I’ve been posting links to stuff I’ve found around the web mostly on our Twitter feed these days, but this deserves its own blog post: Red Bucket Films, the home of filmmakers Josh and Benny Safdie as well as Brett Jutkiewicz, Alex Kalman, Sam Lisenco and others, has launched a new version of their website. And it’s not just a design refresh — it’s got a bunch of new stuff on it, including “Talk Show,” four episodes of Red Bucket’s “TV Party”-like downtown interview show. The first guests are filmmaker Ronnie Bronstein, National Scrabble Association’s John D Williams, and musician […]
Where went the music business may go the film business is a common refrain these days. The music business was slow to deal with the digital revolution and has seen its business models capsized. For this reason, Filmmaker has asked journalist Mike Johnston to attend the Future of Music Summit, just wrapping up in Washington, D.C., and report back on what went down. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” That quote from The Who seems to encapsulate the material presented during the first day of the Future of Music Conference. While the Internet has obviously eliminated many […]
Filmmaker Martha Colburn was asked by the journal Electric Literature to create an animated film based on one sentence of Diana Wagman’s story “Three-Legged Dog,” which is described as a “beautiful, harrowing, and funny tale of a young woman’s first sexual relationship after a mastectomy.” The great score is by Nick DeWitt.
Back in 2001 we selected Ari Gold as one of our “25 New Faces” on the basis of his great short films Helicopter and Culture. Wrote Peter Bowen: In the past few years, Ari Gold has been to the Sundance Film Festival more often than most established filmmakers. He arrived in 1997 with Frog Crossing, a short film that he co-directed with Jamie Babbit. Two years later he was back with Culture, a one-minute short that reel.com hailed as the “the best 60 seconds of film at Sundance.” In 2000 he returned once more, not as a filmmaker but as […]
Filmmaker, critic and Filmmaker magazine writer Shari Roman died in Manhattan on Wednesday, September 9. The following is a reprint of the last piece that Shari wrote for us, published in Summer, 2007. In the piece she surveys a number of young visual artists using film and film installation as a medium. For more on Shari and her life and work, visit the blog post on her passing. When Matthew Barney kicked off his five-part Cremaster film cycle in 1994, perforating the barrier between the art world and independent cinema, the multidisciplinary artist took some hard knocks from purists who […]
Filmmaker, writer and critic Shari Roman, a friend to many in our community, including all of us at Filmmaker, died September 9 at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York after a short illness. Her passing took us by surprise as she told few people that she was sick. Indeed, many heard the news only after a small family memorial was held on the 13th. Readers of Filmmaker will remember Shari’s byline, as she wrote for us on numerous occasions, penning interviews, reports, festival coverage, and, in Spring, 2002, our cover story on Matthew Barney and his Cremaster series — the […]
Congratulations to 2008 Filmmaker 25 New Face writer/director Oren Peli, whose Paranormal Activity is not only a fantastic, genuinely scary independent horror film but now also the poster child for successful studio release experimentation. Quick recap: Peli’s film, shot with a three-person crew in seven days was bought by Dreamworks at Slamdance, 2008. Rumors were that the studio would shelve the film in favor of a remake, but there was always one problem: like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity depends on a feeling of casual verisimilitude. Throw in a name actor and that’s blown, and beef up the production […]
One of the most reprinted articles we’ve run at Filmmaker was South African producer Jeremy Nathan’s 2002 piece on “No Budget Nigeria,” the thriving Corman-esque film scene otherwise known as Nollywood. Now, artist Pieter Hugo has released a book containing his stunning square-format photos featuring portraits of performers from these films. It’s called, appropriately, Nollywood. In an essay about the images, Federica Angelucci explains Hugo’s approach, which is to compose photographs that play off the mythologies created by the films. An excerpt: Movies tell stories that appeal to and reflect the lives of its public: stars are local actors; plots […]
EZRA MILLER IN WRITER-DIRECTOR ANTONIO CAMPOS’ AFTERSCHOOL. COURTESY IFC FILMS. To call Antonio Campos a precocious talent would be to understate his abilities. Amazingly, the 26-year-old writer director, a native of New York City, has already spent half of his young life making films. Campos directed his debut short, Puberty (1997), at the age of 13 as part of a New York Film Academy program, and over the course of his teens made numerous shorts – both fiction and documentary – including First Kiss (2001), Pandora (2002) and Who’s Your Daddy? (2004). At 21, he had his short film […]
David Lowery, who worked on this short, passed along the link to the latest from Funny or Die, entitled “Birthday Suit.” It’s one of those satires that’s only really one step away from reality. Birthday Suit from Jason Lewis