During the fall, Filmmaker magazine organized a traveling screening series showcasing the work of this year’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film,” which included a fantastic show at the IFC Center. Tonight, the 25 New Faces series returns to NYC for a week of screenings at the reRun Theater in Dumbo, with the festivities kicking off with an excellent shorts program followed by an opening night party. Screening this evening are shorts by Drea Cooper and Zackary Canepari (Aquadettes), Desiree Akhavan and Ingrid Jungermann (3 episodes of their web series The Slope), Julia Pott (Belly), Ian Harnarine (Doubles with Slight […]
We’ve seen the RLSH phenomenon explored in dramatic films like Kick-Ass and Super, but now Filmmaker 25 New Face director Sheldon Candis looks at it in the form of a documentary short. Here, executive produced by Ashton Kutcher for Thrash Lab’s Subculture Club series and based on San Diego’s XTreme Justice League, is The Subculture of Real Life Superheroes. From the press release: “Superheroes are for both children and adults. With so many varying characters there is at least one superhero everyone can take a liking to. We heard about these guys that live their lives playing the role of […]
An intelligently written and genuinely felt Iraq War drama, Allegiance is perhaps the first film about the way the conflict shaped the lives of those who prepare to go to battle that has been written, produced, directed and mostly financed by veterans themselves. The directorial debut of Michael Connors, the picture has an unforced verisimilitude few films about military life can match. Allegiance portrays an insular community with its own moral logic, in this case an American military regiment of New York National Guardsmen being called up to active duty in Iraq on the eve of the Sadr City/Fallujah nightmare of 2004. What […]
I first got to know Tony Pemberton when his production company Go East Productions co-produced my documentary The Mark of Cain. Tony was living in Moscow at the time and I could not have navigated Russia without him. He directed his own Film Beyond The Ocean (2000) in Russia and he knew the ins and outs of filmmaking there. No matter how insane my requests were, he never considered anything impossible. Pemberton is currently in Germany shooting his feature film Buddha’s Little Finger. He is in Berlin, which is standing in for Moscow in the ’90s. Additionally, Pemberton is in […]
Nominees for the Heterodox Award, the Filmmaker-sponsored Cinema Eye award given to a narrative film that imaginatively incorporates non-fiction strategies and aesthetics, were announced today by Cinema Eye Honors. The five nominated films are: Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s Caesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire), Craig Zobel’s Compliance, Jem Cohen’s Museum Hours, Pablo Larraín’s No, and Terence Nance’s An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. Said Scott Macaulay, Editor of Filmmaker Magazine, “In the third year of the Heterodox Award, our nominated filmmakers explore the interstices of documentary and fiction in fascinating and diverse ways, from situating their characters within the confines of […]
As one of the three journalists contacted by documentary film programmer Thom Powers last Spring about Caveh Zahedi’s The Sheik and I, I wanted to weigh in on the controversy that erupted this week following Zahedi’s accusation that Powers has “blacklisted” his picture, which opens today from Factory 25. After watching Zahedi’s YouTube video and then reading Powers’ response, I decided to talk to both men to explore the situation in more detail. Then, in the midst of writing this, I noticed Eric Kohn’s post at Indiewire this morning, which exhaustively discusses the film, the timeline of Powers and Zahedi’s […]
It’s been more than a week since IDFA, but I can’t stop thinking about their DocLab program, a competition section showcasing “new and unexpected forms of digital documentary storytelling.” This program presents new non-fiction transmedia projects, each allowing the viewer to interact with the reality the filmmakers have documented and constructed. Most of the projects were presented in screenings or in talks at the excellent DocLab Interactive Documentary Conference. In addition, each was presented on their own computer monitors in the DocLab’s gallery space. What makes most of these mostly web-based projects different from a “normal” documentary is that the […]
Capturing the subtle ache of youth on screen has never been an easy task – as evidenced by the long tradition of idiosyncratic, auteur-driven “coming of age” features like American Graffiti, The Last Picture Show, and Dazed and Confused. So it’s quite an impressive feat that those same emotions and aesthetics are so naturally evoked in the real-life stories of three adrift youth in the new documentary Only the Young. Following the quiet travails of evangelical skate punk best friends Garrison, Kevin and Skye, this debut feature from filmmaking team Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims is one of the year’s […]
Following on from the Bay Area Boom article about the San Francisco Film Society’s Filmmaker360 program, we are profiling the 13 finalists for the SFFS’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking grant. The winners of this award will be announced on December 8. SUSAN YOUSSEF AND MAN KIT LAM, MARJOUN AND THE FLYING HEADSCARF Synopsis: With her father imprisoned on dubious terrorism related charges, a Lebanese-American teenager in Arkansas searches for identity in the headscarf and a motorcycle. This feature is an extension of the short by the same name that screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf is the first […]
Every November, amidst the onset of ski and snowboard season, the Whistler Film Festival attracts a crowd of producers, filmmakers, journalists, critics and the occasional celebrity (this year the token stars are Daniel Radcliffe and Rashida Jones). Left off that list would be cinephiles — sure, there may be a tiny scattering of hardcore movie buffs, but they’re the exception that proves the rule — as WFF is a deliberately uncinephilic festival composed of accessible indie-ish Canadian cinema and more emphatically put the spotlight on an industry-driven summit. You’re more likely to find a far greater number of people squeezed […]