6302 Results for “Open ”
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Finding Communion at the 2017 Camden International Film Festival
When I arrived at CIFF in 2012, I was attending the Points North Forum Pitch, which runs concurrently with the festival and is the centerpiece of a weekend of panels and discussions. I came to Maine from Los Angeles, a first-time director who somehow couldn’t get the last four union days to join Local 728 and thus decided that shooting my own film would be a perfect antidote to hearing my buddies brag about the shows they worked on — shows that, finally, their friends had heard of. I perfectly remember the anxiety I felt when I arrived. Everyone knew each other, nobody stood […]
by Martin DiCicco on Sep 21, 2017 -
“Find a Small, Possibly Unsexy Job You Can Do Well”: At IFP Week, Directors and Producers on Getting Started in Indie Film
So you’ve made a film. Congrats, but you’re not out of the woodwork yet. You may never be. The four filmmakers and one producer who appeared on the IFP Week panel called “On Working (and Staying) in Indie Film Today” had vastly different stories to tell about how they turned movie-making into an actual job. The biggest name on the panel was Gillian Robespierre. Having directed and co-written the indie hits Obvious Child and this summer’s Landline, she has more stability than most in her field, having parlayed those successes into TV work on top of a future making her […]
by Matt Prigge on Sep 21, 2017 -
IFP Week: Sean Baker and the Safdie Brothers on How To Film Inside Working Businesses
If you’re a filmmaker, it may seem like the city is your playground. It’s not. Everything costs money. Every public space you want to shoot in requires permits and insurance. It all requires planning, hard work, negotiations, or simply lots of pleading. One issue that’s cropped up in multiple talks during IFP Week has been this: What do you do when you want to shoot in a place of business? How do you get a bodega owner or a restauranteur or the owners of a giant mall in Flushing to let you run around with cast and crew, even though […]
by Matt Prigge on Sep 20, 2017 -
“I Don’t Want To Kill a Medium”: Director Sean Baker Talks The Florida Project and iPhones at IFP Week
Sean Baker is amazed some people still think he’s a new filmmaker. That implies that he’s young. On the contrary. “I’m old,” Baker remarked during his talk at IFP Week 2017. (Or at least he’s 46.) Back in 2015, Tangerine put him on the map. And it was shot on an iPhone 5S, which made him seem like some millennial who’d never even heard of a Bolex. As it happens, Tangerine was his fifth film. The others weren’t obscure; Four Letter Words, Take Out, Prince of Broadway and Starlet were all acclaimed. (He also spent years as the co-creator of […]
by Matt Prigge on Sep 19, 2017 -
Panelists at TIFF Talk Distribution, Data Analytics, Documentary and New Audience-First Marketing
Diversity was a hotly debated topic within the “Dialogues: At the Table” panel. Gil Robertson, CEO of the African American Critics Association, probed the panelists to explain why people of diverse backgrounds are still struggling to get their films made. The outspoken, decisive Franklin Leonard, who runs online network The Black List, which connects writers and their scripts with agents, producers and financiers, shrugged his shoulders: “The numbers don’t lie. Look at the success of films such as Titanic and Avatar. [They] made it clear many years ago that women could sell films. And this year we have the success […]
by Tiffany Pritchard on Sep 18, 2017 -
Angelina Jolie, Aaron Sorkin, Gael Garcia Bernal and Mary Harron Talk at TIFF
The Toronto Film Festival closed out its 42nd year with another impressive round of masterclasses and “TIFF talks.” On the industry side, while not as heavily programmed as other festivals, there was an engaging round of panels that tackled on-topic discussions such as diversity and alternative distribution. Typical to other years, a robust line-up of filmmakers and writers made up the festival’s one-to-one talks, their “In Conversation With…” series. Aaron Sorkin’s candid conversation was one of my highlights. He openly discussed his ten year-dependence on drugs, regarding which Carrie Fisher sent him a letter assuring him he could write even […]
by Tiffany Pritchard on Sep 18, 2017 -
“Find Your Tribe”: Moonlight Director Barry Jenkins and Producer Adele Romanski Give Advice at IFP Week
Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski know what IFP Week is like. They know what it’s like to pitch a passion project. They even know what it’s like when time — in Jenkin’s case, several years — elapses between features. When the writer/director and producer, respectively, of Moonlight swung by this year’s Filmmaker Talks day at IFP Week, it was a kind of victory lap. After all, their last film together took home three Oscars, including Best Picture, on top of a towering pile of other accolades. But they used their talk with moderator Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker‘s Editor-in-Chief, to remember when life was […]
by Matt Prigge on Sep 18, 2017 -
Enabling What is to Come: IFP Previews its 2017 IFP Week
“Film” — what’s in a word? It’s still the first half of Filmmaker, even as our new logo design nods to the ways in which this term’s meaning is continually mutating and no longer fixed in celluloid. But, as Joana Vicente, Executive Director of IFP (Filmmaker’s publisher) and the Made in NY Media Center notes, it’s been dropped this year from the name of IFP’s signature event, which begins today through September 21 in Brooklyn. Over the last several years “Independent Film Week” has shortened to “IFP Film Week” to, now, simply, “IFP Week.” That’s because, as Vicente says, “the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 16, 2017 -
“…Much More Truthful and Much More Alienated than Anything I Would Produce Myself”: Jonathan Lethem on Fred Barney Taylor’s Lethem
Last week I was very much looking forward to talking with friend Jonathan Lethem about the new film Lethem, directed by Fred Barney Taylor, which screens at the Metrograph on Sunday, September 17, with the author in attendance. Before that happened though, we both received the news that Michael Friedman had died. A beloved friend and collaborator, Friedman co-founded The Civilians, a theater company where I’m an associate artist. He also wrote the score and lyrics for the musical adaptation of Fortress of Solitude, Lethem’s 2003 novel. Fortress of Solitude tells the story of Lethem’s childhood on Dean Street in […]
by Alix Lambert on Sep 15, 2017 -
TIFF Critic’s Notebook 7: The Nothing Factory, Wavelengths Shorts
The very first thing I saw after arriving at TIFF was Pedro Pinho’s The Nothing Factory: a three-hour film is tough to slot into any festival schedule for practical reasons even before factoring in day-wearing-on exhaustion, and seeing it as a stand-alone first night entry point to the fest seemed like the right move. After some establishing shots of a squat silo being torn down and a factory in action, Pinho cuts to a couple having a sex scene. A phone call letting Ze (José Smith Vargas), the male half, know there’s trouble at the workplace intrudes: capitalism as coitus interruptus. […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 14, 2017
