6582 Results for “production”
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Overdraft Protection: Chloë Sevigny Talks to Amalia Ulman About her Feature Debut, El Planeta
Starting in 2012, the saga of mother/daughter scammers Justina and Ana Belén was low-key Spanish news fodder. Their scheme followed a buy-first, pay-never model, using a variety of excuses to dodge their bills. They came to legal attention when they attempted to dodge a hotel bill in Gijón, Spain, by threatening to accuse the proprietor of sexual harassment; a year later, in 2013, they were again arrested in the same city for racking up thousands of euros in unpaid dinners. In 2017, Argentinian-born artist Amalia Ulman received a photo of the Beléns from her mother, Ale, who still lives in […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 11, 2021 -
Frederic Da
Much of Frederic Da’s life has been an extended exercise in film education. His youthful penchant for raiding his uncle’s indie DVD collection led him to pursue cinema studies at NYU (“I wanted to do film production, but my mom, a teacher, wanted me to have a B.A., not a B.F.A.”), where he and his roommate spent their days devouring movie classics. Now 36, the L.A.-based filmmaker has imparted his love of cinema studies to a new generation. For the past several years, Da has taught high school film theory and production classes at New Roads School in Santa Monica. […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Suneil Sangziri
In three 16mm shorts that premiered over the past three years, Suneil Sanzgiri uses a broad array of formats to delve into his father’s memories and their inevitably political intersection with Goa’s history. CG renderings of now-gone and never-visited locations, desktop documentary, commissioned drone footage, archival excerpts of classic Indian films, still-resonant news footage of past protests: All are in the mix as Sanzgiri thinks through key thematic preoccupations—diaspora, colonialism, how to understand a homeland from a distance, political activism and genocides—in overlaid, Roboto-font text. In 2019’s At Home But Not at Home, which premiered at the International Film Festival […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Jordan Lord
Make a film and along with the movie comes, usually, a folder containing all the associated contracts: financing docs and loan agreements, footage releases, location agreements and, especially for documentaries, appearance releases. Together, they constitute a matrix of power relations, a charting of the debts incurred, risks undertaken and obligations owed by all of those participating in the film’s creation. The deconstruction of these relationships is both subject and method in the films of New York–based filmmaker Jordan Lord. In the 2018 short After…. After… (Access), Lord and their producer attempt to secure permission from a hospital to film Lord’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Ramzi Bashour
Ramzi Bashour’s first short, No One Gets Out of Here Alive, premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2016. Five years later, his NYU thesis film, The Trees, brought him back. In between those premieres, Bashour left Beirut, his home since age nine. Shot in 2015 as an influx of refugees poured into Lebanon from the Syrian War, No One is, he says, “my goodbye letter to the city and the country that I’d been living in” and already left once before. Focusing on a migrant laborer’s precarious day-to-day routine, the grimly immersive short shares a quick, often unexpected rhythmic […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Isabel Castro
Born in Mexico in the early 1990s, Isabel Castro moved extensively with her family throughout her childhood. After relocating to Argentina and Brazil, the Castro family arrived in the United States—first, Los Angeles, then a predominantly white neighborhood in Connecticut. Assimilation was paramount, and Castro’s high school experience became a constant push-and-pull between needing to fit in and embracing her Mexican heritage. An early interest in painting and photography gave way to a fascination with the still image, providing Castro with a path to exploring her creativity and, potentially, making a career out of it. Still, the financial implications of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Jason Park
A decade ago, Jason Park had taken a year off from Andrews University, the Michigan Christian college he was attending as an undergraduate, to work as a “missionary/teacher” on the island of Palau. As a freshman he studied theology, but cinema was always a draw. Growing up, his mother, a first-generation Korean American, would often take Park to the theater. But Andrews didn’t have a film department, and, regardless, Park never thought filmmaking could be an actual profession. But, during that missionary year, he saw David Fincher’s The Social Network, “projected off a DVD on a crappy projector. To this […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
The Girl Who Knew Too Much: Bong Joon-ho Interviews Edgar Wright about Wright’s Exhilarating, ’60s-Set Psychological Thriller, Last Night in Soho
“A unique collision of private and public fantasy took place in the 1960s, and may have to wait some years to be repeated, if ever,” J. G. Ballard said in an interview contained within the 1983 reissue of his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition. In Ballard’s view, the decade’s political and cultural jolts, coupled with the rise of mass media, produced what he called in another interview “a peculiar psychological climate…” a “landscape around us that was almost like a gigantic novel; we were living more and more inside a strange, enormous work of fiction.” Eloise, the 18-year-old heroine of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 11, 2021 -
Jazmin Jones
Jazmin Jones was eight years old and living in the Bay Area when she first encountered Mavis Beacon, a fictional figure created by the cofounder of MySpace to represent the popular Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing software game. “I’m a pupil of Mavis Beacon’s,” Jones says. “I owe this woman so much. When I was learning the game, they have these little Black hands that mimic typing. It was so amazing to see a digitized version of a body like mine on screen at such a foundational age.” But, as Jones grew older she has realized Beacon is a bit of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021 -
Anthony Banua-Simon
The commodification and exploitation of the sugar business is a recurring preoccupation of nonfiction director Anthony Banua-Simon, whose debut feature, Cane Fire, premiered at Hot Docs in 2020 and recently played MoMA’s Doc Fortnight. With its primary subject the labor movements and activist strikes that arose from sugar plantation mismanagement and employee abuse, Banua-Simon’s documentary is laser-focused in its interests but expansive and sprawling in mapping out key players and historical ramifications. Dissecting the colonization of Kaua’i, the picturesque Hawaiian island known for its once-thriving sugar production (and the site of several whitewashed Hollywood films), Cane Fire is both a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Oct 11, 2021
