A little over three years ago, I decided I wanted to make a sci-fi short film about a robot trying to become human. My idea was to combine live action with miniatures and rod-puppetry – despite having no previous experience with special effects. Initial reactions from family, friends, and collaborators were of the “Are you insane?” variety – perhaps rightfully so. It was at that point I knew I had to make the film. What followed was an odd combination of luck, coincidence, and disaster – three ingredients that are rarely talked about, yet I’m convinced are completely inseparable from […]
First things first – Texas’s Thin Line Film Fest does not take place in Austin, nor in March, nor does it accept indie narratives, nor any fiction films at all. In fact, this six-year-old event, which plays a month prior to SXSW, smartly doesn’t define itself in relation to that cinematic elephant in the Lone Star State. Which is its strength. Texas’s only fest devoted strictly to docs – from local to international – Thin Line (the name inspired by its founders’ desire to explore that space between fact and fiction) does take over Denton, Texas, for 10 days in […]
The current class of “25 New Faces” continues to make headlines, this time bagging opening and closing night spots at the upcoming New Directors/New Films being works by 2012 alums. Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye‘s archival doc Our Nixon kicks off the MoMA/FSLC-housed festival, while Alexandre Moors‘ Beltway sniper drama Blue Caprice closes the event. Other U.S. indies at the 2013 edition of ND/NF include Joshua Oppenheimer’s buzz doc The Act of Killing, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and Shannon Plumb’s Towheads, while additional standouts include festival favorites like Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking and Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell. The […]
Is it possible to produce a cinematic narrative based on the collective wisdom of a tribe with no real actors? Can a film be made where true stories are brought to life by the people who have actually lived them? Joey L. not only believes it is possible, he has every intention of making it happen. By the age of 18, he was commissioned to photograph the movie poster for Twilight. Currently his work, on National Geographic’s Killing Lincoln promos, can be seen on billboards from Times Square to Sunset Boulevard. So how does someone who makes a living routinely […]
Jenny Deller’s Future Weather takes an unusual look at Middle America, forgoing the clichés of its demography for ecology. Introverted Laudurée (Perla Haney-Jardine) is abandoned by her mother (Marin Ireland), who flees their trailer for Hollywood, with gelatinous aspirations for a career as a make-up artist. Fiercely independent, Laudurée carries out her daily life as though nothing happened, her days consumed by experiments and the threat of global warming. Yearning to be taken under the wing of her science teacher (Lili Taylor), Laudurée is nevertheless snatched up by her alcoholic grandmother (Amy Madigan), who plans to move to Florida to […]
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(Bestiaire had its World Premiere at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. It is being distributed theatrically in America by KimStim and screens in L.A. at the Cinefamily, Feb. 21 – 27, 2013. ) The first animals we see in Bestiaire are humans, observing something with great attention. The scene resolves in a funny anti-climax: it’s revealed that they’re sketching in an art class, and all that intense focus is directed at a small, taxidermied deer. By starting his film looking at the viewer, director Denis Côté suggests that what we’re about to experience will be as much about ourselves and […]
While probably best known as belligerent barista Ray on the HBO show Girls (and also for his role as a lousy houseguest in Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture), Alex Karpovsky started out and continues to be a prolific indie film director who makes diverse styles of micro-budget films. His fourth and fifth films, the stylistically contrasting Rubberneck and Red Flag, are being released by Tribeca Film and screen at Film Society of Lincoln Center from February 22. In Rubberneck, Karpovsky plays a scientist obsessed with a former fling, and in the road trip comedy Red Flag he plays a filmmaker named Alex Karpovsky who is […]
In Canadian writer/director Ruba Nadda’s elegant and oddly topical thriller Inescapable, Adib Abdul-Kareem (Alexander Siddig) is a computer operations manager at a Toronto bank who fled Syria some 30 years ago. Married to a Canadian with whom he’s fathered two pretty teenage girls, he’s kept his checkered past a secret from his family the whole time, but after the disappearance of the older of his two daughters (Jay Anstey) during a clandestine visit to Syria in order to find out where her father is from, Adib heads to Damascus despite the possibility of repercussions for long ago sins. With combative ex-flame […]
Anyone who’s joined the FCPX bandwagon will tell you one of the main draws is speed (or at least I will). FCPX let’s you do things quicker. But how we interact with the system (and computers in general) has its limitations. For years the standard of working with NLEs has been left fingers planted on J, K, L, right hand on mouse. It’s not a terribly bad way to edit. Doing it for years you build up a fast muscle memory, but there are still keyboard tasks that stretch the limit of what you can remember, along with the span […]