Open | Filmmaker Magazine

REDACTED: A LETTER FROM THE FUTURE

Through a bizarre anomaly in the space-time continuum, I received the following email in my in-box. It’s dated March 30, 2010, so it’s from the future. Since what’s being discussed hasn’t happened yet, I can’t, of course, vouch for its authenticity, but the internet routing and DNS server codes all seem accurate. I’m going ahead and posting it because this filmmaker’s thinking is interesting, but I’m redacting his name and the name of his film so as to protect his privacy. — S.M. Dear Friend, What a tumultuous but exciting two months since our film, REDACTED, premiered at Sundance! Thanks […]

by Scott Macaulay on Oct 8, 2009

OF CRISES, FALL DAYS AND NEW POSSIBILITIES AT THE WOODSTOCK FILM FESTIVAL

Several familiar faces, including my own, spoke at the Woodstock Film Festival on a panel entitled “The Changing Face of Independent Film.” I moderated, and the panelists were directors Rick Linklater and Ira Sachs; Cinetic’s John Sloss; and Big Beach’s Peter Saraf. As four of the five of us attended the Indiewire/MoMA/Zipline summit on the crisis in independent film production and distribution, I began by asking what the term “crisis” meant for them. Sloss spoke about the vanishing studio specialty divisions and with them the erosion of the indie film business model that requires a marketplace with well-funded buyers. He […]

by Scott Macaulay on Oct 7, 2009

ARI GOLD PREMIERES HELICOPTER ONLINE

Back in 2001 we selected Ari Gold as one of our “25 New Faces” on the basis of his great short films Helicopter and Culture. Wrote Peter Bowen: In the past few years, Ari Gold has been to the Sundance Film Festival more often than most established filmmakers. He arrived in 1997 with Frog Crossing, a short film that he co-directed with Jamie Babbit. Two years later he was back with Culture, a one-minute short that reel.com hailed as the “the best 60 seconds of film at Sundance.” In 2000 he returned once more, not as a filmmaker but as […]

by Scott Macaulay on Oct 6, 2009

PICTURING NOLLYWOOD

One of the most reprinted articles we’ve run at Filmmaker was South African producer Jeremy Nathan’s 2002 piece on “No Budget Nigeria,” the thriving Corman-esque film scene otherwise known as Nollywood. Now, artist Pieter Hugo has released a book containing his stunning square-format photos featuring portraits of performers from these films. It’s called, appropriately, Nollywood. In an essay about the images, Federica Angelucci explains Hugo’s approach, which is to compose photographs that play off the mythologies created by the films. An excerpt: Movies tell stories that appeal to and reflect the lives of its public: stars are local actors; plots […]

by Scott Macaulay on Oct 4, 2009

THE TRUTH: WANTED AND DESIRED

In a week of stories surrounding Roman Polanski’s arrest in Zurich on a warrant for his three decade old conviction on a sex charge involving a 13-year-old girl in the U.S. and retired prosecutor David Wells‘s sudden admission that he fabricated the comments he made in Marina Zenovich‘s documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, it got me thinking of Zenovich’s answer to our yearly question to Sundance directors the year she screened the film there in 2008. The question: “If you had 10 percent more of anything, what would it be and why?” I wish I’d had a 10 percent […]

by Jason Guerrasio on Oct 2, 2009

NOTES ON A CRISIS: DISCUSSING INDIE FILM AT THE INDIEWIRE/MOMA SUMMIT

Indiewire and MoMA jointly organized a summit at MoMA on September 25 to discuss independent film and its future direction in a time of economic crisis and technological change. That the two groups could assemble a fairly astonishing collection of about 70 distributors, producers, directors, festival reps and others from the community at one place at one time is testament to the strength of the organizations but also the widespread sentiment that our business is changing and that what is yet to come will be defined by our collective actions — or, possibly, non-actions. Some of the attendees, listed here […]

by Scott Macaulay on Sep 26, 2009

Michael Almereyda, Paradise

A STILL FROM DIRECTOR MICHAEL ALMEREYDA’S PARADISE. COURTESY POST FACTORY FILMS. As he himself puts it, writer-director Michael Almereyda loves to make movies like a fighter likes to brawl, and over the course of his directorial career he has sought out an intriguing variety of creative challenges. Born in 1959 in Overland Park, Kansas, Almereyda spent his formative years in the Los Angeles area, where he discovered cinema and became a voracious moviegoer. Almereyda attended Harvard as an art history student, but dropped out in order to pursue his film career. He made his debut with the short film A […]

by Nick Dawson on Sep 24, 2009

Bob Byington, Harmony and Me

JUSTIN RICE IN WRITER-DIRECTOR BOB BYINGTON’S HARMONY AND ME. COURTESY HARMONY AND ME, LLC. From Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez to Bryan Poyser and the Zellner brothers, Austin is a hotbed of gifted directors, and Bob Byington now emerges from there as another talent to be reckoned with. A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Byington studied at UC-Santa Cruz before going to graduate school at the University of Texas, where he used his American Studies major to indulge his newfound love for the movies. In 1995, he cut his teeth as a production assistant on the indie hit The Last Supper, […]

by Nick Dawson on Sep 18, 2009

TORONTO — THE BEST LAID PLANS: ACCIDENT AND THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED

Industry friendly genre films are always top draws at film festivals, and So Chiang’s Accident, produced by Johnny To and straight from Venice, has a diabolical premise that calls out for an English-language remake. A team of hit-men and women meticulously stage their killings to appear as accidents. Chiang takes an Argento-like glee in these elaborate projects, which are part Rube Goldberg and part Al Queda training manual. Balloons float into the sky to block ever-present security cameras; minor car crashes set off chain reactions leading to neck-slicing rain showers of shattered glass; the slicked-down streets found in so many […]

by Scott Macaulay on Sep 17, 2009

“BRICK WORK” — TORONTO’S WAVELENGTHS 4: IN COMPARISON

Ironically, a strange, brilliant one-minute trailer for the Buenos Aires Festival International de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) by Argentine director Lisandro Alonso opened the fourth Wavelengths program of avant-garde cinema at the Toronto International Film Festival. In the piece, officially titled S/T (pictured above), an unblinking owl stared in luxuriously saturated color, while pounding drums created a masterful musical score. The work was being asked to function not primarily as advertising but as cinema — and experimental art cinema at that. S/T was followed by In Comparison, a 16mm film by accomplished filmmaker and installation artist Harun Farocki. Born in the […]

by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 16, 2009

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