For the past half-year or so, I have been in constant dialogue with the distribution and foreign sales companies who are releasing four of my recent productions. While engaging these companies, in conjunction with the four directors, I noticed some patterns emerging that are revealing of the current distribution landscape — patterns that differ dramatically from the old ways of theatrical and home video release. Rest assured, it’s not all bad news. It used to be that foreign pre-sales would help us get our dramas financed. Now we can barely find foreign sales agents for our American independent films, even […]
Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess is the most daring feature film of the year. A bewildering and baffling trip back in time (to circa 1980), the movies follows a group of four-eyed super-nerds engaged in a unique chess tournament – in which their carefully designed computer programs face off against each other. Shot on 43-year-old video equipment (the Sony AVC3260, one of the earliest consumer cameras), the movie looks like a lost artifact from another era — with soupy black-and-white images that take on a ghostly pallor. If Bujalski is known for his lo-fi minimalist human comedies Funny Ha Ha, Mutual […]
When you put over 20 independent filmmakers in a room behind closed doors, the kind of honesty and frankness about the industry that emerges is hard to find anywhere else. There’s also a lot of humor, albeit ranging from the cynical to the scatological. The words below are some of those tidbits I overheard during my week at the June IFP Narrative Lab that capture much of the essence of the week and are, I think, solid pieces of advice for filmmakers in post: “[Film distribution is] a new diaper to change every day. Your film keeps on pooping.” – […]
As an undergrad at NYU, Timur Civan studied sculpture before moving into video. “I became really interested in video because I was able to bring time into my sculptural work,” he says. Civan has produced a wide variety of work, from short films, music videos, and corporate videos, to commercials and documentaries. He recently DP’d Vincent Laforet’s intro for the M?VI digital 3-axis gyro-stabilized camera gimbal. He has an affinity for experimenting with unusual gear, and finding new in-camera effects. Civan spoke to us briefly at a recent presentation he gave at Rule Boston Camera: Filmmaker: How did you first get […]
Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate — the 2011 25 New Faces who created the delightful Marcel the Shell with Shoes On — have a new web series, a 12-part “comedy of sincerity” called Catherine. Camp wrote in an email: It’s a comedy, but it’s also sincere and menacing and hopefully kind of evocative. In some ways it’s a response to the “awkward” comedy that dominates TV & movies right now. My secret hope is that it kicks off a new movement away from that kind of boring cynicism toward something with a live, beating heart. A single-entendre sense of […]
Something of a cinematic wunderkind, BAMcinemaFest (June 19-28) is the offspring of the three-year marriage, consummated in Brooklyn in 2006, between the Sundance Institute and BAMcinematek. The festival jumped past the Sundance-only model, adding submissions and films from SXSW, Toronto, and True/False. Curator Florence Almozini expertly cherry-picks the best indies from the previous year; each is a New York premiere. Around the time the betrothal was dissolving, Almozini explains, “We were looking at the NYC festival scene to find our own niche. We felt that no other festival was actually focusing on new U.S. indie films. BAMcinemaFest as a showcase […]
Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film, The Great Beauty, premiered in competition in Cannes this year, wowing fans with its over-the-top depiction of modern Rome. Seen through the sad eyes of an aging journalist, Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), the film uncovers a series of unsettling scenes where everyone in Rome aims to be an actor on his or her own stage. And Jep is at the center of it all, a man who squandered his writing talents in exchange for a hard-partying lifestyle. He is surrounded by characters too distracted by their urban surroundings to make anything meaningful. Yet behind every image of decadence […]
A Hijacking, Tobias Lindholm’s first feature as a solo director (his first film, 2010’s prison drama R, was co-directed with Michael Noer) begins before its title event, with cargo ship cook Mikkel (Pilou Asbæk) calling home to his wife, and it ends after it’s all over. But the bulk of the film is a two-setting procedural, radiating verisimilitude both on-board and in the corporate offices, where a CEO (Søren Malling) personally conducts negotiations with hijackers. During an interview with Filmmaker, Lindholm spoke about the production in all its preparatory and practical aspects. Filmmaker: When I heard the sound of the […]
It’s a tough thing, being the Brooklyn Film Festival. Perched right at the beginning of the summer, the festival, which just concluded its 16th year, has the potentially world-class brand of Williamsburg Cool to exploit. According to most casual observers, it has never been able to adequately do so. The New York cinerati just doesn’t take the event seriously. If they don’t, who else will? The reasons for its reputation remain somewhat murky, but most lay the blame on the festival’s programming. The festival certainly suffers from its placement in this regard, between its newer, more prestigious Gotham neighbors Tribeca […]
An often stirring and certainly very odd meditation on the difficulties and ambiguities of love and friendship about a pair of female teenage assassins, Violet & Daisy is the debut feature of Oscar-winning screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher (Precious). A tricky balance of near camp, New Wave aesthetic hijinks and earnest melodrama unfold in this three-handed chamber piece and are for the most part deftly pulled off by Fletcher and his collaborators, who have made a film that is reminiscent of both grindhouse cheapies (Danny Trejo is in it after all, albeit very briefly) and Godardian reveries. Ex-Gilmore Girl Alexis Bledel and Atonement‘s Saoirse Ronan play the title […]