6294 Results for “Open ”
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The 2023 Sundance Question: What Was an Unforeseen Obstacle, Crisis, or Simply Unpredictable Event You Had to Respond To?
Each year, Filmmaker asks all the incoming feature directors at Sundance one question. (To see last year’s question and responses, click here.) We also send out cinematographer and editor questionnaires. This year’s question: Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? Below, find links to each director’s individual response to the prompt. Keep checking back here during the festival, as more responses will be posted daily! “A Rare […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2023 -
“I Found Out That the Interview Was to Be Broadcast on NASA TV” | Ido Mizrahy, The Longest Goodbye
Every production faces unexpected obstructions that require creative solutions and conceptual rethinking. What was an unforeseen obstacle, crisis, or simply unpredictable event you had to respond to, and how did this event impact or cause you to rethink your film? Toward the end of our shoot, I was given the green light to conduct a 20 minute interview with astronaut Kayla Barron—one of our main subjects—while she was on the space station. I don’t think I’ve ever been this nervous about an interview (also, it kinda felt like I was going to space). Following up on an interview I did […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2023 -
“We Needed To Embrace a Certain Amount of Ugliness”: DP Dustin Lane on Sometimes I Think About Dying
Daisy Ridley stars in Sometimes I Think About Dying, directed by Rachel Lambert and co-written by Kevin Armento, Stefanie Abel Horowitz and Katy Wright-Mead. Ridley plays Fran, an office worker who, as the film’s title suggests, is driven to such mind-numbing boredom that she often thinks about her own death to pass the time. That is, until a new employee named Robert (Dave Merheje) begins striking up conversation with her. Surprisingly, he manages to pique her interest, effectively breaking the monotony of her isolating office job. DP Dustin Lane tells Filmmaker how he crafted the visual language of the film […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2023 -
“This ‘Space Problem’ Became Our Problem”: Ido Mizrahy on The Longest Goodbye
With NASA under “presidential orders” to land humans on Mars by 2033—and the industry titans of Silicon Valley rushing to make space exploration sexy again (not to mention cash in on that lucrative action)—it might be a good time to stop and ask not when our long-mission astronauts will launch, but rather who should be going and how they will survive. And not just physical survival, but mental and emotional, for even the Trekkiest among us may give pause before signing up for a years-long journey that requires relentless isolation, being stripped of any semblance of privacy and deprived of […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 19, 2023 -
23 Films We’re Anticipating at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival
The Sundance Film Festival is always the American independent scene’s bellwether. The festival’s curatorial decisions vault a select group of films — this year, 99 features out of 4,061 submitted — to the top tier of pictures receiving attention from distributors, critics, curators from other festivals and, through copious media coverage, audiences. And while longtime festival veterans — I’ve been attending since 1993 — are accustomed to the usual first-half rhythms (“the festival seems slow”; “the documentaries are stronger”; “did you hear Company X bought film Y for $Z million dollars!”), Sundance’s return to in-person combined with its first true hybrid […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 19, 2023 -
“To Change Reality, You Need to Change the Narrative”: E Mãlama Pono, Willy Boy Director Scott W. Kekama Amona at Hawaii International Film Festival 2023
At the end of the recent Hawai’i International Film Festival, Filmmaker reached out to director Scott W. Kekama Amona to learn more about E Mãlama Pono, Willy Boy, which won the festival’s Audience Award for Best Short Film. An astonishingly assured, measured debut, Willy Boy is one of the more important Native Hawaiian and indigenous titles to come out in recent years, successfully addressing issues like land-rights injustice, political disenfranchisement, police overreach and native identity in a concise narrative framework that takes place in only one day, from one character’s awakening to their eventual “awakening.” Shot in a steely, timeless black-and-white […]
by Jason Sanders on Jan 19, 2023 -
Editor Walter Murch on the Golden Ratio, Recreating a ’70s-era Editing Room and The Conversation
Watching a documentary on film history, editor Walter Murch was struck by how different cinematographers tended to frame faces in close-ups similarly. “I noticed something peculiar,” he said. “No matter what the film was, the eyes of performers in close-up seemed to float along the same line from shot to shot.” Murch tested his theory by tying a string of knitting yarn across his television screen. Dividing measurements from above and below the line gave him 1.618, a number that represents phi, or the golden ratio. Further measurements of faces in close-ups—from the upper frame edges to hairlines, from chins […]
by Daniel Eagan on Jan 18, 2023 -
Trailer Watch: Hlynur Pálmason’s Godland
Watch the trailer for Godland, the third feature from Icelandic filmmaker Hlynur Pálmason. The film takes place during the late 19th century and follows a young Danish priest as he embarks on a grueling journey through the harsh yet stunning landscape of Iceland to establish a church and photograph the inhabitants of the then-remote Danish territory. In his dispatch out of Cannes last year, Blake Williams expands on the film’s sumptuous visuals and the film’s (albeit fictitious) historical reference: “The film is shot on 35mm and lets you know it by adopting what appears to have been an extremely hands-off […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 17, 2023 -
Awakening: Hawai’i International Film Festival 2022
Over the past decade or so, the Hawaiʻi International Film Festival presented by Halekulani—like any good organization—has been in a state of evolution. Ten to 15 years ago, under the then-leadership of executive director Chuck Boller, it was considered one of the best American festivals to celebrate and discover East Asian populist cinema, with guests lists of Hong Kong icons, Japanese auteurs and Korean superstars that put most other festivals to shame. In the 2010s, it shined through its programming of independent Asian American cinema, providing a platform for voices and visions typically shut out of mainstream media. In recent […]
by Jason Sanders on Jan 13, 2023 -
“Significant Portions of the Movie Were Literally Just Lit by the Television”: Kyle Edward Ball on Skinamarink
The primordial fear of being watched, stalked and caught by an unknown entity lurking in the dark is the basis of Skinamarink, the microbudget feature debut from writer-director-editor Kyle Edward Ball. The incredibly loose narrative follows young siblings Kevin (Lucas Paul) and Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault) as they patter around their family’s strikingly ordinary middle-class house in the dead of night circa 1995. Their parents are nowhere to be found, all of the doors have mysteriously vanished and the lights eventually stop working. While this phenomena is enough to chill any child, their well-being is most threatened by a supernatural […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jan 13, 2023
