Supporting filmmakers who are delving into the medium of transmedia, the Tribeca Film Institute has currently opened submissions for its TFI New Media Fund. Seeking non-fiction, social issue media projects that are integrated across multiple platforms, four to eight projects will be accepted to receive $50,000 – $100,000 in funding. According to the TFI website, the fund is dedicated to nurture “projects that activate audiences around issues of contemporary social justice and equality around the world and demonstrate the power of cross-platform storytelling and dynamic audience engagement.” Eligible projects can be non-fiction or scripted as long as it’s based on […]
I first met Zach Clark last October when his excitingly subversive, sex-scene-less SXSW hit Modern Love Is Automatic opened Pornfilmfestival Berlin (where my own short The Story of Ramb O had its premiere). Since we barely had the chance to chat in the buzzing, jam-packed Moviemento hub, I was thrilled when I heard recently that Clark’s follow-up Vacation! (pictured above) was already on the festival circuit and would be playing theatrically at Brooklyn’s own reRun Gastropub Theater in May. Finally I had an excuse to find out what makes this offbeat yet seemingly well-adjusted director of a feature about a […]
This week I leave you in the capable hands of our editor Scott Macaulay. One of the exciting aspects of this gig is learning from a fella like Scott. A producer of some of my favorite indie films, he has been a great mentor and producer of this column. I asked him to just go nuts and write what was on his mind. Voila! Last fall, I posted a call for new columnists for this website, and the first to respond was John Yost with the idea for this “Micro-Budget Conversation.” I liked John’s proposal for a number of […]
(City of Life and Death opened on May 11, 2011 at Film Forum in New York City. Learn more at the film’s official website.) In December 1937, China’s capital city Nanking fell to the invading Japanese Imperial Army. During the weeks that followed, the Japanese raped, tortured, and butchered the city’s remaining inhabitants; the death toll varies widely, but some estimates put it at over 300,000. Lu Chuan’s epic film, which screens at Film Forum through May 24 and in select U.S. cities after that, dramatizes the Nanking Massacre (also known as the Nanjing Massacre) from multiple perspectives. The major […]
For the three-year-old FilmNation, the 2011 Cannes Film Festival is a big deal. That’s not just because the company’s market slate is substantial, containing projects by Terrence Malick, John Hillcoat and, as executive producer, James Cameron, but because the young New York-based sales and production company has, for the first time, two films in the festival. The company is repping both Pedro Almodovar’s latest Competition title, The Skin I Live In (pictured above), as well as American indie Jeff Nichol’s Sundance hit, Take Shelter, screening in the Critics Week section. FilmNation was launched by international sales veteran Glen Basner just […]
When Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death won the top prize at the San Sebastián Film Festival two years ago, it was a testament not only to the emotional resonance and technical mastery of his widescreen black-and-white epic, which dramatizes the infamous 1937 Nanjing massacre at the height of the Second Sino-Japanese War, but a tacit acknowledgment of the film’s daring revisionist ambitions. A graduate of the Beijing Film Academy, Lu had previously directed a small-scale crime thriller, Missing Gun, and the critically well received Kekexili, Mountain Patrol, a rural drama about efforts to stop antelope poachers that screened […]
Dee Rees’s debut feature, Pariah, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this month with a free screening and Q&A hosted by the Academy Museum. Rees, who first appeared in Filmmaker when she was selected for our 2008 25 New Faces, was interviewed upon the film’s release by Brandon Harris. That interview, originally dated November 18, 2011, is reposted below. The free screening of Pariah is viewable until May 20. — Editor With Pariah, a buoyant tale of a young, middle-class New York lesbian’s tough coming-of-age amid the class and cultural proxy battles that simmer within black America, lauded newcomer Dee Rees […]
Paranormal Activity 2 is not an avant-garde film, but only because no one has argued that it is. 1. The Importance of Framing The difference between commercial culture (pop culture) and the avant-garde is a matter of rhetorical framing. Jean-Luc Godard, for instance, created the conditions for the New Wave not only through his films, but through his words about his films, and about cinema in general. Confrontational, witty, manifesto-like, Godard framed the way people saw his films. Godard was an auteur of language, not just cinema. “A movie should have a beginning, a middle, and an end,” he famously […]
(Lord Byron opens on Friday, May 6, 2011, at the reRun Gastropub in Dumbo. Read Zack Godshall’s “Revolution and Apocalypse: The Lord Byron Manifesto” if you haven’t already, then visit the film’s official website to learn more.) Zack Godshall’s Lord Byron was not shot on the Canon 5D (aka, the everybody’s-using-it-so-you-should-too-consumer-grade-Digital-SLR-camera-of-the-very-moment !). Instead, Godshall used a Sony Z1U that he purchased all the way back in 2005 (the horror!). This means that the movie’s images were captured at a 29.97 frame rate, as opposed to the more cinematic 23.98. Which is to say that this 2011 narrative feature has a […]
The eponymous prior evening of Massy Tadjedin’s Last Night takes the form of an out-of-town business trip between handsome, somewhat taciturn and very married Michael (Sam Worthington) and Laura, his sexy and very interested coworker (Eva Mendes). Or, you could view it, the “last night” is the clandestine evening spent between Sam’s beautiful author wife, Joanna (Keira Knightley) and her still-charming ex, Alex (Guillaume Canet), while Sam is away. But most accurately — and no matter what your gender or point-of-view on modern relationships is — the film’s “last night” is best considered from its morning after, when whatever rash […]