When it replaced BAM’s season of Sundance favorites some years ago, BAMcinemaFest emerged as a stronger and much more Brooklyn-centric event, a true festival rather than just a Park City greatest hits package. This year, it bookends proceedings with festival favorites from two our “25 New Faces” of previous years, David Lowery’s gorgeous period outlaw drama Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and Destin Cretton’s SXSW-winning social worker drama Short Term 12. Michael M. Bilandic’s artworld satire Hellaware — which was featured in our Summer 2012 article “The Shooting Parties” — is the sole world premiere, however the focus here is on local […]
I just got back from eight film festivals in less than four weeks with my first feature, The Discoverers. We’ve been fortunate to win a few awards, get great press and meet new friends this past month. I’m sharing a few things I’ve learned to hopefully help fellow filmmakers on their own unique journeys. 1. Embrace your audience Festivals can be a lot of things: a market where distributors see your film, or an opportunity to get press, but they are also your first time to connect with an audience. Embrace the experience of sharing your work in a theater […]
Big Data — the term is everywhere right now. Sometimes used as a shorthand for the companies that are in the business of collecting, aggregating and sifting through large data sets (often comprised of personal info), it more properly refers to the data sets themselves — collections of information so gigantic they require advanced technologies to interpret. There’s much creepy potential in Big Data, but it is here to stay. The question, then, is whether the technologies of Big Data can be marshaled for progressive and creative goals. At Arts Fwd, Erinn Roos-Brown argues that arts organizations can learn from […]
For Narratively, Carolyn Rothstein revisits the kids from Kids, 20 years later, in “Legends Never Die.” Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson are stars, Justin Pierce and Harold Hunter have passed away, and the others are living their lives in diverse and at times unexpected ways. As her interviewees tell it, Kids was not just about people but a city: The kids say the film was accurate, except for the most fantastical stuff. There’s no denying they weren’t sober during filming. Even the scene with Javier Nunez, at fourteen, by far the youngest of the skate crew, and three other little […]
Sumptuous and evocative, Jared Moshe’s Dead Man’s Burden is the rarest of species in specialty film, a Western. More importantly, it is a fine addition to the genre, a complex meditation on the wages of sin and the burdens of family, a chamber drama with more than a hint of noir. Set during the years after the Civil War in and around a rural New Mexican ranch, the film initially focuses on a young couple, Martha (Clare Bowen) and Heck (David Call). They plan to sell the ranch after the death of her father, a struggling farmer, and use the money […]
Could John Cassavetes’ children, all of whom have grabbed his passed torch, be any more different? Son Nick has dabbled in gritty crime fare (Alpha Dog) and mainstream melodrama (The Notebook), daughter Zoe helmed Broken English and has ties to the fashion biz, and now eldest daughter Alexandra — or “Xan,” for short — has carried on the tradition, making her own distinct narrative directorial debut with the vampire romance Kiss of the Damned after previously making the cinephilic doc Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession. Adamantly stylized, worldly, and nostalgic, Kiss of the Damned, which Xan also wrote, joins Neil […]
The distance between video games and cinema has been shrinking for years. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the presentation of Beyond: Two Souls last Saturday during the Tribeca Film Festival’s closing weekend, an event billed as the first time a video game has ever been shown in a film festival. Certainly in the packed SVA theater, past the red carpet for actors like Elliot Page and after the enthusiastic introduction by Tribeca’s Chief Creative Officer Geoffrey Gilmore, it felt like a convergence of the two media that we haven’t seen before. This isn’t a game based on a […]
Trent Harris has paid his dues. The Salt Lake City-based filmmaker has made more films than he can count, mostly shorts, documentaries, and experimental films. But his narrative feature films are among the best examples of underground cult films, including three that will show tonight, tomorrow, and Friday at the 92 Street Y’s Tribeca location. Harris will be in attendance for a post-screening discussion every night. The Beaver Trilogy (Wednesday), his best-known work, is broken into three parts, each filmed years apart. The first is a documentary about Groovin’ Gary (Richard LaVon Griffith), a young man from the small town […]
Post Tenebras Lux is distributed by Strand Releasing and opens theatrically at the Film Forum on Wednesday, May 1, 2013. It world premiered at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. NOTE: This review was first published at Hammer to Nail on September 14, 2012, in conjunction with its North American premiere at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux is a landscape of possibility, vibrantly alert to the tensions of class, family and desire, pulsating with life. The story of a wealthy family living in the secluded Mexican woodlands, the film takes on the issues of duty, […]
Screenwriter George Richards wrote Case Sensitive as “an American thriller with American actors for an American audience.” Director Gil Kofman (The Memory Thief) brought the script to producer Seth Scher, who had connections to a Chinese investor who was making films for the Chinese market. The film was greenlit and Kofman, who does not speak Chinese, traveled to Xiamen, China, to direct his second narrative feature. Soon afterward his friend, documentary filmmaker Tanner King Barklow, joined him and began documenting Kofman’s travails as he tried to navigate a colossal language barrier, bureaucracy, corruption, and cultural differences. Early in the documentary […]