Back in 2015, I wrote an article for Filmmaker on the best practices for delivering an exhibition copy of your film to festivals. In the ensuing two and a half, almost three years, I’ve received a lot of positive feedback, including a few panicked emails from filmmakers submitting their films to a festivals I worked at. Now in 2018, my editors have asked me to update it. Why the update now? Allow me the use of a clumsy and imperfect technical reference to Moore’s law that computing power doubles every eighteen months and the same has happened to available filmmaking […]
Tabitha Jackson, director of the Documentary Film Program at Sundance Institute, and Joaquin Alvarado, from Studiotube and former director of Centre for Investigative Reporting, were in discussion in March 2018 at CPH:DOX about the relationship between journalism and creative documentary filmmaking as part of Doc Society’s the Safe+Secure initiative. The following is a lightly edited transcript of their dialogue. Alvarado: When we say documentaries, it means a lot of different things today — they have evolved greatly in the last couple of decades. How you would you sort of level-set for folks the space of documentary and how we talk […]
“Americans love the story of saving people,” filmmaker Stephanie Wang-Breal (Wo ai ni mommy, Tough Love) tells us when discussing her film Blowin’ Up, which premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Set within the Queens Human Trafficking Intervention Court, the documentary explores the lives of various women involved with sex work and prostitution, dropping its audience into this complex subject matter and wasting no time explaining what’s going on or introducing its characters. Wang-Breal wants you to feel as emotionally connected to the subjects’ circumstances as possible. Many of them live in the unknown, fearing arrest and/or deportation each […]
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP), Filmmaker‘s parent organization, announced today the projects selected for the inaugural Audio Story Lab, IFP’s first foray into supporting makers with serialized audio projects. The two-day intensive program runs April 26-27 at the Made in NY Media Center by IFP. Based off the long-running IFP Filmmaker Labs and, more recently, the Screen Forward Labs dedicated to serialized content creators, the IFP Audio Story Lab will support groundbreaking audio artists with the necessary tools and mentorship to move their projects and careers forward. As part of IFP’s ongoing commitment to diversity, the IFP Audio Story Lab inaugural […]
In the opening minutes of Olivier Assayas’ Cold Water, two boys huddle around a radio like it was a small fire in the woods. The year is 1972; the place, just outside Paris. They madly fumble for reception. Finally, success! They get a decent (though still fuzzy) signal, just in time to bob their heads to Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain.” It’s a moment that must seem alien to anyone who grew up pre-Internet, who have no idea what it was like when everything (if not everything) wasn’t a click away. For ages, you had to fight to find Cold Water too. […]
1999 is one of the most haunting documentaries I’ve ever seen, which perfectly suits its subject matter. Director Samara Grace Chadwick returns to the small Acadian town in New Brunswick, Canada that she left as a teenager after a wave of suicides shook her high school over a handful of years, though the actual events always remain somewhat mysterious and opaque. A portrait of a group of people who, just when they were beginning to live, came intimately face-to-face with the finality of death, 1999 is not an investigation but an immersion into the emotional flux of a community struggling […]
So soon after Thessaloniki International Doc Fest I wasn’t expecting to be all that inspired to write about yet another festival, but an unexpected invitation saw me traveling to Nyon, Switzerland for the last few days of the 49th edition of Visions du Réel, an event I’ve been curious about for quite a while. But even after just a brief 72-hour visit, Visions inspired me greatly in the quietest, most refined of ways — the festival created a flawlessly professional but relaxed atmosphere to mingle and take in the beauty of the town, where every well-dressed denizen looks like they […]
One of the most interesting filmmakers to emerge from Roger Corman’s New World Pictures in the 1970s – a period in which great directors like Jonathan Demme, Allan Arkush, and Joe Dante were making their first movies for the company – was Michael Pressman, whose 1976 action-comedy The Great Texas Dynamite Chase remains one of the smartest, funniest, and most energetic exploitation pictures of its era. Throughout the late ’70s and early ’80s, Pressman directed one distinctive film after another, exhibiting astonishing range – the only thing his movies of the era have in common is that they have nothing […]
There’s a sequence early in A Thousand Thoughts, Sam Green and Joe Bini’s “live documentary” about the Bay Area musicians, the Kronos Quartet, that may seem familiar to anyone who has watched a music biopic. Scored to the ticking of a metronome, it’s a “rise to fame” montage of newspaper headlines, all taken from the years in which Kronos were becoming new music superstars. On top of each article, the bold-faced type indulges in the same wordplay, a riff on the Greek meaning of the group’s moniker: Kronos’s “time is now,” one headline reads; the group has hit “the big […]
A few months after my son was born, I took my wife to see the Tommy Lee Jones western The Homesman. If you know that movie, then you know why it was a bad idea: minutes into the film, a woman driven mad by the harshness of pioneer life kills her infant child. My wife nearly walked out. I didn’t understand that impulse at the time, but as my kid has gotten older I’ve become equally squeamish toward onscreen violence directed at children. It’s not an uncommon sentiment for parents, which is why it’s a perilous choice to open the new horror […]