Via Google Analytics, here are our most popular posts of July, 2013. 1. 25 New Faces of 2013. No surprise here. Our annual survey of new talent regularly nabs our top traffic of the year — so much so that our site has crashed for two years straight. (Thanks, site5!) If you haven’t surveyed the list, you can find all 25 of our directors, actors, cinematographers and new media artists here. 2. Summer Grant Deadlines for Filmmakers. Dante Pilkington’s listing of funding opportunities for both fiction and documentary filmmakers took the number two spot. But if you’re just coming across […]
Filmmaker Braden King has made a hauntingly beautiful, web-only “interactive music video” for “Stitches,” the new single from Califone. In real time, the video pulls and sequences images from a curated selection of Tumblrs, sidescrolling them across your monitor in sync to the song’s elegant melancholy. Black-and-white photos and animated GIFs drift by, and by highlighting one with your cursor color bleeds back in. Click and the image flips over, allowing you to write a caption that is then sent to the band (and included on the “Stitches” home page) or, if you want, reblogged. Califone’s Tim Rutili and King are […]
Plenty of us independent filmmakers claim to be as environmentally friendly as can be, but beyond a few minor lifestyle tweaks (like claiming we just watched Gasland 2 while bemoaning Hollywood’s reliance on sequels), are we really as green as we’d like to think we are? Sadly, probably not. But one way we can help make a small difference to our planet is to take a page from the food movement and become locavore filmmakers — making movies close to home, in order to reduce our carbon footprints. I tried this strategy on my new film (Between Us, starring Julia […]
It’s the time for fall festival announcements, and in the last 24 hours TIFF has now unveiled its second wave of programming, including the documentary section, Midnight Madness and Vanguard. A lot of these films have (or will have) played elsewhere, but there are still a number of notable world premieres. Among the doc strand, Filthy Gorgeous: The Bob Guccione Story, a film about the head of the Penthouse empire, seems certain to be entertaining, and Jehane Noujaim’s excellent doc on the Egyptian uprising, The Square, will have its first official screening after playing in rough-cut form at Sundance. (I […]
“She was an incredible collaborator,” says Ryan Coogler of his Fruitvale Station d.p., Rachel Morrison, in Ava DuVernay’s cover story on the writer/director this issue. “She’s very tough,” he continues. “On your first glance of her, you know she has edge. You know she’s somebody who will bust her butt to get the shot. But as you get to really know her and some of the things she’s been through in her life, she’s just this big ball of emotion on the inside. Once she’s set on fire by a story there’s just no stopping her.” Selected after a recommendation […]
Last year, to celebrate POV’s 25th anniversary, Filmmaker organized a series of conversations between documentary directors whose work had been featured on the PBS non-fiction showcase. This year, we continue this series with a fascinating discussion between Stephen Maing — whose debut feature on Chinese citizen bloggers, High Tech, Low Life, is currently streaming for free on the POV website — with Lixin Fan, the Chinese filmmaker whose Last Train Home, an intimate portrait of a fractured family of migrant workers in China, won him great acclaim in 2009. In the conclusion of this five-part discussion, the two discuss how to construct a story through intimacy. High […]
Compared to film festivals, webfests — “film” festivals geared specifically toward web series (like Mission Backup Earth, pictured above) and other online videos — are definitely the new kids on the block, but they’re fast coming to fill the role for web video that names like Venice and Cannes did for film decades ago. And they’re springing up much faster — 10 of the thirteen events described below are premiering in 2013 or ’14 — making it appropriate to survey what’s out there, how filmmakers can get their content shown and who’s eligible. TO WebFest (Toronto): Announced Tuesday by the Independent […]
Last year, to celebrate POV’s 25th anniversary, Filmmaker organized a series of conversations between documentary directors whose work had been featured on the PBS non-fiction showcase. This year, we continue this series with a fascinating discussion between Stephen Maing — whose debut feature on Chinese citizen bloggers, High Tech, Low Life, is currently streaming for free on the POV website — with Lixin Fan, the Chinese filmmaker whose Last Train Home, an intimate portrait of a fractured family of migrant workers in China, won him great acclaim in 2009. In the fourth segment of this five-part discussion, the two documentarians discuss the co-dependent relationship between the filmmaker […]
In Nenad Cicin-Sain’s moody debut feature, The Time Being, Frank Langella plays Warner, a wealthy art patron who after buying a painting at an art gallery hires the financially strapped artist behind the work (Wes Bentley) to do odd, artistically tinged jobs for him. Daniel, a dedicated painter who’s dour work isn’t exactly flying off the walls, struggles to support his family — to the increasing annoyance of his wife Olivia (Ahna O’Reilly). He is drawn to the reclusive and mysterious millionaire as a potential new benefactor, but when Warner’s assignments for Daniel become increasingly bizarre surveillance excursions, Daniel senses that he may […]
IFP, publisher of Filmmaker Magazine, announced today 163 projects in development selected for its Independent Film Week Project Forum. Projects include documentaries by such directors as Academy Award Winners Louis Psihoyos and Cynthia Wade; fiction features by documentarians Jennifer Fox and Jeremiah Zagar; fiction features by web creators Mesh Flinders and Thom Woodley; and an original web series, Awesome Asian Bad Guys, by Patrick Epino and Stephen Dypiangco. In addition, a number of projects from Filmmaker Magazine 25 New Faces have been selected, including new work from Carlen Altman, Sophia Takal, the Zellner Brothers, Alex Jablonski, Pete Ohs & Andrea […]