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Before I head out of town for a couple of days I want to post here my best wishes for a great Thanksgiving to you, our readers, and your friends and families. It’s been a tumultuous year for independent film and independent filmmakers, but on the eve of this holiday, it is clear that we have much to be thankful for. The indie film world may be cash and credit-deprived at the moment, but, at least from my vantage point, it is rich in creativity and passion. It’s also blessed with a deep brain-trust capable of thinking ourselves out of […]
The people who run the Masters of Criminal Justice website, which provides “valuable resources to help you make a career transition into criminal justice or to advance your current criminal justice career,” like lists. On the site now are the “100 Best Open Source Security Tools” and “DIY Home Security: 100 Essential Tips, Tools and Resources.” There is also the site’s picks for the “100 Top Crime Movies of All Time.” A lot of the expected classics are there — The Godfather, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction — but what’s interesting is that the list is broken down by sub-genre. The Matrix, […]
A fly infestation, event-based audience building and a grape-eating contest at the Golden Gate bridge — they are all part of what is turning into the On the Road of indie film web series, Tour de Fours. The webisodes are Todd Sklar and Range Life Entertainment’s chronicles of their movie road tour in which four titles — Box Elder, In Memory of My Father, On the Road with Judas, and Registered Sex Offender — are presented by their makers in theaters across the country. For more on the tour click here.
Look forward to a blog post later this week or early next in which we print and comment upon the list of films accepted into this year’s Sundance Film Festival. And while word-of-mouth generally circulates that a few titles are in, for the most part filmmakers keep a lid on it until the list comes out. This year, however, leaks are occurring. Sean Means’s blog at the Chicago Tribune lists a few films that the filmmakers themselves have posted news of their acceptance. The blog for Cory McAbee’s Stingray Sam says that the director’s follow-up to The American Astronaut will […]
Over at Ted Hope’s Truly Free Film blog, Dan Cogan, producer and financier (his Impact Partners funds socially-relevant docs and features) posts advice for filmmakers who may, depending on a phone call they get this week, be looking to leverage the boost that a Sundance selection will bring them. Interestingly, the piece is titled “What Financiers Want Now,” suggesting a shift in the desired rhetoric of an indie film pitch. Rather than endorse the traditional high-risk/high-reward model of most indie-film business plans, Cogan and his company emphasize the filmmaker’s ability to mobilize the multiple smaller revenue streams that arise from […]
ANIA BUKSTEIN AND MICHAL SHTAMLER IN DIRECTOR AVI NESHER’S THE SECRETS. COURTESY MONTEREY MEDIA. Avi Nesher seems to have had two careers as a filmmaker rather than just one. Nesher’s dual identity partly stems from the fact that the Israeli writer-director spent most of his childhood and teenage years in New York and only returned to the country of his birth after attending Columbia University. Once back, Nesher wasted little time in establishing himself as one of the brightest young figures in Israeli cinema with hits like The Troupe and Dizengoff 99 (both 1979). In 1985, Rage and Glory, Nesher’s […]
Billed as the first short film shot on the new Canon EOS 5D still camera, here is “Tokyo Reality.” Hat tip: Movie City Indie. Tokyo Reality (Canon 5D MarkII) from utsuru on Vimeo.
New on the FilmInFocus site is “575 Castro Street,” a short film by San Francisco filmmaker Jenni Olson (The Joy of Life). The film contains images shot on the set of Gus Van Sant’s film over which audio from the real Harvey Milk is played. Excerpted from her director’s statement, which can be read in full at the link above: The visuals of 575 Castro St. (the play of light and shadow upon the walls of the Castro Camera set for Gus Van Sant’s Milk) harken back to those gay short films of the ‘70s: The films that passed through […]
Over on the main page, check out Alicia Van Couvering’s interview with Randall Sharp, director of the indie anomaly Henry May Long that plays at New York’s Sunshine Theater this week. I call it an anomaly, because you don’t see many elegant turn-of-the-centry period dramas arising from the Gotham indie scene. Here, Sharp tells Van Couvering why she chose to set her tale in 1887: I felt like setting it in that period would wake up the story again. Otherwise it’s just another guy shooting heroin, another gay guy who loved a straight guy. Also it’s a way to say, […]
David Poland posted on his Hot Blog early this morning that Rich Raddon, the director of Film Independent’s L.A. Film Festival who found himself under fire when it was reported that he donated $1,500 in support of California’s anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8, has resigned. Mike Jones now has a story at Variety that contains two statements. First, from Raddon: “I feel honored to have worked with such a wonderful group of people at the Los Angeles Film Festival over the last nine years. I am proud of our accomplishments. And I am proud to have worked at Film Independent, an organization […]