6300 Results for “Open ”
-
Laura Poitras’s Spy Theater
There was a spooky feeling at the Whitney Biennial one Friday night this past April. Visitors to Laura Poitras’s “Surveillance Teach-In” were forcibly detained as they tried to enter the museum, while downstairs a masked man handed out leaflets with lists of addresses (NSA listening posts?), sinister in their nondescription. Slides flashed, of the anonymous desert buildings that house the servers that index our every email, phone call, transaction. And on the dais, an odd couple riffing one acronym after another: “NSA, NARIS, AES….” Hacker Jacob Appelbaum, black clad, with earrings, played something of a straight man, even as the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 27, 2012 -
MARK RASO’S MICROBUDGET PRODUCTION DIARY: WRAP REFLECTIONS
Director Mark Raso, whose short film Under won a Student Academy Award earlier this year, is writing a series of blog entries about making his feature debut with a microbudget movie shot in Copenhagen, Denmark. This is his second dispatch. After starting principal photography on July 18th, I sat down every Sunday — our one off day per week — with the intention of writing an entry for this blog. It was not my plan to agree to do this and come up lame, but it seemed that despite my best efforts I just couldn’t finish one. Perhaps I was too […]
by Mark Raso on Aug 23, 2012 -
Kleber Mendonca Filho, Neighboring Sounds
One of the year’s most startling debuts, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds is a queasily effective portrait of a society undergoing dynamic change. Unfolding over the course of a few weeks in the perpetually sunny Brazilian metropolis of Recife, the film centers on several families in one upscale block which is surrounded by new development. Yet the perpetual noise of high rise construction isn’t the only thing haunting the denizens of this seemingly comfortable and manicured urban space. Fear of crime and just-under-the-surface racial tension takes its toll on everyone in unspoken ways. Even as fading reminders of Brazil’s ever-present […]
by Brandon Harris on Aug 23, 2012 -
Five Questions with Teddy Bear Director Mads Matthiesen
Kim Kold, the six-foot-something, 300-plus pound star of Teddy Bear, is a striking, memorable screen presence. In the first feature from Danish writer-director Mads Matthiesen, Kold plays Dennis, a mama’s boy who decides to travel to Thailand in search of a wife. Dennis knows this will irk the heck out of his possessive mother Ingrid (Elsebeth Steentoft), so he lies, telling her he’s off to Germany to compete in a bodybuilding competition. This buys him time, but ultimately Dennis will have to sort out his feelings: Is his desire to forge a life of his own as powerful as the […]
by Kevin Canfield on Aug 21, 2012 -
Samein Priester, 1st &4Ever
I met the documentary filmmaker Samein Priester last spring while I was at The MacDowell Colony. He screened his documentary short 1st &4Ever, which elicited an emotional response from all of us who saw it, and it launched my friendship with Priester. We talked about film and life and he showed me footage from other projects. There is a quality to Priester that is also evident in his work: you want to listen to him. 1st&4Ever addresses the absence of the father figure and how one can learn to be an effective father if one has never had an example […]
by Alix Lambert on Aug 21, 2012 -
A PLUK DE NACHT PRIMER: AMSTERDAM’S ANSWER TO ROOFTOP FILMS
“Open-air cinema as a means to an end,” is how Caspar Sonnen, the driving force behind IDFA DocLab summed up the vision for the Open Air Film Festival Amsterdam (a.k.a. Pluk de Nacht), the summertime tradition he co-founded back in 2003, when I last chatted with him over coffee at Two For Joy in Frederiksplein. He went on to explain that all the film schools and Netflix DVDs in the world can’t capture the magic of cinema like a single collective movie experience can. “Our organizational structure is that of a block party,” he added. Interestingly, this indie movie evangelist […]
by Lauren Wissot on Aug 21, 2012 -
WHERE IDEAS GO WHEN THEY DIE
The following blog post originally appeared at the IFP’s site and is cross-posted with permission. — Editor. May 15th, 2011. I am given a book by my favourite poet, Bob Hicok. In it there’s a poem about the 2007 Virginia Polytechnic Institute massacre – to date the deadliest shooting of innocent people by a single gunman in US history. This excerpt from the poem speaks for itself – People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed because they know I teach at Virginia Tech, to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually I answered these messages: there’s nothing to say back except of course […]
by Caspar Newbolt on Aug 20, 2012 -
Independent Film Success: Luck or Merit?
Two of my favorite economics bloggers — Felix Salmon at Reuters and Joshua Brown at The Reformed Broker — are debating a new work by a third writer, Black Swan‘s Nassim Taleb, that has something to say to independent filmmakers. To bring their dialogue into our world: has the DIY revolution led to a system in which luck is the primary determinant of independent film success? Let’s start at the beginning. The work referenced — “Why It is No Longer a Good Idea to Be in The Investment Industry” — opens with a new term, “the spurious tail,” that refers […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 19, 2012 -
Lady Vengeance: Trailer Happy, Scaring the Children Edition
Trailers have the ability to psyche us up, freak us out, turn us off, and lead us very, very astray, but the heightened anticipation is part of the fun, regardless of how accurate a representation of the film that cleverly constructed little bugger ends up being in the end. Recently there’s been a spate of trailers for horror-themed animated children’s films, starting with ParaNorman (pictured above), which opened today. So which of these flicks is most likely to either give your kids nightmares, or send them down a lifelong path of genre appreciation? Let’s judge a book by its cover […]
by Farihah Zaman on Aug 17, 2012 -
The Blue Velvet Project, #152
Second #7144, 119:04 [Final post. Thank you to Scott Macaulay for taking a chance with this.] The blue curtain, creating the conditions for its own strange, vertical, blue-noise static. Remainders: 45,000 = total words in project 2 = frames that feature Dorothy, Jeffrey, and Sandy together 3 = frames including Aunt Barbara 17 = frames in which no human being appears 20 = frames featuring Jeffrey and Dorothy 23 = frames featuring Jeffrey and Sandy Robin Wood, from his classic 1979 essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film”: Some version of the Other [include, simply] other people. It is […]
by Nicholas Rombes on Aug 17, 2012
