6300 Results for “Open ”
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“Christine [Choy] Has Always Been a Person Who Puts Her Ideals into Action”: The Exiles Directors Violet Columbus and Ben Klein
The first rule of documentary film? “Lie to everyone.” This from no less an authority (and anti-authority) than Christine Choy, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker (Who Killed Vincent Chin?) and educator (NYU, Cornell, Yale, etc.), founding director of Third World Newsreel, and straight-shooting (no pun intended) civil rights rabble-rouser. (Once during the US Film and Video Festival – soon to be rebranded Sundance – Choy even pulled Robert Redford aside to bluntly ask what was up with all the white people and white snow.) And now she is the cigarette-puffing central character in Violet Columbus and Ben Klein’s The Exiles, which executive produced […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 21, 2022 -
“Shooting Digitally Means Not Having to Play It Safe”: DP Doug Emmett on 892
In 892, the debut film by Aby Damaris Corbin, a desperate former US Marine, driven nearly to homelessness by lack of resources and a stifling bureaucracy, decides to take hostages at a bank—but not because he wants money. What he wants instead is for people to hear his story and acknowledge what he has been through. Much of the film takes place in a single location where artificial lighting was not possible; cinematographer Doug Emmett explains how he was able to overcome these challenges and give the film a realistic and consistent look. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 21, 2022 -
Sundance Curators and Directors Speak, Along with 16 Films Not To Miss
“Making the shift to an online-only experience was a difficult decision, but it was the right one for the full community,” said new Sundance Executive Director Joana Vicente at the top of today’s opening press conference of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. While the contours of last year’s largely-virtual (excepting the Satellite Screen events around the country) event were visible last June and then explicitly stated in early December, 2020, this year’s necessary hard-pivot to a largely virtual edition (again, with the Satellite Screens) happened late, in early January, 2022. So, when, as the various programmers all announced themselves by […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 20, 2022 -
“Do Younger Israelis Care at All About This History?”: Alon Schwarz on His Sundance-Debuting Doc Tantura
Alon Schwarz’s Tantura takes its title from a particular Palestinian village that was depopulated – by any means necessary, including through a still-contested massacre of civilians – during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence (aka “Al Nakba,” the Catastrophe, if you hail from the occupied side). Yet the doc is less a history lesson than a deep-dive investigation into the stories a nation chooses to tell about itself. Schwarz’s (Aida’s Secrets) own story began when he got access to over 100 hours of shockingly candid audiotaped interviews that the (government and academia-silenced) researcher Teddy Katz conducted decades ago with former soldiers […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 20, 2022 -
“At the Root of This Rivalry Is a Historical Conflict Between Mexican Nationals and Mexican-Americans”: Editor Luis Alvarez y Alvarez on La Guerra Civil
Julio César Chávez and Oscar de la Hoya were once two of the biggest names in boxing, and their 1996 bout dubbed “Ultimate Glory” was a flashpoint for the divide between Mexican-Americans and Mexican nationals. Mixing archival footage with interviews of the boxers themselves, <i>La Guerra Civil</i> examines the bout, the rivalry and its cultural dimension. Editor Luis Alvarez y Alvarez discusses his memories of the fight and how the filmmakers were able to recapture and illuminate one of the defining sports moments of the 1990s. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2022 -
“We Wanted to Target an Audience Not Necessarily Interested in the Royal Family”: Editors Jinx Godfrey and Daniel Lapira on The Princess
From the beginning, director Ed Perkins knew he wanted to tell Princess Diana’s story without any retrospective interviews and instead rely purely on archival material. That’s a rich archive, consisting of thousands of hours of footage, meaning the editors would need to choose among countless potential approaches or narrative threads. Below, editors Jinx Godfrey and Daniel Lapira discuss what drew them to the film and how they managed to whittle thousands of hours of footage into a 104-minute feature film. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2022 -
After the Curtain: The Tragedy of Macbeth Production Designer Stefan Dechant
Shot by director of photography Bruno Delbonnel in stark black and white using the Academy aspect ratio, Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is an impressively lean (105 minutes total runtime) and stylized take. A reserved Denzel Washington stars in the title role alongside Coen’s wife Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth, reprising a performance she gave for the Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2016. In his first film without his brother Ethan, Coen eschews halfhearted attempts to “open up the text,” instead choosing to embrace its theatricality by filming the entire production on Warner Brothers’s soundstages in Burbank, California before and, […]
by Erik Luers on Jan 18, 2022 -
On the Journey: The Power of the Dog Producer Tanya Seghatchian
As a young woman, Tanya Seghatchian remembers laughing, crying and suffocating through Jane Campion’s early work, a cinematic compass she had internalized by the time she began her first job for the BBC—researching a two-part TV documentary about John Ford, pioneer of the American western. Over the years, Seghatchian’s trajectory expanded across genres and scales, from coproducing the first two Harry Potter films and executive producing more than 20 episodes of The Crown to producing Pawel Pawlikowski’s My Summer of Love and Cold War, the latter of which was nominated for three Academy Awards, including Best Foreign Language Film, in […]
by Taylor Hess on Jan 18, 2022 -
Pedagogical City Hopping: the DocNomads Film School
“What if we create a curriculum for a school we’d like to attend ourselves?” That question was the foundation for a group of five educators who gathered in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2011 to brainstorm an entirely new two-year Masters-level film program dedicated to documentary production. The partners came from Lusófona University in Lisbon; the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest, Hungary; and LUCA School of Arts/College Sint Lukas in Brussels, Belgium. Vítor Candeias, who represented Lusófona University in designing the program and is a course director as well as a documentary filmmaker, says that the original idea was […]
by Holly Willis on Jan 18, 2022 -
Speed of Life: The Worst Person in the World Director Joachim Trier Interviewed by Mike Mills
“With the passing of the years, each neighborhood, each street in a city evokes a memory, a meeting, a regret, a moment of happiness for those who were born there and have lived there. Often the same street is tied up with successive memories, to the extent that the topography of a city becomes your whole life,” said French novelist Patrick Modiano in his 2014 Nobel Prize speech. Modiano was speaking of Paris, the setting of most of his novels, but his words resonate with the work of Norwegian director Joachim Trier—specifically, his loose “Oslo trilogy,” which culminates with the […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 18, 2022
