The Islands and the Whales, which recently had its North American theatrical premiere at IFC Center and broadcast premiere on POV, is one of the most innovative documentaries on marine conservation I’ve seen in years. Director Mike Day is carving out a niche for himself by addressing the interstices where traditional cultures butt against modern conservationist ideals, resulting in nuanced interactions that defy expectations. The Islands and the Whales, for instance, shows the people of the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic — Viking descendants who have lived off of the sea for generations — and how they are struggling […]
Awakening from a foggy haze, a wet dream of sorts, filled with opportunities more immense than I could daydream, I find myself writing follow-up emails that can only signify Film Week is over. Over 160 filmmakers, curated into a database cross-referenced by production companies, sales companies and distributors, as well as every other industry intersection imaginable, the Project Forum is a four-day event where filmmakers meet interested parties (kind of like a dating service) and parlay over films in every stage of production. A word of advice: bring your producer! Without Carlos Zozaya I would have been lost! What was […]
Sean Baker is amazed some people still think he’s a new filmmaker. That implies that he’s young. On the contrary. “I’m old,” Baker remarked during his talk at IFP Week 2017. (Or at least he’s 46.) Back in 2015, Tangerine put him on the map. And it was shot on an iPhone 5S, which made him seem like some millennial who’d never even heard of a Bolex. As it happens, Tangerine was his fifth film. The others weren’t obscure; Four Letter Words, Take Out, Prince of Broadway and Starlet were all acclaimed. (He also spent years as the co-creator of […]
Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski know what IFP Week is like. They know what it’s like to pitch a passion project. They even know what it’s like when time — in Jenkin’s case, several years — elapses between features. When the writer/director and producer, respectively, of Moonlight swung by this year’s Filmmaker Talks day at IFP Week, it was a kind of victory lap. After all, their last film together took home three Oscars, including Best Picture, on top of a towering pile of other accolades. But they used their talk with moderator Scott Macaulay, Filmmaker‘s Editor-in-Chief, to remember when life was […]
The very first thing I saw after arriving at TIFF was Pedro Pinho’s The Nothing Factory: a three-hour film is tough to slot into any festival schedule for practical reasons even before factoring in day-wearing-on exhaustion, and seeing it as a stand-alone first night entry point to the fest seemed like the right move. After some establishing shots of a squat silo being torn down and a factory in action, Pinho cuts to a couple having a sex scene. A phone call letting Ze (José Smith Vargas), the male half, know there’s trouble at the workplace intrudes: capitalism as coitus interruptus. […]
My origins as a filmmaker split the past 25 years in two. I’m now nearly as close in time to my debut efforts as I was to the early 1990s American New Wave when preparation for those efforts began. As an aspiring filmmaker with no formal film training, nothing was more inspiring to me during the mid-aughts than soaking up the narratives of DIY filmmakers who took it upon themselves to make something from nothing, way back in the grand ol’ 20th century. In reviewing the logistical and budgetary recaps presented in these pages by Peter Broderick more than two […]
In the infant years of this publication, Ted Hope wrote a piece musing on the death of 1990s off-Hollywood production models, and controversy arose! I was only 12 at the time, but I glean now that there was a sense then — at least in this tiny community of cultural producers and aspirants — that the debate within Hope’s “Indie Film is Dead,” (and then-partner James Schamus’s response “Long Live Indie Film”) mattered. But here we are, making magic together still. This 25-year-old magazine, and the tiny corner of the entertainment industry it covers with a level of detail and […]
Independent film has always had a funny relationship with the world of foreign sales. In the ’80s, it wasn’t uncommon for a certain breed of hip, black-clad downtown New York filmmaker to find most or all of his or her funding from a besotted West German TV-commissioning editor. By the late ’80s and early ’90s, following the model of Jim Jarmusch, independent film produced auteurs like Hal Hartley who developed real audiences — and financing — in territories like France, Germany and Japan. But for a myriad of reasons — and, indeed, like the rest of the film business — […]
Since I started working in film ten years ago I’ve been fascinated by the creative possibilities of distribution. Filmmakers tend to think of releasing their film primarily as homework: the creative work is over and now the boring part begins: booking theaters, organizing print traffic, getting your film onto the right platforms online, generating press, and perhaps toughest of all — convincing anyone out there to actually care about what you made. It can be a boatload of labor, and a lot of it is administrative and connection-based. It’s no wonder that most filmmakers prefer to outsource distribution to companies […]
Annemarie Jacir’s third film, Wajib, a wry comedy set in the run up to Christmas in Nazareth, premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival before heading to, this week TIFF. The film pairs legendary Arabic actors Mohammed and Saleh Bakri together in a movie for the first time. Naturally, the father and son play father and son. Saleh, who has appeared in all three films directed by Jacir, plays Rome-based Shadi, who is returning to Nazareth after a period away for the wedding of his sister Amal (Maria Zreik). In keeping with Palestinian tradition, Shadi, alongside his divorced father, […]