6296 Results for “Open ”
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Off Screen Spaces: Azazel Jacobs on His Three Daughters
Azazel Jacobs’s films treat the tragicomedy of human existence with tenderness and a heartbreakingly honest sense of the absurd. In his first released feature, The GoodTimesKid (2005), the anti-hero (played by Jacobs) is trapped in a repetitive nightmare of mistaken identity punctuated by Marx Brothers slapstick and 1930s movie dance routines. Jacobs made it with colleagues and friends he met when he was getting his MFA from the AFI Conservatory, some of whom became a permanent part of his team, including his wife Diaz, an actor and filmmaker in her own right. Momma’s Man (2008) memorialized the trauma of moving […]
by Amy Taubin on Sep 18, 2024 -
Review This: Letterboxd and Independent Film Marketing
There are no silver bullets for solving the crisis in independent film distribution, but there are a lot of industry professionals looking to Letterboxd—and its opinionated and rapidly growing 15 million–strong community of cinephiles—as an important new tool for their survival. Most crucially, as one distributor put it, “They’ve opened up a new channel of communication between filmmakers and their audiences, both actual and potential.” And, unlike other major industry disrupters, from Netflix to Rotten Tomatoes before it, Letterboxd appears to be embracing independent films as a distinct part of its identity. Matthew Buchanan, Letterboxd’s New Zealand–based co-founder, told Filmmaker, […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Sep 18, 2024 -
Sam Shainberg
Growing up in Greenwich Village, Sam Shainberg thought he’d become a historian, but that changed when he went to Bard College. “I found out that real historians study one topic their whole careers. I didn’t have patience for that; I wanted to learn a lot of stories and also to be out in the world as much as possible—to, I guess, have adventures.” At Bard, where his early work “veered a little bit more towards magical realism,” as well as documentary, teachers included the filmmakers Kelly Reichardt, Peggy Ahwesh and the late Peter Hutton, part of a program that was […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Véra Haddad
Filmmaker Véra “V” Haddad’s short film Opener immediately evinces familiarity with the touring musician life. Queer guitarist Sam (Saara Untracht-Oakner) faces familiar headaches when she walks into her hometown’s small venue: a cold club manager, a dismissive sound tech (“Is that the loudest you’re going to get?” he asks her, interrupting her already truncated soundcheck) and a broken string that necessitates a protracted trip to a local music shop mostly populated by dudes. Only the eventual appearance of a supportive queer community, including a cameo from Jane Schoenbrun, puts her at ease. “All of my closest friends are musicians,” Haddad […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Amelia Evans
Minor Attraction takes its title from a lesser-known term for what’s more commonly and stigmatizingly referred to as pedophilia. Its footage was mostly captured in the summer of 2013, when Amelia Evans was interested in making a film about subjects with that diagnosis who met two other criteria: they’d never sexually interacted with a child as an adult, and they could handle the risks associated with appearing on camera. Only three people checked all those boxes: Paul, a dancer and choreographer; the older Gary, married to a woman fully conversant with his history; and Ben, with whom Evans enjoys the […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Tomi Faison
In 2020, Tomi Faison joined a Discord server created by her friend Joshua Citarella. “A bunch of us were super online during the pandemic,” recalls the Baltimore-based video artist and filmmaker. “Politics were on everyone’s mind, but it felt like there was a discursive gap.” So, participants formed a weekly book club to help guide their conversations, which inspired many to produce essays and artworks. The Do Not Research Substack was created as an online platform for these pieces, alongside other commissions, that probe the “emerging online subcultures, political trends and different phenomena” indicative of our current moment. “It very […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Subtle Inconsistencies: Filmmakers and Generative AI in 2024
In Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Black Book, there’s a story about a mannequin maker and his underground workshop. The craftsman believes that after the introduction of cinema, people began to lose their natural gestures and now simply imitate the movements and behaviors of actors they see on the big screen. To preserve natural and native mannerisms, he undertakes an immense archival project: He makes mannequins of people performing small gestures in great detail. I’m curious what the craftsman would do faced with generative AI. AI film festivals and competitions are growing in popularity. Last May, the second annual Runway AI […]
by Deniz Tortum on Sep 18, 2024 -
“The Presence of the Moments While Performing Was, I Think, Something I Was Just Starved for as a Person”: Booger Star Grace Glowicki, Back To One, Episode 309
The mega-talented Canadian multi-hyphenate Grace Glowicki gives an incredible performance in Mary Dauterman’s debut feature Booger. On this episode, she reveals why she was interested in the project before even opening the script, and how she could just tell Dauterman was going to be the kind of director that would give her the support she needs. She talks about her current focus on examining issues dealing with authority, her love of bodily fluids in film, her struggle with emotional scenes, how directing herself as an actor actually helped her acting career, differences between the Canadian and American indie film scene, […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Sep 17, 2024 -
“The Budgetary Challenges of Getting a Dead Squirrel Puppet”: DP Sam Davis on Dìdi
In the opening scene of Dìdi, the titular 13-year-old and his friends film themselves blowing up a mailbox and making a run for it while laughing hysterically. It perfectly encapsulates director Sean Wang’s view of adolescence as “the worst version of yourself, having the best time of your life.” Set in 2008 in Wang’s hometown of Fremont, California, the coming-of-age story follows a Taiwanese American teen during his final summer before high school. Though not strictly autobiographical, the film was inspired by Wang’s own adolescence and the making of it was awash in familiarity. The main character’s bedroom scenes were […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Sep 16, 2024 -
TIFF 2024: The Gesuidouz, Sad Jokes, The Future
A standard festival story: I had plans to see a particular film at the end of TIFF 2024 day one, but my schedule had to be hastily rearranged, I had time to kill and thought I might as well see a movie I was kind of curious about. So there I sat at the P&I screening of Kenichi Ugana’s Midnight Madness world premiere The Gesuidouz, sandwiched between two independent theater bookers having a catch-up. The man on my left started reeling off every anime he’d programmed for the last two months and would be showing for the foreseeable future; the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 13, 2024
