Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Jason Guerrasio interviewed Precious director Lee Daniels for our Fall 2009 issue. Precious is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Daniels), Best Actress (Gabourey Sidibe), Best Adapted Screenplay (Geoffrey Fletcher) and Best Editing (Joe Klotz). It’s November 2007 and manager-turned-producer-turned director Lee Daniels is shooting a film in New York City for the first time. Having already been shut down by the NYPD for going over his permit time in Harlem, […]
On March 20 & 21, IFP, with The Writer’s Guild of America, East, will present its annual Script to Screen Conference in New York City. This year’s conference opens with The Daily Show’s Steve Bodow and closes with Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Twilight) and Brian Koppelman (Rounders, Ocean’s Thirteen). Other guests include Peter Hedges (About a Boy), Debra Granik (2010 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Winter’s Bone) Sophie Barthes (Cold Souls), Ry Russo-Young (You Wont Miss Me) and recent Filmmaker “25 New Face” Lena Dunham (Delusional Downtown Divas) to name a few. The guests will discuss new challenges and opportunities taking […]
The desire to be an opera singer is a career path that the broad majority of Americans would probably treat with some skepticism. If you come from Harlem, that skepticism is probably more palpable than most places. Yet the protagonist of Bill Jennings’ winning first feature Harlem Aria finds himself in just such a predicament. Anton (Gabriel Casseus), a dim-witted, twentysomething Harlemite who launders clothes for a living and resides with his overbearing grandmother, is determined to do just that. Despite the bullying of local teens and the entreaties from a local drug dealer (Malik Yoba) to work for him, […]
Celebrated film critic, screenwriter and national arbiter of taste for the moviegoing public, Roger Ebert, will be honored at the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival (April 22 – May 6) with the Mel Novikoff Award, an award that celebrates an individual or institution’s achievement in bringing to the public a treasured appreciation of world cinema. He will be honored on Saturday, May 1 at 5:30 pm as part of a presentation entitled An Evening with Roger Ebert and Friends at the Castro Theatre. Guests include directors Jason Reitman and Terry Zwigoff, with others to be announced soon. The festival […]
Traditionally known for unveiling blockbusters on opening night, the Tribeca Film Festival will continue that tradition in 2010 when it screens the World Premiere of DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek Forever After. The final chapter in the successful Shrek franchise, the film will also be shown in 3-D. Shrek Forever After will be released nationally on May 21. The slate of films at this year’s festival, running April 21 – May 2, will be announced later this month. Tickets for the Tribeca Film Festival are available at www.tribecafilmfestival.com/festival.
The International Film Festival Rotterdam has always been an exciting oasis in the festival calendar, a place to see new directors, experimental programming, and to connect with new projects away from the din of more market-defined festivals and red-carpet affairs. (Full disclosure: I’m on the board of Rotterdam’s CineMart.) This year’s festival was a good one — you can read Michael Tully’s wrap-up here — and now New Yorkers have the opportunity to discover the filmmakers of the Tiger Competition. The Tigers consist of films by new filmmakers, and the gamut runs from edgy dramas to intriguing doc-fiction hybrids to […]
There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times’ Science section today called “Bringing New Understanding to the Director’s Cut.” It details a scientific study in which the shot length of films over the decades were analyzed and it was determined that as cinema has progressed its editing rhythms have been more closely resembling a natural frequency found in the brain as well as in in “natural and artifactual surroundings.” From the piece: According to the new report, the basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act […]
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Scott Macaulay interviewed Up in the Air co-writer-director Jason Reitman for our Fall 2009 issue. Up in the Air is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Reitman), Best Actor (George Clooney), Best Supporting Actress (Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner). Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, which debuted at Telluride and went on to critical acclaim at Toronto, is a perfect film to […]
Check this out! A great series of videos (I’ve embedded the first—visit PitchforkTV for all four) of Ryan Gosling and Zach Shields’ Dead Man’s Bones performing with the Philadelphia St. Peter’s Children’s Choir. There’s a talent show too. This is one concert I wish I had been at.
Are you addicted to large oil drums of coffee? Feel alive only when you’re a sleep-deprived stumbling zombie? Relish your emotions ripping from ice berg to flame thrower? Then you are made for the International Documentary Challenge. Started in 2006, the International Documentary Challenge is a timed filmmaking competition — this year beginning on March 4 — where filmmakers have five days to craft a five-to-seven minute non-fiction film. In the last four years, more than 500 participating filmmakers — more than 125 each year — from some 20 countries chose to forgo sleep and sanity for this the ultimate […]