A squirm-inducing sensation on the festival circuit, Harvard Sensory Lab leaders Lucien Castaing-Tayler and Véréna Paravel’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica has a new trailer ahead of its limited release next month. The film consists of raw medical footage—eye surgery, genital drilling and an assortment of equally unsettling internal procedures—shot between eight different French hospitals. Vadim Rizov covered De Humani during its Cannes premiere last year, writing: …Fabrica toggles between something like Fantastic Voyage and a particularly grody Wiseman documentary. Defamiliarizing images on the former front include a camera being inserted deep inside….whatever (I don’t want to know) that made me wonder why I’ve never […]
In 1989, Friday the 13th transplanted its hockey-masked slasher from summer camp to concrete jungle for the franchise’s eighth installment, Jason Takes Manhattan. That titular promise was not fully delivered upon: Manhattan was mostly Vancouver and Jason spent much of the running time on a boat full of high schoolers traveling to the city. The newest Scream offers up a similar relocation as Ghostface follows the previous chapter’s survivors from Woodsboro to college. Again, a Canadian city (this time Montreal) stands in for New York. But this time, the killer actually spends the entire running time chasing his victims through […]
SFFILM announced today the full lineup for the 66th annual San Francisco International Film Festival (SFFILM Festival), which will take place in the Bay Area from April 13-23. The longest-running film festival in the Americas, this year’s program will screen films from 37 countries at various theaters in San Francisco, Berkeley and Oakland. “It is SFFILM Festival season once again and I cannot wait to share this year’s program with local audiences,” said Jessie Fairbanks, SFFILM’s Director of Programming in a press release. “The line-up includes a wealth of Bay Area filmmakers across all sections, and highlights new—and seminal—work from […]
Jeremy Jordan is probably best known for his Tony and Grammy-nominated portrayal of Jack Kelly in Newsies on Broadway, as well as his many roles on television including series regulars on CW’s Supergirl, NBC’s Smash and Disney Channel’s Tangled. And now he leads a star-studded cast as the tenacious record industry giant Neil Bogart in the epic new feature film Spinning Gold. On this episode, he talks about how finding a character’s physicality and where they hold tension informs his preparation, the importance of letting every single moment of a performance tell the story, why he’s still getting used to […]
David desperately wishes to change the color of his eyes. Thanks to an experimental procedure peddled by an Indian company called BrightOcular, his fantasy of physical transformation might actually manifest. Documentary filmmaker Liza Mandelup (who made our 25 New Faces of Film list in 2017) follows David on this journey in her sophomore feature Caterpillar, as he meets other BrightOcular patients in India and grapples with the not-so-subtle side effects of these implants. Unsurprisingly, many of these patients are Western people of color who’ve been overwhelmed with images of European features (which ostensibly represent the pinnacle of physical perfection) for […]
Provoked by a recent artist residency at La Becque in Switzerland, I started to develop a Swiss-set romantic fantasy film called Interlaken that will take place between an ancient alien theme park and a Swiss heritage open-air museum, both located on the outskirts of the titular town. Amid multiple trips back to what has been called the “playground of Europe,” I probed archives, forums, blogs, databases and gray matter for cinematic depictions of Switzerland, which is more of a challenge than one would think considering it’s squeezed, accordion-like, between France, Germany, Italy and Austria, each of which has fostered four […]
Talking to The Guardian’s Xan Brooks in 2014, Kelly Reichardt reflected on the students she’s taught in her teaching position as an artist in residence at Bard. “The kids I know, I love them, but they’re not mad the way we used to be,” she noted. “They seem so unafraid and so un-angry. It makes them very nice people. It doesn’t make for great art. I ask them all the time: ‘Aren’t you mad at anything?’ They look at me like I’m off my rocker.” That sense of simmering discontent percolates through Michelle Williams’s performance as Lizzy, a ceramics sculptor […]
Last fall, desiring information to aid our own filmmaking careers, we launched an experiment to see whether we could obtain hard data on independent film revenue. Having experienced firsthand how difficult it is to get this information, we created a Google form and asked filmmakers to self-submit not just their feature film top-line revenue data, but thorough, detailed and specific numbers on everything from their budgets to best- and worst-performing revenue streams to cast to how much their films made in gross and net terms. From the details of the 104 submitted films, we have drawn critically important—and many surprising—conclusions. […]
For Metropolis special effects artist Eugen Schüfftan, a model, a mirror and a sharp-edged tool were all the instruments required to create cinematic wonder in the 1920s. The mirror—placed at a 45-degree angle in front of the camera—reflected the image of a model cityscape located just out of frame. The tool then scraped away sections of the mirror’s reflective layer, leaving only glass and revealing strategically placed actors in the distance. When the mirror was filmed, the citizens of Metropolis now magically appeared to inhabit the colossal urban dystopia. A century later, virtual production is the latest evolution in cinematic […]
At the end of the 2000s, Jonathan Wysocki went to both the Sundance Screenwriters and Directors Labs, then spent years on projects that would assemble pieces of financing before falling apart. All the while, he watched colleagues from those labs launch Kickstarter campaigns and make ultra-low-budget debuts. Deciding to take a similar approach, at the start of 2019, he raised $62,000 on the crowdfunding platform and an additional $180,000 in private equity and was shooting his first feature, Dramarama, by summer. Of course, as the timeline above suggests, Wysocki’s picture will forever be asterisked in the independent film distribution history […]