6300 Results for “Open ”
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“We Needed a Visual Approach that Would Match the Poetry of Mr. Ailey’s Words”: Jamila Wignot on Ailey
With Jamila Wignot’s documentary Ailey opening today from NEON, we are reposting Randy Astle’s interview with the director out of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Alvin Ailey’s choreography was as powerful and muscular as it was elegant and sublime. Most dance outsiders probably come to him through his most famous work, 1960’s Revelations, which exemplifies the fierce pride of the Black community moving from slavery through baptism and into celebration. The work also includes delicate and restrained moments, such as in an early pas de deux, where a slowly raised arm contains all the beauty of a the later exultation. […]
by Randy Astle on Feb 1, 2021 -
“Toes the Line Between Dreams and Reality”: DP Tyler Davis on Strawberry Mansion
Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s surreal sci-fi romantic comedy Strawberry Mansion reimagines the dystopia as something shockingly similar to our own world: a society where even our dreams are plagued with marketing and advertisement. DP Tyler Davis shares what the team took from music videos and fantasy films like The NeverEnding Story to capture their dreamy, fantastical vision. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Davis: In early 2019 I met Albert Birney (one of the directors, along with Kentucker Audley, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 1, 2021 -
“You Learn a New Language From Scratch Each Time”: Editor Annukka Lilja on Ailey
Jamila Wignot’s Ailey explores the life of seminal choreographer Alvin Ailey in poetic manner. With a heartbeat as studied as Ailey’s jazz-dance that made him famous. Editor Annukka Lilja explores the seamless collaboration between herself and Wignot and her method of approaching documentary much the way she would a fictional film. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job Lilja: The producer Lauren DeFilippo knew me through my longtime collaborators David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg, whose three feature documentary films I […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 1, 2021 -
“Create the Spell and Then Not Break It”: Editor Jenn Ruff on Superior
Erin Vassilopoulos’ Superior isn’t your classic film about twins. While on the run, Marian (Alessandra Mesa) returns to her childhood home where her housewife sister Vivian (Ani Mesa) lives. Marian’s past begins to catch up with her, endangering both her and her sister’s life tremendously. Editor Jenn Ruff shares what it was like to collaborate with one of her students and the brilliant madness that came from working during COVID. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Ruff: How? […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 1, 2021 -
Sundance 2021 Critic’s Notebook 2 (Abby Sun): I Was a Simple Man, Strawberry Mansion, Cryptozoo
The Sundance Institute has been running producer and director labs since 1981, even before taking over and renaming the former US/Utah Film Festival in 1985. In that sense, the projects coming out of the Feature Film Program (whose founding director, Michelle Satter, is still in charge), Indigenous Program and Documentary Film Program are just as important a marker of Sundance’s effect on the US film ecosystem as the platform provided by the festival. When I programmed film festivals, I tracked their press releases as closely as official lineup announcements. This year, 16 projects in the festival were officially supported by […]
by Abby Sun on Jan 31, 2021 -
“The Colors and Textures of Being a Teenage Girl”: Director/Cinematographers Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt on Cusp
Parker Hill and Isabel Bethencourt’s Cusp embeds itself with a trio of teenage girls, all sustaining best friends, over the course of a long, alcohol-sodden rural Texas summer. Relationships come and go, but cycles of systemic sexual abuse and misogyny structure the lives of its indefatigable protagonists. As photographers, Hill and Bethencourt speak to acting as their own cinematographers, lighting from the Texas sun and capturing the textures of teen girl life. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Hill and Bethencourt: We […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 31, 2021 -
Love Story, The Other Side of the Mountain, Hard to Hold, The Underneath: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
The weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day are flooded with new Blu-ray releases of vintage romances, starting with one of the most beloved and effective of all cinematic tearjerkers, Arthur Hiller and Erich Segal’s Love Story (1970). In a shrewd piece of promotion concocted by Paramount studio executive Robert Evans, Segal wrote Love Story as a screenplay but turned it into a novel while the movie was well along the way to production. The book came out a few months before the movie, became a bestseller, and director Hiller’s “adaptation” of Segal’s literary phenomenon opened to huge grosses. The movie […]
by Jim Hemphill on Jan 31, 2021 -
Sundance 2021 Critic’s Notebook 3 (Vadim Rizov): El Planeta, Luzzu, Taming the Garden
I generally strive to be a well-informed viewer; in the case of Amalia Ulman’s El Planeta, however, I was perhaps better served by going in uncharacteristically ignorant. I didn’t really know anything about Ulman besides the fact that she’s a performance/video/web-artist, so I wasn’t picking up on any of her debut feature’s connections to the personas developed on Instagram, galleries et al.. Instead, Ulman’s debut feature, shot in the town of Gijón, where she grew up, registered as exactly the type of movie I like, a droll comedy formally descended from Éric Rohmer. Rohmer’s legacy doesn’t just lie in delicately shaded […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 31, 2021 -
“The Subjects in Our Film Brought a Lot of Life Back to My World”: Editor Hannah Buck on Searchers
Dating’s complicated arc during the pandemic has been lovingly captured in Pacho Velez’s documentary Searchers. Whether on Grindr, Tinder, or any other app, the question “what are you looking for?” varies from person to person amid the chaos of mid-COVID New York City. Editor Hannah Buck addresses the challenge of introducing the director as a subject of the film and the value of mediated experiences. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Buck: In 2019 I was the consulting […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 31, 2021 -
“It Is Always Tempting in Animation to Show More Than You Need to”: Art Director Jess Nicholls on Flee
Deftly merging animation and documentary, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee tells the true story of a gay Afghan refugee living in Copenhagen since being granted asylum. Art director Jess Nicholls shares how they protected their subject, Amin’s (a pseudonym), identity through the unbounded use of animation, and how to tell a true story through unique mediums. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the cinematographer of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Nicholls: Just to clarify, I’m not a cinematographer but an art director as Flee is an animated […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 31, 2021
