The hyper-industrialization of the independent film space and the shift away from in-person screening to the vertically integrated streaming-sphere means that content curation is increasingly more general (massified), with fewer people participating in the process of sharing films with the public. In general, the U.S. A-list film festival circuit, where independent voices used to be able to thrive in more ragtag and aesthetically diverse ways, is now mostly a self-reflexive bourgeois echo chamber of sanctimonious gatekeepers serving corporate interests and neoliberal logics. Something has to change. Perhaps it’s time to turn away from the independent film industrial complex and toward […]
I can’t think of a better film to grace the cover of the final issue of Filmmaker’s 30th anniversary year than Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama. From its opening scenes, it impresses as a work of classic independent cinema—social realism shot through with unexpected creative flourishes and informed by the personal life experience of its maker. A version of this film might have been made in each of Filmmaker’s three decades, but with different emphases, of course, and perhaps under very different circumstances. The story of this one—a U.K./U.S. production backed by Channel 4 and A24—was told last issue by Anthony […]
In today’s entertainment industry, owning a production company has become synonymous with having a trainer, manager or overall deal—no celebrity can be seen without! But what exactly makes owning a production company such a crucial and sought-after asset? How can aspiring producers, particularly those who are young and not yet famous or well-established, go about creating one? What are the key factors that contribute to making it successful? Drawing from a decade of observing producers, learning from their triumphs and setbacks, as well as my personal experiences, here I explore the anatomy of a production company, the elements that lead […]
The following interview with director Ira Sachs by director Stephen Winter was published in Filmmaker’s Summer, 2023 issue and is being reposted today as Sachs’s film Passages arrives in theaters from MUBI. There are acclaimed films about filmmakers set during production—Fellini’s 8 1/2, Truffaut’s Day for Night and Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, to name three. But there are far fewer set during what might be an even more psychologically fraught time: post-production. For some directors, it’s when a film wraps that things become unstable. The ersatz family of cast and crew retreat, the militarized schedule lessens somewhat and […]
Remember “Peak TV”? It was a good run, starting more than a decade ago with the launch of filmmaker-driven shows such as Lena Dunham’s Girls on HBO, David Fincher’s House of Cards on Netflix and Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake on Sundance Channel, not to mention episodic heavyweights like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Mad Men and The Walking Dead, all of which supplied steady work for a plethora of indie writers and directors. But that party is over—or at least taking a break. If the corporate mergers and media layoffs of the past year weren’t enough of a […]
An application like ChatGPT is “taking the last 20 years of the internet and chewing it up, then producing a system that draws from that,” Allison Parrish explained when we spoke over Zoom last month. To the poet and programmer, generating content with large language model (LLM) neural nets is like “powering an engine with the methane that comes from decomposing corpses in a graveyard.” Few artists working today have Parrish’s depth of experience with generative text. You have likely encountered her work online, especially if you were active on Twitter in the “Horse_ebooks” era. Early on in her career, […]
There are two long back-and-forth tracking shots in Savanah Leaf’s wise, emotionally full debut feature, Earth Mama. In the first, the pregnant Gia—a 24-year-old Oakland single mother fighting for custody of the two young children she already has lost to state-sponsored foster care—purposefully strides across a playground, the camera focused on her as she passes expensive strollers and children playing in the background in soft focus. Moments before, she has asked the owner of the photo studio she works at for a cash advance: “I don’t want my baby coming out with no clothes or nothing,” she says. (Leaf cuts […]
After more than 30 years of collaborating as a writing-directing duo, the Coen brothers have decided to embark on solo projects for the foreseeable future. Joel Coen helmed The Tragedy of Macbeth back in 2021, and Ethan Coen debuted Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind last year at Cannes. While that documentary still awaits a release, Ethan’s lesbian road movie Drive-Away Dolls is set to hit theaters early this fall. Co-written by spouses Coen and Tricia Cooke (who also edited Drive-Away Dolls together), the film stars Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan in the lead roles with Beanie Feldstein, Pedro Pascal, […]
“It’s so great that this festival is back again!” In one form or another, I kept hearing that phrase between June 15 to 18 at DC/DOX, a brand-new festival in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Sky Sitney, DC/DOX’s co-founder, was also a founder of the 1990s-born Silverdocs, a partnership between American Film Institute and Discovery Networks mourned by the entire doc community after it passed. Silverdocs morphed into AFI Docs when Discovery bailed, but AFI Docs was run out of AFI’s Los Angeles office and often seemed out of touch with DC. Meanwhile, Sitney co-founded a mini-festival, Double Exposure, with […]
PAM CUT // Center for an Untold Tomorrow, the film and new media arm of the Portland Art Museum, is currently accepting applications for their third annual Sustainability Labs. The six month program is specifically tailored for multidisciplinary media storytellers, providing mentorship, career-developing resources and stipends to further their artistic practices. Applications close on July 1. “Our organization is all about artists who aren’t content to be contained—by medium, what’s come before or a singular type of media that they’re working with,” Amy Dotson, director of PAM CUT and curator of Film & New Media at the Portland Art Museum, […]