6580 Results for “production”
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Alex Morelli
In 2015, Alex Morelli drove through Ely, Nevada, for the first time as part of a larger western road trip. “I’d been researching the history of the west and the extractive economies that have sustained some of these really small, isolated communities,” he recalls. Ely had gone from stagecoach town to copper mining boom and bust before the late 1980s, when a maximum security prison facility was built there, becoming the area’s primary employer. After passing through, Morelli “couldn’t get Ely out of my head” and, with grant money, continued making trips there. When Nevada decided to build an execution […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Georden West
The spirit of Boston’s oldest gay bar, the now-shuttered Playland, is summoned, as though via seance, in the debut feature of artist and filmmaker Georden West. In their ambitious, nearly uncategorizable Playland, now in post-production, West creates a series of uncanny tableaux and interactions in precise 4:3 compositions—trancelike moments among the bar’s cooks, waiters and bartenders as well as drag performers—that slide across decades, from the late 1930s to the mid-’90s, building narrative along the way. Bits of archival footage of the bar and its surrounding Combat Zone neighborhood are woven throughout, and the film’s vintage soundtrack would thrill the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Michele Mansoor
Michele Mansoor began freelancing full-time for casting director Jennifer Venditti’s company JV8 Inc. after college, scouting for A24 productions like the Safdies’ Good Time and Uncut Gems and HBO’s Euphoria. While casting for the title role of Yann Demange’s White Boy Rick, Mansoor returned to Columbus, Ohio and was introduced to Chrissy Brown, a woman whose 15-year-old son, Gage, would’ve proven perfect for the role—had he not been incarcerated for felonious assault with a firearm. After serving his 18-month sentence, Gage would quickly return to prison for a similar offense and an additional four years of confinement. Although she was […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Jorge Sistos
Jorge Sistos was sitting in a New Jersey McDonald’s when inspiration struck for his most recent short, In Freedom, currently in post-production. While pursuing an MFA in directing at NYU (he obtained his degree in 2021), he regularly commuted to Manhattan from humble Garden State digs. After one of these NJ Transit bus rides, he was hankering for a midnight snack of Chicken McNuggets. As he ate, he noticed a middle-aged couple with two toddlers at a nearby table, engaging in a teary phone call in Spanish. As he eavesdropped, the details of their difficult situation became clear: They were […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Lucy Kerr
Growing up in Houston, Lucy Kerr remembers that “disciplinary systems were a big part” of her childhood. These included attending “a very difficult private school academically. Ballet was a part of that: I enjoyed the discipline and intensity of how it pushed my body, even at a young age, and having that form of expression, but how gendered it is, and how much suffering there is in the dancers, wore on me. That’s a big part of my work now: how our bodies are disciplined and conditioned on a daily basis.” That work includes her first feature, Family Portrait, which […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Darol Olu Kae
In a way, Hollywood was always within earshot of Darol Olu Kae’s home in Watts, Calif., but he didn’t consider filmmaking a possibility growing up. The road to such a career was shrouded from view, as was the integral role his hometown played in myriad Black arts movements, particularly free jazz—Watts being the home of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, or Ark, a non-traveling music ensemble, founded in 1961 by the late avant-garde jazz virtuoso Horace Tapscott (composer for the LA Rebellion films Passing Through and As Above, So Below, directed by Larry Clark). It would take leaving home and […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan
Like many couples quarantined together during the early days of COVID, spouses and occasional cinematic collaborators Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan found themselves saddled with “creative cabin fever” and an excess of time on their hands. Just weeks prior to the pandemic’s arrival in the United States, Shaw was working on a surreal play based on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined off the coast of Japan for two weeks in February 2020 when 712 passengers were stricken ill with COVID. Before long, though, the circumstances that intrigued Shaw from afar became a permanent presence in her and […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Alec Moeller
Shot on richly textured three-perf 35mm, Alec Moeller’s Empath follows Kate (Betsey Brown), who’s prone to uncontrollable tears at the slightest provocation, e.g., seeing a clown drawing made by her psychiatrist’s son. “He must be such a sad little boy to paint such a very good clown,” she bawls. The doctor thinks she needs mood stabilizers, but Kate seeks out more meaningful help at a support group for “hyper-empaths,” who describe themselves as simply feeling too much. The group is run by a suspiciously controlling doctor (Michele Simms), and the short derives tension from the increasingly hard-to-pin-down motivations of its […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2022 -
Global Conversations: Camden International Film Festival and Points North Pitch 2022
Two long, anxious years of ever-shifting pandemic regulations, shutdowns and travel obstacles turned the expansive, buoyant and super-social Camden International Film Festival into a largely local and virtual affair. Though the festival—an essential annual magnet for the nonfiction film community—did a stellar job meeting the challenge, any Zoom subscriber knows the workarounds get wearying. There’s nothing like the real thing. No doubt that accounted for the “extra” vibe at this year’s gathering, the first full-fledged staging of the festival since 2019. As always, the 18th edition was situated in a cluster of picturesque towns in north coastal Maine: Camden, Rockland […]
by Steve Dollar on Oct 5, 2022 -
U.S. in Progress Wroclaw Announces 8 Selected 2022 Edition Projects
The American Film Festival in Wroclaw, Poland has announced the eight feature film projects selected for the 12th edition of the U.S. in Progress co-production forum, taking place November 9 – 11, 2022 at the festival. Invite-only work-in-progress screenings of American independent films in their final editing stages, curated from a record number of submissions, will be screened for European and Polish film professionals, festival programmers and buyers. Additionally, projects will compete for in-kind awards of post-production service pcckages. The selected projects are: Crooked Finger directed by Julia Halperin and Jason Cortlund, produced by Julia Halperin and Todd Remis Falling […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 4, 2022
