Today the full lineup for BAMCinemafest has been unveiled, including the opening and closing night films. (The initial slate of titles was announced just over a month ago.) The fest will be bookended by comedian Mike Birbiglia’s Sundance charmer Sleepwalk with Me and Rock ‘n’ Roll Exposed: The Photography of Bob Gruen, the latest doc from British musician and filmmaker Don Letts (Dancehall Queen). The Spotlight screening is Benh Zeitlin’s Sundance Grand Prize winner Beasts of the Southern Wild, and other highlights out of the newly announced titles include the Ross brothers’ Tchoupitoulas, Cory McAbee’s Crazy and Thief and Tim Sutton’s […]
(The purpose of Milestone Films’ ‘Project Shirley’ is to re-introduce the best available prints of Shirley Clarke’s work to audiences across the world. The Connection opens in NYC at the IFC Center on Friday, May 4, 2012. Visit the Milestone website to learn more.) Usually when you watch a once-banned film decades after the fact, it leads to a deflated feeling that the film wasn’t ban-worthy at all, that it wasn’t ever close to being “dangerous.” But when one of those films is also widely deemed a classic by trusted sources? Well, that just about guarantees it’s going to land […]
Steve Collins’ You Hurt My Feelings is the story of emotionally remote and unavailable people, a trio of wounded individuals who fail to connect with one another. Though Collins’ film deals with familiar subject matter, its tale is told with such clever minimalism and discernible sweetness that it goes down rather smoothly. While the characters may not be able to express themselves emotionally, Collins and his director of photography, Jeremy Saulnier (Septien, Putty Hill), find real poetry in the changing of the New England seasons, the passage of time providing an even greater window in the the failed lives on display. John […]
A Filmmaker reader recently emailed me with a simple question. After going to film school, making some shorts and working conspicuously within his means, he’s now written a script purely from the imagination — not censoring himself by thinking of things like money and production requirements. The resulting project, I take it, is too big for his usual DIY methods. He asked, “What do I do now?” A tough question, not knowing the filmmaker very well and not having read the script. There are easier-said-than-done answers: “Find a producer! Get an agent!” But just sending out a bunch of PDFs, […]
With her debut documentary, Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, Jessica Oreck reinvented the nature doc. Oreck, an entomologist who worked as a docent at the American Museum of Natural History, made a film about an insect that was as much about man’s fascination with that creature as it was the creature itself. To top it off, she made her poetic and allusive picture in Japan, exploring the country’s endemic beetle-mania through evocative cinematography and haunting voiceover. When so many documentary filmmakers make their artistic choices based on the desires of their funders, Oreck chooses the harder path. Her latest film, Aatsinki, […]
And like that it was gone. Funny thing about film festivals — no one seems to really miss them when they’re over, although within the provisional community that pops up during such events, no one seems to be able to talk about much else (except what they’d rather be doing). So it was with the 11th Tribeca Film Festival, which came to a close on Sunday. Even at the party for The Fourth Dimension, perhaps the most undeniably hip film in the selection (Vice! Grolsch!), the mood was sort of dutiful. As for the actual film, I, like many, left after the Harmony […]
The opening night movie of the Los Angeles Film Festival — Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love — was announced three weeks ago (along with screenings of Sundance winners Middle of Nowhere and Beasts of the Southern Wild), but today the rest of the line-up was unveiled, with the headline news being that Steven Soderbergh’s male stripper romp, Magic Mike, starring Channing Tatum and Matthew McConaughey, will close out the June fest. In the narrative competition, there are notable entries from Cory McAbee (The American Astronaut), Jared Moshé (a familiar name as a producer, making his first film as director), […]
In this second part of an interview with Eric Austin of HeliVideo, Eric talks about camera control, future cameras, and the most amazing sequence he’s shot so far: What camera control are you doing remotely? We have remote record-on, off from the ground, and we can also punch-in. The lens we are currently using on the Sony is actually the kit lens, usually the 18 to 55. Are you using that because of the image stabilization? Yes, in part. The gimbal is stabilized, and with the extra little stabilization in the lens it just takes out the little nicks […]
(Read parts one and two.) I’m sitting deep inside the bowels of the Elinor Bunin Monroe Film Center on West 65th Street. The Story Hack got off to a friendly start around 10:00 this morning with an orientation by Aina Abiodun, Mike Knowlton, and Film Society of Lincoln Center Executive Director Rose Kuo. We made sure everyone was on the same page and were told our final wild card, the Emily Dickinson quote “Fortune befriends the bold,” which has to be included in every hack. Aina’s opening thoughts also laid down the gauntlet when she said that our work in these […]
In just under eight hours, the first hackathon dedicated exclusively to narrative transmedia gets underway at Lincoln Center; here’s Part 1 about what it is and who’s sponsoring it. There are seven teams of four, so 28 participants total, and if the other groups are anything like my team U.S. Maple, they’re all already feeling tired and well worked. I’ve written sample bibles and transmedia proposals before, as evidence of my versatility as a writer and ability to work in transmedia, but I’ve never finished an actual project. So this Story Hack is my first chance to develop something cross-platform beyond […]