The Canadian Film Centre and SHORTSNONSTOP Mobile Festival announced this week that this quarter’s best short film is Mexican filmmaker Karen Weiss‘s Bad Head Day. Weiss will be awarded a $1500 cash prize. Launched in 2007, SHORTSNONSTOP is in its second year and awards a $1500 cash prize each quarter to the best short film selected by an international jury. Learn more on how to submit your film, here. Next deadline is Jan. 15. Weiss’s Bad Head Day can be found here.
You may recall Scott’s “Midwestern Rhapsody” post in mid Oct. about Todd Sklar and the other filmmakers who are doing a DIY tour with their film. Here’s another video diary from the guys.
IFP announced today that The Daily Show With Jon Stewart‘s correspondent Aasif Mandvi will be hosting this year’s Gotham Independent Film Awards on Dec. 2. Named one of our 25 New Faces of Independent Film this year for his upcoming project, 7 to the Palace, which he stars and co-wrote, Mandvi was recently in the Ricky Gervais-starrer Ghost Town and appeared in episodes of The Sopranos and Sex and the City. But he’s best known for his witty fake reporting on The Daily Show and will certainly have a lot of material to play with come Dec. 2. Interesting sidenote: […]
For those who enjoyed the excerpt we put up of Scott Macaulay‘s roundtable discussion on the current state of independent film from the Fall issue, one of the participants, Ted Hope, was on NHPR’s “Word of Mouth” this week and continued the thinking that he voiced for the magazine and at his keynote address at the Film Independent Filmmaker Forum: the truly free filmmaking community will survive.
Executive producer William Horberg attended the premiere of Gus Van Sant’s Milk last night in San Francisco and writes about it on his blog. An excerpt: It was almost 37 years ago that Harvey Milk, the subject of the film, moved to the Castro District from New York City and set up his camera shop there with his boyfriend Scott Smith, at what was to become ground zero in a cultural movement and struggle for respect and equal rights for gay people that, despite the major victories Harvey and his supporters achieved before his untimely assassination, as he became the […]
For those of you planning a Halloween viewing party, the staff of Filmmaker has compiled thoughts on seven films guaranteed to generate chills. Inside. If you watch a lot of horror films, at a certain point you being to feel that you’ve seen it all. I did… at least until I saw Inside. This French shocker is part of a new wave of Gallic horror that includes films like Haute Tension, Frontieres, Calvaire and Them. For me, it’s the most extreme and transgressive of the bunch, mostly due to its relentless, remorseless elaboration of its queasy premise: a pregnant woman, […]
If you’re one of, probably, about 3,000 feature filmmakers who have submitted your features to the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, then you are beginning to think about that best-case scenario: getting in. After the acceptance rush fades, you will realize that the whole process of finishing your film, scheduling the festival, and devising a publicity and marketing plan is a lot of work. To help you out producer Ted Hope, who has a lot of first-hand experience, has been posting this week on this Truly Free Film blog a series of pieces on the different stages of the process. He […]
The filmmaker Charles Stone caused a sensation in the indie film world in 1998 with his short film, True, which launched him in both the film and ad worlds. The hilarious short, along with his music videos, led him to make his first feature, Paid in Full. And when the short was seen by ad agency DDB Needham, they had the idea to hire Stone to take the characters and concept and apply it to a Budweiser ad. These spots, called Whassup?!, won all the big advertising awards in 2000 and Stone went on to make movies like Drumline and […]
Jennifer Venditti’s doc Billy the Kid arrives on home video today. Check out Nick Dawson’s interview with Venditti here.
In what is something like an appendix to his famous “The Sky is Falling” L.A. Film Festival keynote speech, Film Department head Mark Gill is the guest on this week’s issue of the “The Business” film podcast. Gill’s segment is called “Mini-Majors, Endangered Species?”, and in it he discusses the independent film theatrical business in the wake of this year’s specialty label shrinkage. Like everyone, Gill wags his finger at overproduction but then he extends the argument to its logical end result — fewer movies in theaters. And that he likes. Quoting Gill: “The first and the best news is […]