Two weeks ago I was on the phone to a lab in Canada, who were holding our film, telling them that 6 lab rolls of Una Noche were missing. The movie was supposed to premiere in Berlin in a matter of days. I proceeded to go through every frame of footage in the NYC lab double-checking to see if the shots were there. They were not. I did not tell anybody. I did not want to believe it myself. When the colorist, Martin, told me that we might have to use black slates with “missing shot” written on them, my breathing spontaneously […]
Second #3995, 66:35 1. Jeffrey, just after the kiss with Sandy, is on his way up the dark, industrially-vibed staircase to Dorothy’s apartment. He has had his chaste kiss; new he wants more. He is hungry for Dorothy, who dispenses with shy-girl playfulness and gives Jeffrey the Real Thing. 2. The blackness of the frame. The amount of screen space dedicated to the experience of no visible light. There is light, of course–just enough–but Jeffrey travels in these moments mostly through the dark. 3. In He Died with His Eyes Open, the first of Derek Raymond’s British crime noir Factory […]
As a child growing up in Scituate, Massachusetts, Nick Flynn (pictured here at left and below with director Paul Weitz) was often left to explore on his own, and he got into varying degrees of trouble. Flynn’s parents were divorced and he had no contact with his father, living instead with his mother, who worked in a bakery. She remarried to a 21-year-old Viet Nam vet, and, after their divorce, Flynn wound up living with her and a new boyfriend — a member of one of the largest drug smuggling rings in New England. Around the age of 18 Flynn […]
For his harrowing debut feature, Australian director Justin Kurzel (Blue Tongue) took on a sensationalistic serial-murder case that rocked the northern suburbs of Adelaide in the early aughts. Known across the country as the “bodies in barrels” case, the Snowtown murders spurred controversy and launched a lengthy investigation that resulted in the conviction of a charismatic drifter, John Bunting, along with three accomplices, including a teenage boy he had taken under his wing. Attached to the project by Warp Films Australia’s Anna McLeish and Sarah Shaw, and working from a script by Shaun Grant, Kurzel brings psychological verisimilitude and a […]
(This Is Not A Film begins a two-week engagement at Film Forum today, courtesy of Palisades Tartan. The movie will then open in other U.S. locations, starting with Los Angeles in early March. Go to the film’s website for details.) For those unfamiliar with the backstory: Jafar Panahi, one of Iran’s most acclaimed directors (The White Balloon, The Circle, Crimson Gold, Offside), was arrested in 2009. A known supporter of the opposition movement, Panahi was charged with “activity against national security and propaganda activities against the regime.” Despite domestic and international outpourings of support, he was sentenced in 2010 to […]
Blogging from last year’s Sundance I wrote that “if I could give an award to the camera delivering the most impact on screen at Sundance 2011, it would go to RED One.” That was then. In the 12 months since, ARRI’s Alexa has all but conquered TV series production in the U.S., and now you can add a dozen low-budget indie films at Sundance too, like the bittersweet romcom Celeste and Jesse Forever, starring Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg and photographed by David Lanzenberg. Sony’s new budget-friendly F3 made a splash at Sundance as well, responsible for Spike Lee’s Red […]
The shine on Apple’s corporate identity has been tarnished. For a period following Steve Jobs’ death after a long bout with pancreatic cancer, the company was in a national media halo, celebrated for its innovative technology as much for its stock performance. As indies long knew, the iMac and Final Cut Pro editing software revolutionized movie making. However, a January 2012 in-depth New York Times exposé about Apple’s manufacturing practices in China undercut the Jobs halo and gave the company a black eye. The report on its Chinese manufacturer, Foxconn, exposed Apple’s questionable business practices as well as those of […]
Actress Penelope Ann Miller took the stage early at the 27th Film Independent Spirit Awards to accept the first of four awards Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist would receive Saturday afternoon. It was for cinematography, and when it was announced d.p. Guillaume Schiffman was on a plane to Los Angeles along with the rest of the film’s contingent following their wins (six awards, including French Film of the Year) at France’s Cesars just a night before. (Befitting a movie that traffics in self-aware nostalgia, The Artist was shot on film, not digitally, although it was lensed in color and converted to […]
The Film Society of Lincoln Center and The Museum of Modern Art have announced the lineup for their annual New Directors/New Films festival, running March 21–April 1 in New York City. This year’s festival opens with Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now, which premiered last year at Cannes and is being distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. Also screening this year are several Sundance alums, including Gareth Huw Evans’s The Raid, Terence Nance’s An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, Joachim Trier’s Oslo, August 31st, David Hamel’s How to Survive a Plague, and Mads Brugger’s The Ambassador. The full lineup is below. For […]
Although you’ve probably never heard of him, writer and professor Gene Sharp is one of the foremost scholars on grassroots, non-violent protest movements. The son of an itinerant preacher, the Ohio-born octogenarian, whose writings have informed the tactics of protest movement leaders from Serbia to Iran and the Ukraine to Syria, teaches at UMass Dartmouth. He lives a life of relative quiet and solitude, at least when revolutionaries from around the globe aren’t clamoring for his advice. In Ruaridh Arrow’s documentary How to Start a Revolution we get up close and personal with Sharp, who has drawn the direct ire […]