6300 Results for “Open ”
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Five Questions with Journey To Planet X Director Josh Koury
Josh Koury is a chronicler of art on the fringes. In 2002, he founded the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival (BUFF), which he ran until 2006, screening weird and wonderful movies that had failed to find a home elsewhere, and in 2007 he directed the documentary feature We Are Wizards, which spotlighted Harry Potter fans who demonstrated their profound love of J.K. Rowling’s world by forming bands that performed “wizard rock.” Now Koury has teamed up with his frequent collaborator Myles Kane (the co-founder of BUFF and Koury’s editor on Wizards) to co-direct Journey to Planet X, a non-fiction feature that focuses […]
by Nick Dawson on Apr 23, 2012 -
Story Hack: Beta, Part 1
Anyone interested in transmedia in New York City needs to know about StoryCode. Mike Knowlton and Aina Abiodun, seen below with their team, originally founded it as a transmedia Meetup group, and then last year transformed it into a nonprofit dedicated to cross-platform storytelling–the first such organization in the world. They continue to sponsor monthly meetings to discuss recent transmedia projects, and now for the first time they’re sponsoring a narrative transmedia hackathon. Hackathons, which come from tech culture, have become a popular venue for transmedia designers to develop their work, but this is the first hackathon to explicitly showcase […]
by Randy Astle on Apr 22, 2012 -
VOTE ONLINE FOR THE 2012 VIMEO AWARDS
We’re entering the final week of voting for the 2012 Vimeo Awards. Over at the Vimeo site are 12 videos each in categories ranging from Narrative to Documentary, Romance to Experimental, Lyrical to Captured. Voting is open until April 30, and you can vote once a day per category. “Each category will be evaluated by a mix of industry experts in that category and the category winner from the 2010 Awards, taking into account the community vote,” Vimeo says, so that means your vote will be mixed in with the opinions of judges like Philip Bloom, Lucy Walker, Ted Hope, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 20, 2012 -
Five Questions with The Playroom Director Julia Dyer
It’s hard to write about Julia Dyer’s The Playroom without writing about the passage of time. It’s been sixteen-years since Dyer’s previous (and first) film, the Sundance hit Late Bloomers, and Dyer has finally crafted a proper follow-up. But beyond that, the film itself is quite concerned with the changes in attitude and perspective that time renders. Set in 1970s suburbia, The Playroom tells the story of a dysfunctional, alcohol-fueled dinner party, while also showing the same night through the eyes of a group of kids upstairs in the house’s attic. Premiering this week in Tribeca’s Spotlight section, the film […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Apr 20, 2012 -
Five Questions with BAM150 Director Michael Sladek
This June, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presents the fourth annual BAMcinemaFest, featuring a lineup of some of the best emerging voices American cinema has to offer. And CinemaFest is just one of dozens that the Brooklyn institution presents each year, as BAM consistently shines a spotlight on the best in theater, dance, music, film, and more. Now, as the venue celebrates its staggering 150th anniversary, filmmaker Michael Sladek (Con Artist, Devils Are Dreaming) explores what it is about the Brooklyn instituation that has lent it such longevity in his new documentary BAM150. Filmmaker: Why BAM? What is it about […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Apr 20, 2012 -
The Micro-Budget Conversation: The End
“Filmmaking is a visual medium. Is it a gimmick that I care about aesthetics in a visual medium? I think a well-shot film looks beautiful. I think well shot digital looks adequate. It’s simply a preference. Truth be told, I’ve always thought the idea of micro-filmmaking was something of a gimmick. How little someone spends on a project doesn’t interest me. Is The Blair Witch Project more enjoyable knowing they spent such a small amount? Should I not support the Batman movies because the budgets are excessive? I just don’t think it’s that important. The great thing about Kickstarter is […]
by John Yost on Apr 19, 2012 -
25 FILMS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO AT THE TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL
At last year’s Tribeca Film Festival I discovered two of my favorite films of the year, Alma Har’el’s Bombay Beach and Panos Cosmatos’s Beyond the Black Rainbow. I’m hoping for at least as good a track record this year, and in surveying the schedule I see more than enough potential candidates. Assuming I can successfully surmount my usual Tribeca challenge — getting into a film-festival headspace while working at home in New York — here are 25 films I’m interested in checking out. As befitting the mission of this magazine, there’s a heavy American independent focus, and I’ve also avoided […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 19, 2012 -
Five Questions with The Revisionaries Director Scott Thurman
Every ten years, the Texas Board of Education revises its textbook standards, leaving the curriculum decisions up to a staggeringly small council of fifteen members. And while this practice has been critiqued on a national level before, The Revisionaries shines a particularly introspective light on the entire procedure. Focused around Board of Education member, devout Evangelical Christian, and all-around complex figure Don McLeroy, this new documentary from director Scott Thurman and the Silver Lining Film Group is sure to stir up debate at the Tribeca Film Festival and beyond. Filmmaker: What originally interested you about the Texas Board of Education? […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Apr 19, 2012 -
Damon Russell, Snow on tha Bluff
The line separating documentary and narrative film aesthetics has never been more porous than it is now, but Damon Russell’s revelatory Snow on tha Bluff lives comfortably on that line. An incredible combination of found footage, no-budget narrative ingenuity and pulled-from-the-streets doc immediacy, it discovers in its incredibly charismatic and troubled protagonist, Curtis Snow, an American life many of us would probably rather forget about. Easy to dismiss as “Cops from the perp’s perspective,” perhaps, this startlingly authentic document of the life of a young, black, crack-dealing single parent — and of the dangers that lurk in poor and working-class black […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 18, 2012 -
COULD YOU BE LOVED: KEVIN MACDONALD’S “MARLEY”
At first it seems curious that the starting point of this brilliant, definitive documentary about the late Jamaican reggae sensation Bob Marley is archival footage of Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, the facility from which 60 million Africans were crammed through the Door of No Return to commence lives of total servitude in the West. Marley was the offspring of a black Jamaican mother and a white English father (who posed as a captain), whom he met only a handful of times. In the film there is no mention of slavery in the family history. Late in this elegantly elliptical movie, Marley […]
by Howard Feinstein on Apr 18, 2012
