6303 Results for “Open ”
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Coffee, Sake and Ambien: Writer/Director Richard Shepard on His Tribeca ’17 Short Film, Tokyo Project
An unexpected pleasure at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, Tokyo Project is a romantic drama with a psychological twist starring Elisabeth Moss and Ebon Moss-Bacharach and directed by Richard Shepard, whose career traverses dark comedies like The Matador and Dom Hemingway as well as some of the most memorable episodes of TV’s Girls. But what’s unexpected about this story of two American wanderers who hook up in Tokyo while both seemingly escaping their normal lives is, simply, its existence. The half-hour work is beautifully acted and shot (by Giles Nuttgens), coursing with a kind of romantic cinephilia, and, unlike other […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 26, 2017 -
“We Need to Stop Patting Ourselves on the Back”: Speakeasy Spotlight at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival’s 20th Anniversary Edition
There was much reason for celebration at the 2017 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (April 6-9) down in Durham, North Carolina. The state had just (kinda sorta) repealed the ridiculous bathroom bill — which had had me scrambling to cover all the queer films I could find at the 2016 fest — and this year’s 20th anniversary inspired artistic director Sadie Tillery to create “DoubleTake,” a wide-ranging retro program featuring 19 films, one from each year of the festival’s history. This diverse selection included everything from Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen’s 2001 Benjamin Smoke, to Linda Goode Bryant and Laura […]
by Lauren Wissot on Apr 25, 2017 -
Tribeca 2017 Critic’s Notebook: Performance Anxiety
Ever searching for an identity, the Tribeca Film Festival returned — for a 16th time last week — to Midtown, the Upper West Side, Chelsea and, yes, the neighborhood for which it’s named. These days the festival never opens with a genuinely great (and thematically appropriate) film like Paul Greengrass’s United 93 or a goofy overstuffed blockbuster like J.J. Abrams’s Mission Impossible III, but usually with a low-key doc centered on iconic New York stuff: comedy (Bao Nguyen’s 2015 SNL doc opener Live from New York!), fashion (Andrew Rossi’s The First Monday in May, which opened last year’s edition) and music — the Nas doc which […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 24, 2017 -
28 Tips on Crowdfunding and Promoting Your Film via Social Media from DOC NYC’s Marketing Bootcamp
Continuing my coverage of DOC NYC’s Marketing Boot Camp (read part one here), this installment focuses on two information-packed presentations dealing with crowdfunding and promoting on social media. First up was Liz Cook, Director of Documentary Film at Kickstarter, who talked about the marketing and audience building and engagement aspects of crowdfunding. First, some basics. Most people know that Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing fundraising platform: if you reach your goal, you’ll receive all the money raised, minus fees. If you don’t, nothing will be charged to those who pledged, and you’ll get no money. Cook also relayed some interesting stats: […]
by Audrey Ewell on Apr 23, 2017 -
Spring Festivals on the Sea: Borscht, Miami and Annapolis
Around the time Miami’s Borscht Diez went down in late February, Black Cinema seemed to take over the world for a second. That was cool; Get Out was all anyone wanted to talk about. The doldrums of the country’s greater ills lifted somewhat during that thriller of a week, in which the Oscar Best Picture winner and the number one movie in America were suddenly, and for the first time ever, directed by African-Americans. That the former had been incubated by the country’s most outlandish short filmmaking outfit, Borscht Corp.— which goes out of its way to produce work by people of […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 20, 2017 -
Oregon Doc Camp Now Accepting Applications
Now in its fourth year, Oregon Doc Camp invites experienced documentary filmmakers to a four-day documentary retreat May 18-21, 2017 at Silver Falls State Park in central Oregon. Developed by Women in Film Portland, Oregon Doc Camp gives working documentary filmmakers an opportunity to gather in an informal setting, learn from each other and build community in an ever-changing industry. This year, Kate Amend, editor of the Academy Award-winning documentaries Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport and The Long Way Home, as well as The Case Against 8, and many other films, will present the keynote speech. Currently on the faculty […]
by Paula Bernstein on Apr 19, 2017 -
“She Knew Then That She was Going to Die of Her Femininity”: The Making of the Ayahuasca Drama Icaros: A Vision
In November 2012 Leonor Caraballo travelled to a healing center in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, with her friend and fellow artist Matteo Norzi. At the center Caraballo and Norzi drank ayahuasca together in ceremonies led by a shaman from the local Shipibo-Conibo people. During the first night’s ceremony, under the influence of the hallucinogen Caraballo had a dream vision that she later recounted to Norzi. It was a memory from her adolescence of horse riding with her uncle on a beach in Argentina. At some point during the vision she found herself laying belly down on the beach trying […]
by Paul Willis on Apr 19, 2017 -
The Art of the Possible: Charles B. Pierce’s Arkansas Cinema
Remembering her filmmaker father Charles B. Pierce, Dallas designer Amanda Squitiero first mentions the place he called home. “Arkansas claims him and he claimed Arkansas,” she says, having recently marked the seventh anniversary of his passing. Emerging regional filmmakers now see more opportunity than ever to achieve the most ambitious of visions on skid-row budgets. Before the digital revolution, one might strain to remember a time when independent cinema could exist outside of the New York and Hollywood ecosystems. In this regard, Pierce realized cinema as the art of the possible, which could exist and even thrive in a place like […]
by Daniel Kremer on Apr 17, 2017 -
Multiple Maniacs, Dead or Alive, House and House II: The Second Story: Jim Hemphill’s Home Video Recommendations
Shock value in cinema is a tricky thing, especially when it comes to posterity; what scandalizes one generation often seems mild to the next, while images and dialogue that might have seemed innocuous in another era – particularly when it comes to attitudes about race, gender, and sex – can come across as abhorrent to audiences discovering them in a different cultural context. Two genuinely transgressive films, movies that were shocking when they came out and are shocking now, are newly available in generously appointed Blu-ray editions: John Waters’ Multiple Maniacs (1970) and Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive (1999). Waters […]
by Jim Hemphill on Apr 14, 2017 -
Drawn to Disaster: In My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea Dash Shaw Cartoons Teenage Angst
Hormones wreck havoc throughout the body, sending the fragile teenage ego into dismay, and for a good part of our formative years we exist in a state between childhood innocence and realizations of adulthood. Showcasing sharp wit and highly quotable dialogue, comic-book artist turned animator Dash Shaw has encapsulated all these feelings of inadequacy and self-loathing in his creatively unhinged first feature, My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, which stars an enviable voice cast of indie stars: Jason Schwartzman, Lena Dunham, Susan Sarandon, Maya Rudolph and Reggie Watts. Pulling from his own recollections of navigating the dangerous waters […]
by Carlos Aguilar on Apr 14, 2017
