[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 11:59 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] Dead Snow is in a very direct way the result of cinema today. Even though the premise of the film is based on a idea that I have had for a long time, there wasn’t a better time to release it until now. After we made a debut film, Kill Buljo, we decided to go for the idea for Dead Snow simply because people don’t make these kind of movies any more. Most of the horror films that are released these days are 100 percent merciless, with violence […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 8:00 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] One of our goals while making Paper Heart was to establish a consistent reality since we would be combining a documentary on love with a loosely scripted love story. [Yi] Charlyne and I felt that most modern romantic films were very formulaic and unrealistic, but hoped that if an audience believed in what they were watching, they would be more affected by it. And with audiences being more familiar than ever with reality-based programming, we knew we had to do a great job to convince them there was […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 11:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] Our movie Mystery Team is the first full-length feature film by DERRICK Comedy, a sketch-comedy group I’ve been a part of for four years now. Our sketch videos have been viewed more than 100 million times online. We never tried to figure out “what plays on the Internet,” and when we did have shorts that became popular, we never tried to figure out what made them popular in terms of universal truths about Internet viewership. We viewed YouTube as a content delivery system and looked at our […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 8:30 pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] What I can remember from very early on in the process of making The Vicious Kind was the desire to shoot my film on film. Specifically 35mm film. Even from the conceptual stage, I latched on to the idea that film would offer the kind of texture that a small, character-driven family story like mine would require. What’s so interesting about making movies today is that the choices of medium are so wide and changing every day. Even seven or eight years ago, if you had anything […]
Last night director Lynn Shelton’s Facebook status report was “Lynn Shelton is… wow.” An appropriate indicator of her mood and well-being because, as Mike Jones reports in Variety, her well-loved Humpday is “in play,” with four distributors circling. With all the speculation about sales and acquisitions, it’s great that this true indie from the Pacific Northwest is the first major buzzed-about title here. Expect Nick Dawson’s inteview with Shelton on these pages in the next few days. (And you can also check out my take on Shelton’s previous film here.)
Courtesy of the Workbook Project, here is Ted Hope’s closing speech at the Sundance Art House Convergence confeence. From their description: This year before Sundance kicked off a number of exhibitors, bookers and filmmakers gathered for an event called Art House Convergence. During the three day conference 51 Art Houses met in Salt Lake City to discuss the major issues facing the industry and how they can work together to share resources. The following video is of producer Ted Hope’s closing keynote. Hope’s remarks present his vision of where filmmakers will be a year from now thanks to new distribution […]
Lynn Shelton has worked in a variety of creative forms for most of her life, but seems to have found her true voice in the role of writer-director. A Seattle native, Shelton spent her formative years immersed in painting, writing poetry, taking pictures and acting. She was a stage actress for ten years (and was told she was destined to work in film), and subsequently studied for an MFA in Photography at NYC’s School of Visual Arts. She then began working in film, both as an editor on movies such as The Outpatient (2002) and Hedda Gabler (2004) and as […]
California-based artist Charlie White has made his mark with highly produced, carefully-staged photographs that construct scenes both disturbing and familiar, work that aims to dissect the violence, desires, and social anxieties that trouble the American collective unconscious. From his Understanding Joshua Series (2001), which offered an adorable/repulsive monster character as surrogate for human fragility and the internal demons that haunt our experiences of self, to the more varied And Jeopardize the Integrity of the Hull series that, among other uncanny images, offered The Persuaders, a flat Sesame Street-like image of puppets taunting their tormented human host in front of a […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 6:00 pm — Egyptian Theatre, Park City] I wrote the first draft of Victoria Day in 2001 before the existence of YouTube or the invention of the iPod. So, Victoria Day in its conception and execution wasn’t influenced by these things. But even if I were to conceive of it anew today, the story would take the same shape, simply because I don’t believe that the effect I hope to achieve — namely an emotional effect — can be achieved any other way. In my experience, the kinds of stories that I’ve seen told on […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 17, 5:15 pm — Racquet Club, Park City] Maybe I’m a dreamer, but I still believe that watching a film should be a collective experience in the darkness of a movie theater, with the viewer floating in a mental state somewhere between consciousness and sleep. I feel that filmmaking as a creative process and as a medium is very close to the process of dreaming. A film is an association of images outside of our control interacting with our memories and emotions. So by replacing the big screen with miniature devices, we’re losing an aspect of […]