6300 Results for “Open ”
-
“Forgiveness is a Big Part of the Movie”: Director Lynne Sachs on her Slamdance-Premiering Doc, Film About a Father Who
Lynne Sachs has been making films since Drawn and Quartered in 1986. Her latest, the documentary Film About a Father Who, screens January 24, the opening night of Slamdance. Her father, Ira Sachs, Sr., helped turn Park City, Utah, into a destination resort. In documenting his life, Sachs uncovers a web of secrets. Film About a Father Who will also screen at Doc Fortnight 2020, MoMA’s Festival of International Nonfiction Film and Media on February 11 and 14. Sachs’ 2019 tribute A Month of Single Frames (for Barbara Hammer) will screen in the series on February 8. Filmmaker spoke with […]
by Daniel Eagan on Jan 24, 2020 -
14 Films Not to Miss at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival
Always a bellweather for the health — artistic as well as business — of the American independent film scene, the Sundance Film Festival began yesterday in Park City, Utah, preceded by more than the usual amount of pre-fest news and drama. On the positive front, Sundance 2020 is something of a launch party for a new documentary financing and production company, Concordia, formed by filmmaker Davis Guggenheim and former Participant Media production president Jonathan King, in partnership with Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective. One quarter of the Documentary Competition slate boasts the Concordia logo. And then distressingly there’s Oprah Winfrey’s withdrawal as […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 24, 2020 -
“The Objects Then Unexpectedly Became Integral to a Brutal Murder Case”: Emma Sullivan | Into the Deep
Whether capturing or creating a world, the objects onscreen tell as much of a story as the people within it. Whether sourced or accidental, insert shot or background detail, what prop or piece of set decoration do you find particularly integral to your film? What story does it tell? When I first started filming at the space lab in Copenhagen, the objects symbolized dreams and positive ambitions; they were the tools used to create the crude inventions forged by the hands of excited young optimists, eager to be part of Peter Madsen’s quest to launch a rocket into space. The […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 24, 2020 -
“Documenting the Scene on Camera is Sort of Like a Dance With the Subjects”: DP Kristoffer Kumar on The Painter and the Thief
The Painter and the Thief is a documentary that investigates the legitimacy of conventional labels: criminal and victim, vagrant and artist, unstable and rational. It follows Czech painter Barbora Kysilkova, who had a naturalistic work of hers heisted from an Oslo art gallery, as well as Karl-Bertil Nordland, the man convicted for stealing it. Mysteriously, the painting was never recovered, but Kysilkova had a proposition for the man who made her work vanish—could she paint his portrait? What follows is a story about human connection and its infinite possibilities. DP Kristoffer Kumar, who has collaborated with Ree extensively, talks about […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 23, 2020 -
Black and Blue: The 35mm Colors of Uncut Gems and Star Wars
Fall 2019 provided us with a massively budgeted 35mm feature in the form of J.J. Abrams’s The Rise of Skywalker (shot by Dan Mindel and colored by Stefan Sonnenfeld at finishing house Company 3) and a surprisingly visible A24 mid-budget art film in the Safdie brothers’s Uncut Gems (shot by Darius Khondji and colored by Damien van der Cruyssen at The Mill). In each case, the choice to shoot on celluloid was rooted in what could be termed (charitably) as a nod to film history or (uncharitably) a nostalgic gesture. I make no claims as to which it is, nor […]
by Jessica Dunn Rovinelli on Jan 23, 2020 -
All We Have Is Now: Borscht 0 (2019)
“Essentially, cinema is dead, and this fellowship is bringing it back to life,” went part of the on-stage intro for the showcase screening at this year’s Borscht. “The people that most of you know are old, and we’re young, and I think we’re more exciting.” At the screenings I attended, Borscht co-founders Lucas Leyva and Jillian Meyer repeatedly, shamefacedly noted that they’d started the festival (and attendant collective of the same name, the screening of whose work is the fest’s top priority) with the intent of never showing the films of anyone over 30—only to, alas, themselves cross that decade […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 22, 2020 -
Cats in Shallow Focus: A Cautionary Tale
Despite an all-star cast, an Oscar-winning director and source material from one of Broadway’s most well-known composers, Cats managed to become a widespread commercial and critical failure. Because the film should have been a recipe for success, it may seem hard to pin down exactly what went wrong during the process, but one of the primary problems is not that complicated—director Tom Hooper’s misuse of one of the most foundational, fundamental tools in a filmmaker’s toolkit: depth of field. Hooper is famously (or perhaps infamously) a fan of shallow focus. He likes having extremely blurry backgrounds, while the shot focuses […]
by Steven Greenwood on Jan 22, 2020 -
The 27 Movies (More or Less) Shot on 35mm in 2019
Since I’ve already compiled a shot-on-35mm dossier for each previous year’s US theatrical releases five times, it’s not super-surprising that as soon as the internet learned Detective Pikachu was shot on 35mm, a number of people eagerly tweeted at me to let me know/make sure it wasn’t missed in this year’s edition. Irony poisoning aside, that turns out to be a surprisingly productive place to begin. The official tally of films shot, in whole or part, on 35mm for calendar year 2019 is 27, the total shot solely on 35mm is 18; Pikachu intersects with a number of common refrains. One concerns […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 21, 2020 -
SXSW Announces 102 Films and Episodic Shows from its 2020 Edition
SXSW announced today the 102 features and episodic shows that from the first wave of films comprising the 2020 SXSW Film Festival. Judd Apatow’s Pete Davidson-starring The King of Staten Island will be the Opening Night feature. Other highlights include Frank Oz’s film based on magician and artist Derek DelGaudio’s acclaimed theater work, In & Of Itself; actor and director Amy Seimetz’s follow-up to Sun Don’t Shine, She Dies Tomorrow; features from directors on this magazine’s 25 New Faces list, including Nicole Riegel (Holler), Celine Held and Logan George (Topside), Tod Chandler (Bulletproof), Marnie Ellen Hertzler (Crestone), and Kitao Sakurai […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 15, 2020 -
Light Through the Darkness: The 2019 Black Nights Film Festival
Darkness falls around 4 p.m. every day in late November when you’re as far north as Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, whose annual Black Nights (PÖFF) nods to the presiding nocturnal mood. Most of the winter light is up on screen, where the festival’s vast programming unspools across 17 days that also are chock full with industry forums and meet-ups. A city of some 400,000 that feels like a village, the Tallinn most visitors experience divvies up between its tourist-speckled Old Town, whose medieval bonafides are rooted as far back as 1154, and the modern design/tech neighborhood Teleskivi, with acres […]
by Steve Dollar on Jan 14, 2020
