6301 Results for “Open ”
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In Transition: Tokyo International Film Festival 2013
The Tokyo International Film Festival is having something of an identity crisis. This year saw the arrival of Yasushi Shiina as the festival’s Director General. He acknowledged that the festival faced a list of problems. Chief amongst them is that despite it being the 26th year of the event, it hardly registers a blip on the overcrowded film festival calendar. “What I think is my job is that we tell the world that the Tokyo Film Festival exists in Japan and we let the world know that,” Shiina said. “We don’t want to be isolated.” He cited a number of problems […]
by Kaleem Aftab on Oct 28, 2013 -
Gangsters, Baseball, Bathhouses and Bill: The 22nd Annual Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival
Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Toronto, Sheffield – Hot Springs, Arkansas? When one thinks of big doc fests, the onetime playground of Al Capone – and Bill Clinton’s childhood home – doesn’t immediately spring to mind. Yet this historic spa town, containing 47 natural hot springs and Hot Springs National Park, the oldest federal reserve in the U.S., also hosts the country’s oldest doc fest. Now in its impressive 22nd year, the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival exceeded my expectations and then some, its programmers bringing in high-quality nonfiction fare – not to mention topnotch filmmakers and colorful characters – that perfectly aligned […]
by Lauren Wissot on Oct 28, 2013 -
So You Want to Make a Horror Film? On Jump Scares and Other Basics of Fright
If you’re looking to make a horror film simply because you think it might be an easy road to notoriety, you’d be dead wrong. This is a dish that’s best served cold by filmmakers who are fans — those who have long loved being chilled to the bone — so it should be in your blood. If you’re a filmmaker who’s new to horror, immerse yourself in the classics and study their techniques before you set out to try to create a monster of your own. The potential pitfalls you face when making a horror film are what’s really frightening. […]
by A.D. Calvo on Oct 28, 2013 -
The Subject as Auteur: Jonathan Demme on Enzo Avitabile Music Life
Italian jazz saxophonist and composer Enzo Avitabile might not be a household name in the States, but in the annals of world music he’s quite a fixture. In his native Naples he is so famous that when he visits the neighborhood of his youth, folks bustle into the streets and onto rooftops and balconies to lay eyes on him. A scholar of jazz, he can hold court on the evolution of the form as long as you’d like him to, although as Academy Award-winning director Jonathan Demme discovers in his newest concert film, Enzo Avitabile Music Life, that may not […]
by Brandon Harris on Oct 25, 2013 -
Seduced and Abandoned‘s James Toback on Movies, Mortality, Shooting in Cannes, and Literally Shooting his Enemies
James Toback has to be one of the most candid individuals in the movie business. Sitting down for a chat about his new genre-defying documentary Seduced and Abandoned, which borrows its title from 1964’s Pietro Germi satire, and premieres on HBO on Monday, Oct. 28, the 68-year-old filmmaker practically blows my mind with his willingness to talk about anything and everything, from late mogul David Begelman’s psychosis and Alec Baldwin’s divorce troubles to mega-producer delusions and his own personal hit list, whose names he has every intention of crossing off before he croaks. Yes, you heard right. Utterly filterless, Toback […]
by R. Kurt Osenlund on Oct 25, 2013 -
Team-Building, Data Science and the Business Plan: Dogfish Accelerator’s New Film Financing Model
Not long after he founded Dogfish Pictures in 2009, producer James Belfer sensed an industry-wide disconnect between content creation and return on investment. Filmmakers, he gleaned, were concerned with short-term assets, agreeing to sell their film to distributors for a fixed sum that was a mere fraction of the eventual profit. In order to capture the full value of their content, filmmakers would need a new set of marketing tools and a fair bit of elbow grease. Belfer felt that any of these strategies would not be found in the traditional film industry at all, but rather, in the tangential […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 25, 2013 -
Blue Is The Warmest Color: Beyond the Media Circus
Enough ink has been spilled over the on- and off-screen controversies encumbering Blue Is The Warmest Color that any moviegoer should find herself beholden to a stance before the film even begins. Subconscious or otherwise, the effects of a months-long media onslaught are almost inescapable. As a woman, I’ve been instructed by some grandes dames of criticism that I ought to take issue with the fact that a man has made such a liberal exploration of female sexuality. As a consumer, I’ve learned that the man in question is tortured, torturous and arguably unhinged for threatening to sue one of […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 25, 2013 -
Peaches Does Herself, Naturally
Peaches – government name Merill Nisker – solemnly swears that her career is built upon natural progressions. Yes, the move from one-third of a folk lounge act to electronica’s most preeminent provocateur was not so much calculated as an aligning of experimentation and tastes. And so, when the Hebbel am Ufer theatre in Berlin approached Peaches about directing a show in 2010, the answer was not a “yes” or “no,” but simply, “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Following the success of the performance, in which Peaches single-handedly played all of the roles to the piano accompaniment of her longtime collaborator Gonzales, the HAU […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 23, 2013 -
“Only At the End You Can See the Origin of Tragedy…. So I Used a Small Camera”: Claire Denis on Bastards
Over 25 years of directing films, Claire Denis has explored the silent rhythms of men and women as they move through spaces of romance and violence, attraction and solitude in stories that range from the love affairs of cannibals (Trouble Every Day), to the exercises of the French Foreign legion (Beau Travail), to the every day spaces of domesticity (35 Shots of Rum). A filmmaker who prefers monologue to dialogue, and silence to any speech at all, her intimate spaces, impressionistic photography, and oblique scenarios can divide audiences, but provide untold riches for those willing to forgo plot devices and […]
by David Barker on Oct 23, 2013 -
21st Century Writer’s Room
The last few years have seen a rise in filmmakers who are extending the stories they tell beyond a single medium. At the same time, festivals, schools and organizations are starting to nurture work that mixes story and code. Tribeca has a program called Storyscapes, which highlights new trends in digital media and recognizes cross-platform approaches to story creation. While Sundance’s New Frontier section has highlighted experiments in storytelling since 2007, they recently added a Story Lab to help incubate forward-thinking, platform-agnostic projects. At Columbia University, where I teach, we are in the process of developing a digital storytelling lab […]
by Lance Weiler on Oct 23, 2013
