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Carin Leong
Director Carin Leong’s narrative short film debut, Ghost Town, “never went anywhere,” she says, “and it’s nowhere online. It was kind of my love letter to Singapore and all the changes I’ve seen there over the years. [Making it] was therapeutic for me. It didn’t do anything for me careerwise, and I didn’t expect it to.” A casual moment on the set of that film, however, planted the seed for Leong’s ambitious and elegantly realized climate-themed documentary short Sandcastles, a Field of Vision production that premiered this year at SXSW. Her producer turned to her one shoot day and said, […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Alex Ashe
“Working your way up through the grip and electric department is, at times, a slower path to becoming a cinematographer,” says New York–based DP and director Alex Ashe as he recalls a decade working as an electric and gaffer on shorts, commercials and independent features, such as Where is Kyra? (2017). For Ashe, that meant “sitting on set with the film lighting technician’s handbook or other books on cinematography, trying to connect all of the dots. I’d ask the DPs what lenses they were shooting on and try to glean as much as I could about camera while I was […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Eli Powers
Eli Powers’ unsettling Exuma depicts an asphalt plant worker rapidly spiraling out of control as he waits for an urgent call he can’t afford to miss. His frantic futzing for his phone while working alone on top of a gigantic structure results in him dropping it down a dark hole; searching for it, he finds himself accidentally locked inside the dark pit of this steel hell as his phone continues to vibrate. The man eventually breaks out but appears almost comatose as he continues about his work—that is, before he takes a few gulps of yellow paint right out of […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Julian Castronovo
“I’ve discovered that the only way you get to make a film is if you’ve already made a film,” a disillusioned young producer—a low-level employee moonlighting from his day job at an arthouse distributor—says to a first-time director in Julian Castronovo’s forthcoming debut feature. The filmmaker he is speaking to is also named Julian Castronovo, and the film the young producer is failing to get financed bears a sideways resemblance to the one we’re watching. Dealing with the search for a disappeared art forger, the movie the on-screen Castronovo pitches is an ambitious hybrid dealing with “the discourse of authenticity” […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Off Screen Spaces: Azazel Jacobs on His Three Daughters
Azazel Jacobs’s films treat the tragicomedy of human existence with tenderness and a heartbreakingly honest sense of the absurd. In his first released feature, The GoodTimesKid (2005), the anti-hero (played by Jacobs) is trapped in a repetitive nightmare of mistaken identity punctuated by Marx Brothers slapstick and 1930s movie dance routines. Jacobs made it with colleagues and friends he met when he was getting his MFA from the AFI Conservatory, some of whom became a permanent part of his team, including his wife Diaz, an actor and filmmaker in her own right. Momma’s Man (2008) memorialized the trauma of moving […]
by Amy Taubin on Sep 18, 2024 -
Review This: Letterboxd and Independent Film Marketing
There are no silver bullets for solving the crisis in independent film distribution, but there are a lot of industry professionals looking to Letterboxd—and its opinionated and rapidly growing 15 million–strong community of cinephiles—as an important new tool for their survival. Most crucially, as one distributor put it, “They’ve opened up a new channel of communication between filmmakers and their audiences, both actual and potential.” And, unlike other major industry disrupters, from Netflix to Rotten Tomatoes before it, Letterboxd appears to be embracing independent films as a distinct part of its identity. Matthew Buchanan, Letterboxd’s New Zealand–based co-founder, told Filmmaker, […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Sep 18, 2024 -
Bryn Silverman and Naveen Chaubal
Naveen Chaubal and Bryn Silverman began collaborating as undergraduates at the University of Southern California, where they both studied film production. Hailing from small towns in Indiana and Oregon, respectively, they first connected within an “amazing friend group” that made work together. “I love the journey that we’ve been on,” Silverman says about their roughly 17-year connection. She’s long admired Chaubal’s “commitment to craft”; he cites her knack for “experimentation” as an enduring source of inspiration. Chaubal received his degree in 2010, a semester earlier than class of ’11 Silverman. Their first post-grad project was shooting yoga videos in Guatemala. […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Sam Shainberg
Growing up in Greenwich Village, Sam Shainberg thought he’d become a historian, but that changed when he went to Bard College. “I found out that real historians study one topic their whole careers. I didn’t have patience for that; I wanted to learn a lot of stories and also to be out in the world as much as possible—to, I guess, have adventures.” At Bard, where his early work “veered a little bit more towards magical realism,” as well as documentary, teachers included the filmmakers Kelly Reichardt, Peggy Ahwesh and the late Peter Hutton, part of a program that was […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
Véra Haddad
Filmmaker Véra “V” Haddad’s short film Opener immediately evinces familiarity with the touring musician life. Queer guitarist Sam (Saara Untracht-Oakner) faces familiar headaches when she walks into her hometown’s small venue: a cold club manager, a dismissive sound tech (“Is that the loudest you’re going to get?” he asks her, interrupting her already truncated soundcheck) and a broken string that necessitates a protracted trip to a local music shop mostly populated by dudes. Only the eventual appearance of a supportive queer community, including a cameo from Jane Schoenbrun, puts her at ease. “All of my closest friends are musicians,” Haddad […]
by Emily Huse on Sep 18, 2024 -
On the Way to the Cutting Room: How to Be an Assistant Editor
If you’ve ever wondered, “What even is an assistant editor, and what do they do?,” you’re not alone. I find myself explaining my job repeatedly to my perplexed but well-meaning family members and even to other people in the film and TV industry. The job varies from project to project, but mostly an assistant editor deals with various technical aspects of post-production so the editor can focus on the creative work of editing. That said, it’s not an entirely technical role. Sometimes, an assistant gets the chance to help the editor creatively through assembling scenes or working on sound design; […]
by Eleanor Mance-Moran on Sep 18, 2024
