6294 Results for “Open ”
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Dustin Waldman
“To be a filmmaker born in the ’90s or later, and to not know how to edit—to me, it’s like you’re just not accepting what filmmaking is,” says editor and writer-director Dustin Waldman. “That’s part and parcel of the thing. On my movies, I work with another editor—I don’t think you should do it alone. But I do think you should have some understanding of what, elementally, that is.” And yet, “editing is a lonely, brutal process, so I have mixed feelings about it.” That ambivalence bubbles under Never Fuggedaboutit, which premiered at this year’s SXSW and is now streaming […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Juliana Barreto Barreto
Juliana Barreto Barreto’s two most recent projects—Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt and Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama—demonstrate the versatility of her work as a production designer. Jackson’s film, an expressionist portrait of Black life in Mississippi, called for Barreto to employ a “macro yet hyper-close frame” when it came to designing the film’s lush visual landscape; for Earth Mama, however, Leaf provided Barreto with “a bible of research” so that she could nail the specificity of Oakland, California, circa 2006. Both films are distinct yet not entirely dissimilar, centering on Black women who navigate tumult while being enriched […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Bright Moments: St. Clair Bourne’s Formative Years on Black Journal
St. Clair Bourne was a photographer, journalist, publisher of the newsletter Chamba Notes, founder of Black Documentary Collective and BADWest, mentor, teacher, cameraman, producer and pioneering documentary director. Bourne’s filmmaking career includes work for public television, beginning at Black Journal in 1968 through 1999’s Paul Robeson: Here I Stand, as well as films made through Chamba Mediaworks, his production company, focusing on people and subjects from all aspects of Black social and political life, including Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, John Henrik Clarke, Chicago blues music, Northern Ireland, education and religion, among hundreds of topics. MoMA’s restoration of his 1983 film The Black and the Green, which […]
by St. Clair Bourne on Sep 20, 2023 -
Zachary Epcar
In experimental filmmaker Zachary Epcar’s shorts, performers enact cryptically evocative fragments of obscure melodramas, their truncated lines and gestures radiating an unease captured almost exclusively on 16mm and shot in Epcar’s native Bay Area. It’s a locale whose stretches of residential anonymity the filmmaker often exploits. With his third short, 2014’s Under the Heat Lamp an Opening, Epcar had a breakthrough when he discovered the power of continuity editing after uniting footage he’d shot at an outdoor restaurant in Barcelona—well-heeled diners eating in bright sunlight, grandiosely captured in a mirrored ceiling above—with close-up insert shots, staged a few years later […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Abby Harri
In one of her first professional film jobs after graduating film school at Johns Hopkins University, Minnesota-born Abby Harri was working as a PA in Oklahoma City on a hybrid feature by the Australian director Amiel Courtin-Wilson. “It was a really tiny crew, maybe fewer than seven people, and they threw me into a room and had me do casting,” she remembers. Harri grew up “painfully shy,” so for a moment the job seemed a mismatch. “But, being in a room with total strangers who were speaking about their lives, getting really deep and revealing a lot of personal things […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Rachel Walden
Rachel Walden’s 17-minute Lemon Tree, which premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in May, centers on a young boy (Gordon Rocks) whose innocence crumbles during what should be an idyllic autumnal road trip with his father (Charlie Chaspooley Robinson). After stealing a magician’s white rabbit at a county fair (a scene scored to 311’s rap-rock tune “Down”) and winning a hefty sum from a scratch-off ticket, dad celebrates a rare winning streak by plunging into a drug- and booze-induced bender (preceded by Cake’s ’90s alt-anthem “The Distance”), forcing the son to face his father’s unobscured parental follies. Walden’s sole previous directorial […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Risk On: Chloe Domont on Fair Play
With credits on high-profile TV series like Suits, Star Trek: Discovery and Billions, writer-director Chloe Domont had experiences in the entertainment industry where she felt like she had to adapt to the boys club. Those experiences, as well as the fear of all she could lose if she didn’t play along, were front of mind when she was crafting Fair Play, an intense, high-stakes and increasingly nerve-wracking relationship and workplace drama with notes of ’90s erotic thrillers. But in no way did Domont want to use the film industry as a backdrop for her masterful feature directorial debut. “That would […]
by Tomris Laffly on Sep 20, 2023 -
Craig Quintero
As virtual reality has developed over the past several years, various arguments have been made on its behalf. The most infamous is that virtual reality is a kind of “empathy machine,” allowing a viewer direct access to the experience of others. Others view virtual reality as the new frontier of gaming. Then, there are documentarians for whom the VR concept of “presence”—a viewer’s ability to feel themselves in a place they are not—has an almost pedagogical function, allowing them the experience of being in different cultures or within historical moments. The mysterious, unsettling work of Craig Quintero and the Taipei-based […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Marathon Training: The Documentary Awards Season Grind
By the time you read this, awards season, that annual ritual of accolades and extroversion, will be full throttle. Mounting and sustaining a campaign is often prohibitive, both as a budgetary line item and as an all-consuming occupation. Contenders live in the air and in hotels, go where their team sends them, agree to hundreds of interviews and participate in just as many Q&As and roundtables. But on the upside, an awards campaign is an opportunity to build a worldwide network of friends and contemporaries. Filmmaker reached out to former Academy Award nominees in the Feature Documentary category to share […]
by Tom White on Sep 20, 2023 -
Among the Ashes: Iterating the Generative Documentary Where There’s Smoke
I grew up in a firefighting culture full of pancake breakfasts, fire parades and beef and beers. For 20 years my dad was a volunteer firefighter and amateur fire scene photographer. He shot thousands of 35mm slides of blazes, often capturing moments of destruction that are disturbing and yet at times hauntingly beautiful. However, my dad’s obsession with fire would eventually intersect with our lives in devastating ways. In the 1980s, while on a family vacation, our van erupted in flames. 11 months later, our house burnt to the ground. For over 30 years, I’ve wondered if those two fires […]
by Lance Weiler on Sep 20, 2023
