Maria Schneider, the soulful and enigmatic French actress who starred in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris and Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger, died in Paris at the age of 58. R.I.P., Maria Schneider.
130 features (consisting of 60 world premieres, 12 North American premieres and 16 U.S. premieres) will screen this year from a record-high 1,792 feature-length films submitted to SXSW producer Janet Pierson and her team. Highlights include opening night film Source Code, from Duncan Jones (Moon), Jodie Foster‘s The Beaver, Greg Mottola‘s Paul, Sundance Grand Prize doc winner How to Die in Oregon, Errol Morris‘ Tabloid, Victoria Mahoney‘s Yelling to the Sky, Azazel Jacob‘s Terri and a special screening of Catherine Hardwicke‘s Red Riding Hood. See the complete lineup below. The Midnight, SXFantastic and shorts lineup can be found here. […]
If you pore over writings on the loose grouping of “mumblecore” or “New Talkies” films from the past few years, writer-director Aaron Katz (Dance Party USA, Quiet City) is the young American indie filmmaker most often singled out for unqualified praise, regardless of the commentator’s assessment of this so-called movement as an artistic whole (or whether it constitutes a movement at all). And with good reason. A filmmaker attuned as much to the gestural nuances of his characters as he is to the expressive beauty of cityscapes and natural settings, Katz has a rigorous eye for the tiniest of details, […]
Honestly, what the hell is up with genre these days? It’s a tricky thing to get a handle on, but we all have an idea of what’s happening in the independent film world: as production financing has dried up in a world where cinema is, simply put, not generating as much revenue as it used to, independent filmmakers who might be more at home making “art” flicks have decided to mix their interests with more familiar genre narratives. Catfish, which generated more intellectual-thought-content-per-minute than any other 2010 release, was sold as (and contained elements of) a Blair Witch-esque thriller, set […]
With a hat tip to Photo Cine News, here are clips from two Sundance 2011 prizewinners shot on DSLR cameras. The first, the Grand Jury Prize-winning Like Crazy, was shot on the Canon 7D. (Felicity Jones, featured in this clip, also won a Special Jury Prize for her acting.) The second, Hell and Back Again, won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize as well as the World Cinema Cinematography Award. It was shot on the Canon 5D with custom-built rigs. Hell and Back Again clip from Danfung Dennis on Vimeo.
Creative Capital, the non-profit funding organization that has supported such recent films as Laura Poitras’s The Oath, Marshall Curry’s If a Tree Falls, and Braden King’s HERE, has announced its new film/video funding cycle. The deadline for letters of inquiry is March 1. From the press release: Creative Capital provides integrated financial and advisory support to artists pursuing innovative and adventurous projects. We support artists whose work is provocative, timely and relevant; who are deeply engaged with their forms, yet also boldly original; who create work that carries the potential to reshape the cultural landscape. To be eligible to apply, […]
Sorry to all for the week off. A little festival called Sundance was happening, and this column would have been lost in the hustle and bustle. PLUS, I’ve become agoraphobic after editing Orphaned for three weeks straight now. I no longer possess social skills and hygiene. (But the movie looks good so far!) After our second article posted, Blake Eckard contacted me and thought I needed to talk to someone ASAP. It could only be one person, Jon Jost (pictured below). Jon is one of Blake’s favorite film directors and he is a legendary indie filmmaker. It was a no-brainer. […]
Here’s one of the most beautiful end title sequences you’ll ever see, one that extends the film’s themes of love found and lost until the final moments the lights come up. It’s for Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine.
Position Among the Stars Winning both the IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam) and Sundance for the same film isn’t anything new for director Leonard Retel Helmrich. Both Position Among the Stars (which received a Special Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this past Saturday) and Shape of the Moon — his previous documentary about three generations of the Shamsuddin family of inner city Jakarta — have won top awards at the festivals. These two documentaries, along with 2001’s Eye of the Day, combine as a trilogy to tell a moving story about religion, politics, and economics, all through the lens […]