6303 Results for “Open ”
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Distribution Strategies for the Regional Festival Circuit
A little while back, I looked at a small portion of The Film Collaborative’s most recent book, Selling Your Film Outside the US, which considered an unusual case of DIY distribution in Europe. Now, over at their blog, Sheri Candler and Orly Ravid are running a series on distribution preparation for filmmakers worldwide. As submissions for Sundance are already open, the latest entry centers on festivals, and why you should already have a distribution strategy on the back burner before your acceptance, or, rejection. If you don’t get into one of the top-tier festivals (Sundance, Berlin, Toronto, etc.), teeming with reluctant buyers, the chances that your film will […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jul 11, 2014 -
Latinbeat: Five Vettings and a Funeral
Once again, this festival of both rarefied and salt-of-the-earth films from all over Latin America graces the Big Apple at the Walter Reade Theater, once again with a delicious menu that does the Film Society of Lincoln Center proud. I’ve been drawn to Latinbeat since now-retired FSLC Program Director Richard Peña established it in 1997. It has consistently displayed not only fine titles but also a less apparent connective tissue that has been expertly if unconsciously simulated, one affording us more than single plotlines, and which provokes a pleasurably heady and arty stretch. Now in its 15th edition, the films […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jul 11, 2014 -
The Rumpus Launches Manual Typewriter iPad App, Typing Writer
I grew up on a manual typewriter, the same one my mom used to write articles for Life Magazine in the ’50s and ’60s. It was a small portable in a beat-up canvas case, and you had to hit the keys hard. Later, my dad outfitted his basement home office with an IBM Selectric. I loved that typewriter. It was a brick, a giant slab of molded something, and once you gave the keys a little push the thing would explode. The violence of it was kind of thrilling. Still, I don’t fetishize old-school typewriters, manual or electric. I can’t […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 10, 2014 -
“Everything Seems to be Licorice”: Land Ho!’s Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz on Shooting in Iceland
Land Ho!, co-written and co-directed by Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens, is an odd-couple two-hander like Katz’s previous Cold Weather and Quiet City, and a progressively rural odyssey like Stephens’ Pilgrim Song, accented by the hues of regional color familiar from both directors’ palettes. But given the film’s Icelandic setting, perhaps another frame of reference is also called for. In interviews, the filmmakers frequently discuss the remoteness of the Icelandic landscape, its incongruity with the day-to-day lives of their characters, and, above all, its mysterious and “otherworldly” beauty. In Iceland, where I currently live, this view is not necessarily reflective […]
by Mark Asch on Jul 10, 2014 -
A Round-Up of the Last Non-Linear Editor Updates
June proved to be a rich month for non-linear editor users. Adobe released their latest Creative Cloud update, Apple updated Final Cut Pro X, Motion, and Compressor, the public beta of DaVinci Resolve 11 was released, and the Mac beta of Lightworks finally appeared. Adobe Creative Cloud On June 17 Adobe released the second major update to Creative Cloud. For Premiere Pro this release adds a new masking feature for effects. You can now easily add an effect mask either using an Oval or a four-point polygon tool. A built-in tracking tool makes it possible to track a shape […]
by Michael Murie on Jul 10, 2014 -
“In Prison, I Had Some Peace of Mind”: Jafar Panahi on Closed Curtain
Dogs have been banned as pets in Iran, providing the starting premise for Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain. A screenwriter (Kambozia Partovi, also the co-director) has a dog smuggled into his seaside villa by friends. Once the animal’s inside, the man systematically draws the curtains over windows on all three floors. The opening of Jafar Panahi’s Closed Curtain fictionalizes the necessary circumstances of its production: working in secret, the director was forced to draw the curtains for as much of the shoot as possible to make sure no one could see what was going on inside. There are echoes of recent scenes […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 9, 2014 -
Malcolm X in Dinesh D’Souza’s America: A Dialectical Double-Feature
Cities with active repertory theaters offer options for constructing cross-town do-it-yourself double-features, and a chance this Sunday to follow Malcolm X at BAMcinématek’s Spike Lee retro with Dinesh D’Souza’s America: Imagine the World Without Her seemed too dialectically productive to pass up. The connecting common component turned out to be a compact Malcolm soundbite (“We don’t see any American Dream. We’ve experienced only the American Nightmare!”), recited by Denzel Washington at the end of a longer peroration in Lee’s opening credits and presented as a stand-alone snippet from the real Malcolm in D’Souza’s film. It’s no surprise America ditches the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 8, 2014 -
Jordana Spiro at the Sundance Directors Lab, Part 2
[Jordana Spiro’s first blog post can be found here.] I was directing my last scene for the lab. It was set in a tiny bathroom and the only place to be out of the camera’s view was the small bedroom on the side with the equipment. After the actors finished a take, the bedroom door opened and Robert Redford asked if he could join me and watch for a while. Sure you can, Robert Redford. We settled in together on the twin bed to watch the small monitor as the actors went for another take and then we talked through […]
by Jordana Spiro on Jul 8, 2014 -
Even Making a Cup of Tea is Erotic: Bernardo Bertolucci on Me and You
Bernardo Bertolucci was barely out of his teens when the first feature film he directed, La Commare Secca, based on a story by Pier Paolo Pasolini, premiered in 1962. In today’s poetry-averse art house environment, his influence surfaces only sporadically — perhaps most clearly in the impulsive, unabashed aesthetics of Paolo Sorrentino — but his filmography remains strong and singular. Nothing feels quite like a Bertolucci film, with its peculiar, poetic fusion of the sensual, the political, and the spiritual. Bertolucci is 73 now, and, because of a series of botched back surgeries, confined to a wheelchair. His newest film, […]
by John Magary on Jul 2, 2014 -
At the Death House Door: Steve James on the Roger Ebert Doc, Life Itself
Two heavyweights of Chicago film culture, director Steve James and the iconic late film critic Roger Ebert were fond of each other from afar for years. It wasn’t until James was charged with making a cinematic document of Ebert’s final months and his life and achievements that the two grew close. The filmmaker behind the masterful Chicagoland documentaries Hoop Dreams and The Interrupters gives us an up close and personal look at the final months of Ebert’s life, crafting both a tough-minded look at his physical decline and a warm-hearted celebration of a singular cultural figure’s life and work. James, […]
by Brandon Harris on Jul 1, 2014
