6300 Results for “Open ”
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Video Streaming & Indies
Now that the 2013 Sundance Film Festival is underway, it’s an opportunity to remind indie filmmakers that, sadly, their future is on the web and not in movie theatres. Park City screenings, parties and other get-togethers are great fun and a good chance to meet other makers and distributors. However, don’t expect to make a deal! This year Sundance will screen 119 feature-length films from 32 countries, including works from 51 first-time directors. These works were selected from 12,146 submissions, including 4,044 feature-length films and 8,102 shorts. One can only wonder if the odds for having one’s feature selected (2.9%) […]
by David Rosen on Jan 18, 2013 -
Dave Grohl on Directing Sound City
Dave Grohl has a history of fruitfully redefining himself. After Nirvana self-destructed, he went from being the former drummer for one the most momentous rock bands of the 20th century to being the frontman for one of the biggest acts of the 21st, Foo Fighters. So it shouldn’t seem too surprising to find him making a successful broad jump from musician to documentarian, especially with a project is as close to his heart as Sound City. Opening its doors in 1969, L.A.’s Sound City Studios was low on frills and gloss, but boasted an almost magical live-room ambience and a […]
by Jim Allen on Jan 18, 2013 -
Five Questions with Kill Your Darlings Director John Krokidas
After premiering his short film at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002, director John Krokidas vowed to be back two years later with his first feature film. Krokidas found that it took a bit longer than anticipated to get his film to Park City, but eleven long years later, Kill Your Darlings premieres in competition today at Sundance. The Beat generation has been a popular subject of films lately, but rather than adapt a Kerouac book or Ginsberg poem, Krokidas follows the nascent writers during their days at Columbia University and one particular event that shaped their future work and careers. In 1944, […]
by Alexandra Byer on Jan 18, 2013 -
Unknown Pleasures: Viewing U.S. Indie Cinema From Afar
Catering to virtually every niche, Berlin offers some 70 film festivals each year. Since 2009, the first on the calendar has been the Unknown Pleasures Festival. Held during the first two weeks of January at the historic Babylon Cinema in former East Berlin, it is a work of love run entirely by three enthusiasts of US independent cinema, providing a sorely needed platform for recent American arthouse films. This year’s edition opened on a disappointing note with the German premiere of Michel Gondry’s The We and the I. Typically saccharine and contrived, Gondry’s latest portrays a group of Bronx teens […]
by Giovanni Marchini Camia on Jan 17, 2013 -
The New Professionalism
Over the last decade, as the tools of filmmaking became less expensive and more generally accessible, there was much excitement about what came to be known as the “democratization” of filmmaking. Suddenly, one didn’t have to be rich or the relative of a studio executive to get a movie made. In addition, websites such as YouTube and others opened up distribution to the masses, creating a new paradigm that was dubbed “user-generated content.” All of this sounded great on the surface, but like other seemingly positive advances — remember the “1,000-channel universe” or the “long-tail theory?” — there are always […]
by Ira Deutchman on Jan 17, 2013 -
How to Succeed at Self-Distribution if You’re Not Louis C.K.
James Swirsky & Lisanne Pajot are the directors, producers and distributors of the Sundance award-winning feature documentary, Indie Game: The Movie. Before we began production on Indie Game: The Movie, we saw Louis C.K. perform in our hometown of Winnipeg, Canada. It was a great show. He was hilarious, and we walked away cemented in the idea that Louis C.K. is one of the funniest people on the planet. Creatively, it’s hard not to be inspired by someone performing at the top of his or her field. However, little did we know, two years later, Louis C.K. would be inspiring […]
by Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky on Jan 17, 2013 -
Positive First Impressions
Documentary filmmaker Farihah Zaman shares the secrets of the Good Pitch.
by Farihah Zaman on Jan 17, 2013 -
The Basement Tapes
It’s easy to imagine movies now as mutable data shuffled endlessly between clouds and hard drives — and for some movies, this is at least sort of the case. But the enduring value of original physical media — prints, expensive video masters and even physical screenplays — is being demonstrated in a dispute that is roiling the experimental film and video world. For the last two years, filmmaker Mark Rappaport has been unsuccessfully attempting — via private correspondence, public pleas and a court case — to retrieve needed archival materials he left for safekeeping with film critic and Boston University […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 17, 2013 -
The 2013 Art House Convergence | Upstream Color Offers A Unique Case Study
This past Monday night, as temperatures dipped well below zero, film curators and programmers from America’s art house cinemas gathered in a screening room in Midway, Utah, for a unique screening opportunity at the annual Art House Convergence. Shane Carruth, the Sundance award winning director of Primer, brought his new film, the highly anticipated Upstream Color, to the conference to show the film directly to art house cinema programmers a full week before the film’s World Premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. And while writers (like I) have been asked to embargo our thoughts on the film itself until the […]
by Tom Hall on Jan 17, 2013 -
Bruno Dumont, Hors Satan
An abiding presence at the Cannes Film Festival, where he has twice won the Grand Prix, French writer-director Bruno Dumont (Flanders) is arguably one of the most celebrated and least understood auteurs of the contemporary European film scene. Hailed as a neo-Bressonian wunderkind for his remarkable debut Life of Jesus (1997), a portrait of grinding life among provincial French youth, the onetime philosophy teacher returned two years later with Humanité, an opaque detective story that baffled many observers and even incensed some of Dumont’s staunchest champions. Subsequent films, the notoriously carnal Twentynine Palms (2003)— a kind of metaphysical horror exercise […]
by Damon Smith on Jan 17, 2013
