premiering documentary Morgana. Hess, a filmmaker and pornographer, and her co-director Peppard, who is also an animator and visual artist, began collaborating […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 20, 2020 -
“I Wanted to Tell a Story Where the Atmosphere Was So Severe That It Literally Consumed the Movie”: Jeffrey A. Brown on the Environmental Horror of The Beach House
In his final book, The Weird and the Eerie, critic and theorist Mark Fischer differentiates between “the weird” and the supernatural as it appears in both literature and film. For example, the supernatural world of vampires, writes Fischer, “… recombines elements from the natural world as we already understand it….” These supernatural stories are contrasted with fictions based around suggestions and byproducts of natural phenomena, such as black holes. “… The bizarre ways in which [a black hole] bends space and time are completely outside our common experience,” Fischer writes, “and yet a black hole belongs to the natural-material cosmos […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 19, 2020
