6300 Results for “Open ”
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“Letting Go…Trusting that the People You’ve Casted Will Bring it to a Better Place”: Karishma Dube on Bittu
Karishma Dube’s Bittu begins with sound before image, a vague squabble over black before it drops you into the middle of a world in motion. The opening shot is not held long before cutting to the next. It is one among many, does not announce itself as the beginning, and is not so contrived and defined that you can remember exactly when the film began. Suddenly, the viewer’s immersed in a story that started well before they became a witness to it. The opening shot introduces the film’s namesake little girl, Bittu, as played by the phenomenal first time performer […]
by A.E. Hunt on Mar 12, 2021 -
Don’t Tell a Soul, Wrong Turn and The Choirboys: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
The potential for horror films to serve as vehicles for provocative moral inquiry is fully realized in a pair of excellent thrillers new to Blu-ray and DVD from Lionsgate, writer-director Alex McAulay’s Don’t Tell a Soul and the surprisingly original 2021 reboot of the 2003 cult classic Wrong Turn. Both films seem, at first glance, to be routine low-budget programmers, but it quickly becomes apparent that the filmmakers are up to something more ambitious and rewarding than simply jerking the audience around with cheap shock effects. Don’t Tell a Soul follows two young brothers who break into an elderly woman’s […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 12, 2021 -
Shot Reverse Shot: The Inheritance Director Ephraim Asili in Conversation with Residue Director Merawi Gerima (Part Two)
(Click here to read part one of Gerima and Asili’s conversation.) Gerima: Since we’re talking about the realities of Black cinema: when you don’t have time or money, a lot of times rehearsal plays an important part. I wanted to ask you about your process with your actors before you got to the studio. Did you have time to rehearse? Asili: Not as much as I would’ve liked, but what we did have, that I would say was even better than rehearsals was, I had written about half of the script, but I had pretty elaborate backstories. So, when I went […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 11, 2021 -
“It’s Kind of Scary to Think About Letting Anyone and Everyone Into the Edit Bay”: Jethica Director Pete Ohs On Twitch Livestreaming His Edit
Drawing from the world of gaming, writer/director Pete Ohs is embarking on a post-production experiment for his pandemic-shot film, Jethica: live-streaming his edit. “I know that YouTube is overflowing with editing and software tutorials but I’ve never heard of anyone actually editing a movie live,” he writes in an email, and I can’t think of anyone who has done this either. Beginning this week, Ohs is using Twitch to transmit his editing screen as well as webcam footage of himself behind the console, allowing viewers to track his process cut-by-cut. “I imagine the audience for this stream is going to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 11, 2021 -
Shot Reverse Shot: The Inheritance Director Ephraim Asili in Conversation with Residue Director Merawi Gerima (Part One)
As I wrote last year in my 25 New Face profile of Ephraim Asili, his first feature, The Inheritance, begins when “Julian (Eric Lockley) moves into his late grandmother’s house and initiates an experiment in Black collective living. The influence of Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise, evident in the film’s poster onscreen and the house’s boldly painted walls, is mixed with Asili’s personal memories of Philadelphia’s MOVE members (the Philadelphia native first met them as a teenager) and living in a Black Marxist collective. Shot, per Asili’s usual practice, on 16mm, The Inheritance marks a shift from overtly experimental to essentially narrative work. […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Mar 10, 2021 -
Back to One, Episode 145: Julia Sarah Stone
You’re about to hear the name Julia Sarah Stone quite a bit. The young Canadian acting phenom is turning Hollywood heads with a focused talent and poise well beyond her years. Her latest movie, the unique sci-fi thriller Come True, which has been wowing audiences at festivals, is opening Friday March 12th from IFC Midnight. In this episode, she talks about the “playable” characteristic that helped her performance in that film, the traps actors easily fall into when they lay in the emotion while losing sight of basic aspects such as motivation, and why she always wants to be a […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Mar 9, 2021 -
FilmEx Creates Virtual Annual Conference in Lieu of Usual Pre-Sundance Gathering
Film festivals of all sizes came together with art-house exhibitors, distributors and filmmakers in mid-January for the FilmEx conference, a five-day virtual conference in January that took the place of Arthouse Convergence’s annual pre-Sundance meeting in Utah. Few are the filmmakers that have not found themselves on a Facebook debate thread at some point with other filmmakers decrying sham film festivals that took their submission fee money and then did not deliver on the most basic expectations. Well, the film festivals, film societies and arthouse theaters that participated in the past Art House Convergence conferences and now this year’s FilmEx […]
by Melanie Addington on Mar 4, 2021 -
“We Spent a Lot of Time Choosing Lenses”: Keith Thomas on The Vigil and His Forthcoming Firestarter Adaptation
Unfolding over the course of one evening in the Hasidic community of Boro Park, Brooklyn, Keith Thomas’s debut feature, The Vigil, gets more unsettling the darker the night gets. Dave Davis plays Yakov, a young man experiencing difficulty living a newly secular life. As securing a job has proved difficult, he agrees to a friend’s impromptu request to serve as a shomer, watching over the cold body of a local man, Rubin Litvak, before the deceased is laid to rest. Anticipating an easy few hours of surfing the web on his smartphone, Yakov settles in for his watchman duties. Unfortunately […]
by Erik Luers on Mar 2, 2021 -
Wuhan, Different Everyday: Shengze Zhu on Berlinale 2021 Premiere A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces
Despite relocating to Chicago in 2015, Shengze Zhu has focused on her hometown of Wuhan throughout her career. Her first feature, Out of Focus (2014), is a creative portrait of the school-life of children from low-income families and the troubles they face. Her second, Another Year (2016), uses long takes to document the mealtimes of migrant worker families. Both are set in Wuhan but were made after she first left China in 2010 to study filmmaking in Columbia, Missouri. For Present.Perfect (2019), she widened her lens, creating a montage of live-streamers living across China entirely from desktop recordings of their broadcasts. […]
by Matt Turner on Mar 2, 2021 -
Phase Zero: Felipe Cazals on His 1979 Gabriel García Márquez Collaboration, El año de la peste (Year of the Plague)
It has been a good day for everyone, even for God. No sign of rain. No evidence of disease or blood. — Henry Miller, quoted at the beginning of El año de la peste Around this time a year ago, many of us were suddenly sent home and forced to become film programmers. I asked people: after Contagion or, from a far distance, Outbreak, what was the ultimate Coronavirus movie? The Last Days of Planet Earth? Prophecies of Nostradamus? 28 Weeks Later? The Host? Tsai Ming-Liang’s The Hole? The South Korean apocalypse thriller The Flu? Logan’s Run? The Seed of Man? Soylent Green? 12 Monkeys? Kinji Fukasaku’s Virus? […]
by Steve Macfarlane on Mar 1, 2021
