Slamdance was yesterday, and now it’s the Sundance Film Festival who are putting out their initial competition slates. There’s no single opening movie anymore, but instead Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, Todd Miller’s doc Dinosaur 13, Hong Khaou’s narrative feature Lilting and Nadav Schirman’s Israeli doc The Green Prince kick off things on January 16. I’m always excited to see lineups that have a mixture of work by familiar faces and names that are as yet unfamiliar to me, and this is definitely one of those. In the U.S. Dramatic Competition, there are films from Joe Swanberg, Jim Mickle, Craig Johnson, Carter Smith and the Zellner brothers plus debuts […]
At the Film Independent Forum a couple weeks back, Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos gave something of a provocative keynote in which he declared that theaters would “kill movies” if they continued to resist multi-platform, day-and-date distribution. Though Sarandos later backtracked, Indiewire picked up the ball and ran with it, soliciting responses from several independent distributors on the matter. Among the executives weighing in were Kino Lorber’s Richard Lorber, Emily Russo of Zeitgeist Films, and Matt Grady of Factory 25. Dylan Marchetti, President of Variance Films, raised an interesting point, noting that “[Sarandos] knows that any resistance here isn’t to […]
With the official launch of the Made in New York Media Center by IFP this week, news of its imminent offerings was not far behind. One particular course that’s setting up shop at 30 John Street already boasts an impressive track record. The Edit Center, which is housed around the corner on Jay Street, will bring their hands-on framework to the nascent Media Center beginning this November. An intensive six-week course, The Edit Center offers students the unique opportunity of cutting their teeth (pun intended) on a real, live independent film currently in post-production. Guided by a professional instructor and […]
Appearing in the Wavelengths section of the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival is La última película, an experimental comedy about filmmaking and the apocalypse by two directors joined in collaboration by CPH:DOX’s DOX:LAB program. Filipino director Raya Martin (Independencia) collaborates with Canadian critic and filmmaker Mark Peranson on a crazily cinephilic conceit: remaking Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie as, literally, the last movie. The Color Wheel‘s Alex Ross Perry stars as a “disillusioned and delusional” filmmaker traveling to the Yucatan to make a psychedelic Western in the days leading up to the Mayan Apocalypse. Nicolás Pereda star Gabino Rodriguez plays […]
Sun Don’t Shine is being distributed by Factory 25 and opens theatrically on April 26, 2013, in NYC and Seattle, in addition to becoming available on VOD. It world premiered at the 2012 SXSW Film Festival. Visit the film’s Facebook page to learn more. NOTE: This review was first published at Hammer to Nail on November 29, 2012, in conjunction with the film’s ‘Best Film Not Playing At A Theater Near You’ nomination. We hear it before we see it. A sharp, resounding slap jumps out from the soundtrack. Milliseconds later, the first jittery, violent, sweaty images of Amy Seimetz’s […]
It’s rare to come across a film that genuinely feels “different,” but Bob Byington’s Somebody Up There Likes Me is one of those films. Byington is an Austin-based writer/director and has worked (on both sides of the camera) with a number of mumblecore and post-mumblecore figures, directing Justin Rice and Alex Karpovsky in his 2009 feature Harmony and Me while also cameoing in Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax and Alex Ross Perry’s The Color Wheel. His recent films, the gleefully edgy RSO [Registered Sex Offender] and the charming, sweet Harmony, were quirky indie comedies but definitely felt like they fit within a […]
Today the Sarasota Film Festival announced that it is joining forces with Factory 25 to offer a distribution deal as the prize for one of its competition sections. The winning movie in the Independent Visions strand will get a deal with Matt Grady’s Brooklyn-based boutique label, which has released many Sarasota alumni films from recent years. Here’s the info from the press release: The Sarasota Film Festival today announced that its Independent Visions Award will be presented by Factory 25, heralding a new partnership with Brooklyn-based film distributor. The winner of this prestigious award will also be presented with an unprecedented […]
Though the New York indie world has still not yet recovered from the exertions of the Gotham Awards, the Independent Spirit Awards nominations are upon us. Unsurprisingly, Beasts, Bernie, Moonrise Kingdom and The Loneliest Planet feature heavily (as they did at the Gothams), while Ira Sachs’ Keep the Lights On here also bags a number of nods in top-level categories. Rama Burshtein’s Fill the Void, Colin Trevorrow’s Safety Not Guaranteed, Martin McDonagh’s Seven Psychopaths, David Ayer’s End of Watch, Adam Leon’s Gimme the Loot, Zal Batmanglij’s Sound of My Voice, Ben Lewin’s The Sessions, Peter Nicks’ The Waiting Room and Ava DuVernay’s Middle of Nowhere also […]
What to say of a film festival at which the most highly anticipated — and, as it turns out, best — entry is an 83-minute-long documentary about fishermen with no real dialogue or narration that was shot on a dozen GoPro cameras, many of them tethered to a commercial fishing boat? A number of things come to mind, all of them complimentary, but what first bears mention is how well matched the 65th Festival del Film Locarno and Leviathan were for one another. Had it premiered at Cannes or Toronto, Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s film would likely have been […]
Leviathan. You may have heard the title by now. By the time it screened to press, the film had already gained some momentous hype, and I’m pleased to report it does not disappoint. Often exhilarating, Véréna Peraval and Lucien Castaing-Taylor‘s creation is a unique viewing experience—loud, disorienting, frightening, exciting and visually awesome. The best film from the main competition, at the very least, Leviathan (above) offers the sort of sensory adventure that cinema can but rarely does offer. Using cheap GoPro digital cameras, the filmmakers show us images and perspectives we’ve never seen before. Apparently, Apichatpong Weerasethakul did not like […]