6300 Results for “Open ”
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“I Made an Audio Drama Under Quarantine and So Can You!”: Frank Hudec on His Pandemic-Produced Audio Drama, Craiglockhart
There was a meme floating around the interwebs in early April. It consisted of two photos of Donald Glover. On one from, I think, Community, where he is clean cut, smiling and drinking coffee, the caption reads: “New Year’s Day, Looking Forward to 2020!” Next to it was the “Three Months Later” photo; it’s a shot from a Childish Gambino video where he’s shirtless and holding a shotgun. My January 2020 pretty much mirrored Donald Glover’s sunny optimism. I had just received a contract to direct a long-gestating film of mine, which had been optioned by a French company […]
by Frank Hudec on Nov 16, 2020 -
“Male Science Fiction Movies are About Men Having a Romance with Their A.I. Women”: Shalini Kantayya on Coded Bias
A.I. and “machine learning models” can decide who is accepted into college, who gets housing, who gets approved for loans, who gets a job, what advertisements appear on our social media and when. The extent of what A.I. dictates in our lives, and how, is unfathomable to us because it is essentially unregulated, yet we have accepted these invisible systems into our lives with incredible faith and speed. We trust the algorithms, assuming their mathematical functions lack the ability or will to hurt us. But activist and filmmaker Shalini Kantayya’s film Coded Bias shows us how these systems will always […]
by A.E. Hunt on Nov 16, 2020 -
“His Materials and His Letters Were Just Sitting in Boxes in the Basement of Her House”: R.J. Cutler on Belushi at DOC NYC
From the mid to late 70s John Belushi was a multimedia meteor, seemingly destined to be an inescapable part of the zeitgeist for years to come. The outsized and ubiquitous talent — original cast member on late night TV’s SNL, scene-stealing star of the big screen (National Lampoon’s Animal House, The Blues Brothers), and hit record maker (again with The Blues Brothers) — was so inescapable that when in 1982, at the age of only 33 and the peak of his career, his life crashed to a drug-fueled end at L.A.’s Chateau Marmont, the shock to the world was seismic. So how […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 13, 2020 -
“There is No Film Safe from Some Version of Exploitation…”: Mo Scarpelli on her DOC NYC Feature El Father Plays Himself
Mo Scarpelli’s El Father Plays Himself, which premiered at Visions du Réel, is now at DOC NYC and will next be hitting IDFA, is one complicated multilayered journey, both logistically and emotionally. It began when Scarpelli (Anbessa, Frame by Frame) decided to train her documentary lens on a narrative feature in the making — specifically her partner Jorge Thielen Armand’s La Fortaleza (which premiered at Rotterdam). La Fortaleza in turn is based on the hard-hitting, hard-drinking life of Jorge Roque Thielen, the director’s father, who stars as himself in his own story. That “el father” remains as wild and unpredictable […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 13, 2020 -
“The Hardest Thing to Do is to Pick Up the Dolly Track When the Shot’s Not Right”: Max Winkler on Jungleland
A lot of filmmakers point to the New Hollywood movies of the 1970s as influences, but few directors have internalized and applied the lessons of the era as effectively as Max Winkler, whose new feature Jungleland recalls seminal studies of masculinity in crisis like John Huston’s Fat City and Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail. The movie follows bare-knuckle brawler Lion (Jack O’Connell) and his older brother Stanley (Charlie Hunnam), broke siblings looking for a way out of their desperate circumstances. They think they’ve found it when a local underworld figure offers to clear their debts if they chaperone a young […]
by Jim Hemphill on Nov 12, 2020 -
First Cow Tops Nominees for 30th Annual IFP Gotham Awards; All Best Feature Nominees are Directed by Women
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) announced today the nominees for its 30th annual IFP Gotham Awards. Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow received the most nominations — Best Feature, Best Screenplay, Best Actor and Breakthrough Actor. Other multiple nominees include Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, Radha Blank’s The 40-Year-Old Version, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Natalie Erika James’s Relic and Alex Thompson and Kelly O’Sullivan’s Saint Frances. And, for the first time, all five of the Best Feature Nominees — The Assistant, First Cow, Never Rarely Sometimes Always and Relic — are directed by women. “We congratulate […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 12, 2020 -
“Until John Brown Becomes the Messiah of the White Man, Black Lives will Never Matter to White Americans”: Darnell Martin on The Good Lord Bird
“I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.”—John Brown on the morning of his death, December 2nd, 1859 The 1859 public execution of John Brown—the 19th century American abolitionist put to death for taking up arms in an attempt to rid the country of slavery—was attended by men, including Stonewall Jackson and John Wilkes Booth, who would go on to make a much larger dent in textbooks. Yet, […]
by Erik Luers on Nov 11, 2020 -
“It Feels like this Case was a Warning Sign for the Future”: Ursula Liang on Her DOC NYC Feature, Down a Dark Stairwell
On November 20, 2014, 28-year-old Akai Gurley was killed by an NYPD officer’s bullet in the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project. Another unarmed Black man dead at the hands of the police; another surge of street protests and demands for justice. But this one was different: the officer, Peter Liang, was Chinese American. Liang claimed the shooting was entirely accidental. When he was indicted, many wondered if he was being scapegoated for the shortcomings of a justice system that had only recently failed to bring charges against the white policemen who killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner. After Liang […]
by Nelson Kim on Nov 11, 2020 -
“Women of Blumhouse: Shaping Genre Storytelling at the Iconic House of Horror” at the 2020 SCAD Savannah Film Festival
Appropriately presented the day before Halloween, the SCAD Savannah Film Festival’s “Women of Blumhouse: Shaping Genre Storytelling at the Iconic House of Horror” provided an intriguing peek inside the multifaceted production house from a female POV. Moderated by Variety’s Deputy Awards and Features Editor Jenelle Riley, the three executives Zooming in included Blumhouse Television’s head of physical production, Lisa Niedenthal; Blumhouse Productions’ executive vice president of development for feature films, Bea Sequeira; and Blumhouse Productions’ head of casting, Terri Taylor. There’s “so much emerging talent in this genre,” Niedenthal enthused when asked about working in today’s scary movie world. Though Niedenthal […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 10, 2020 -
Grace of My Heart, Hard Eight and Mallrats: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
I’m a big fan of anything and everything written and directed by Allison Anders, but I’ve always been particularly fond of her 1996 musical Grace of My Heart. A magical blend of the kind of intimate behavior-driven filmmaking Anders is known for with the scale and resources of a big studio movie, it’s one of the most generous films I’ve ever seen in terms of how much it gives its characters (all of whom are presented with deep empathy and respect) and the audience. The heart of the picture is the richly detailed story of a singer-songwriter (a fantastic Illeana […]
by Jim Hemphill on Nov 6, 2020
