6583 Results for “production”
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Editor’s Letter
Thirteen months ago, I was writing this letter from Berlin, where I was attending the festival and working on the issue with one of our designers. And sure, I noticed all the people coughing at the DAU. Natasha premiere. And that my screenwriter tutor pal extended an elbow rather than a hand when we sat down for lunch. And how empty the plane was on my trip home, just one day before the European travel ban. In the next week, I attended my last party of 2020, a post-Sundance celebration with a number of local filmmakers. Surprisingly, the oncoming pandemic […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 8, 2021 -
As the Calendar Rolls Around: Producers and Sellers on the Pandemic-Altered ’21 Festival Season.
For more than 40 years, there was a certainty to the film festival calendar—a comfort in knowing that, since 1978, when the Berlin International Film Festival moved to February, followed by Cannes in May, and Venice in the fall, there were three distinct seasons for producers, sales agents and buyers to meet, see films and make deals. But in 2021, things are different, of course. While the inflection points of the business cycle—winter, summer, fall—remain somewhat in place, the ongoing pandemic has scrambled the dates, formats and plans for hundreds of film events, upending launch strategies and causing potential logjams […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Apr 8, 2021 -
Everybody’s in Showbiz: The ‘80s Downtown Actors of Miami Vice
Between 9 and 11 p.m. on Friday, September 27, 1985, after Knight Rider and before the late local news, one of every five American TV sets was tuned to NBC to see the theatrical impresario who would send his casts into audiences to beg for change, was arrested for indecency after stripping alongside ticket buyers and had disrupted his own trial for tax evasion with spasms of poetry. Julian Beck, cofounder of The Living Theatre, appears in the feature-length season two premiere of Miami Vice as a Mephistophelean financier. Cultured and skeletal—Beck died of cancer before the episode aired—the trickster-god […]
by Mark Asch on Apr 8, 2021 -
The Rocking Chair Interview: In Conversation with Ja’Tovia Gary
This article is co-published with Sentient.Art.Film, as part of their new monthly newsletter. The Sentient.Art.Film Bulletin is a community newsletter focused around fostering discourse around film exhibition infrastructures, art and cinema cultures, social change, and beyond. Subscribe to the bulletin here. Where to begin? I met Ja’Tovia Gary in Boston, Fall 2018; she was starting her Radcliffe–Harvard Film Study Center fellowship, and I my Ph.D. We were introduced by a mutual filmmaker friend, Theo Anthony, who I had met while living in Baltimore and Ja’Tovia knew from the Flaherty Seminar. The drone of this institution made us both feel strange […]
by Keisha N. Knight on Apr 8, 2021 -
The 25 or So 2020 Features Shot on 35mm
Since 2015, I’ve annually rounded up interviews and features covering the previous year’s U.S. theatrical releases shot on 35mm, an inherently melancholy collation of (increasingly dead) links. (“This is your most quixotic project,” a friend messaged recently.) The 25-ish 35mm releases of 2020 I’ve tallied this time are in line with each previous year’s 30-or-bubbling-under features, a boutique fraction of the larger landscape. Each list builds toward a larger index of minor deaths. My first edition, covering 2014, noted the close of Australia’s last commercial film lab and Bong Joon-ho’s return home to South Korea after Snowpiercer, only to discover […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 8, 2021 -
Conversations Between: Sky Hopinka and Theo Anthony Discuss maɬni – towards the ocean, towards the shore
There’s a moment in Sky Hopinka’s 2017 short film, Anti-Objects, or Space Without Path or Boundary, where for just a few frames, a layer of video floats on top of the subtitles. Blink and you’ll miss it, but in those frames something deeper winks back at you. Subtitles often float like oil on top of water; they are in the image but not of the image. But in Sky’s films, language is not a metatext. It’s organic, dynamic, always in the process of becoming something else. Language shapes and is shaped, carries and is carried, by the specificity of the […]
by Theo Anthony on Apr 8, 2021 -
Mask Mandate: Writer/Director Tim Sutton on Funny Face
Every major city goes through extended periods of change. Since the turn of the century, New York City has been engaged in perhaps the most detestable metamorphosis. It’s increasingly become an unaffordable playground for wealthy elites, where longtime residents get bought out and relocated to satisfy greedy land developers’ dreams of additional luxury apartments. It’s in the brewing frustration (if not outright rage) of those displaced that New York–based writer-director Tim Sutton’s fifth feature, Funny Face, finds its inspiration. Set in Coney Island, Brooklyn, in the early months of 2019, the film follows Saul (Cosmo Jarvis), a socially awkward loner […]
by Erik Luers on Apr 8, 2021 -
“Fish is Expensive to Keep Purchasing and Replacing”: Emma Seligman on Shiva Baby
From its double-entendre title to the hilarious sightgag of a closing scene, Emma Seligman’s debut feature, Shiva Baby, is universal in its uncomfortable awkwardness and specific in how it chooses to bathe in it. Adapted and expanded from her NYU thesis short, Seligman’s film follows Danielle (Rachel Sennott), a young Jewish New Yorker who has taken to sex work to solidify her funds. After concluding a session with a client, Max (Danny Deferrari), Danielle heads to Flatbush to meet up with her parents (Polly Draper and Fred Melamed) and attend the shiva of a family friend. Faced with unending nagging […]
by Erik Luers on Apr 5, 2021 -
“The Script Had to be Drunk — Drunk Alongside the Characters”: Director Thomas Vinterberg on Balancing Humor and Sadness In His Unexpectedly Life-Affirming Another Round
A besotted cinematic sub-genre consists of films about drinking — liquor, bars and the imbiber’s life. Whether the lives portrayed are rowdy and boisterous ones, or, as is often the case, destructively out-of-control, these films — ranging from Days of Wine and Roses and The Lost Weekend to Leaving Las Vegas — usually map their character arcs alongside their characters’ physical and social deterioration; they wind up as cautionary tales. A recent film that took a different approach is the Ross Brothers’s hybrid documentary, Bloody Noses Empty Pockets, which captured the woozy exuberance of one intoxicated day/night while not eliding […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 31, 2021 -
“I’ve Always Been Very Frustrated with Sports Films”: Julien Faraut on The Witches of the Orient, Learning from Chris Marker and Volleyball Anime
In his extraordinary portrait of American tennis champ John McEnroe, In the Realm of Perfection (2018), French filmmaker Julien Faraut engineered a hypnotizing meditation on the intersection between sports, performance and the creation of images—not at all the conventional retread of history one might expect from anything with the “sports movie” label. In his latest, The Witches of the Orient, Faraut returns to the arena of athletic competition in similarly idiosyncratic fashion, profiling the women of Japan’s most famous volleyball team. Made up of former textile workers, team “Nichibo Kaizuka” nabbed gold at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and inspired a […]
by Beatrice Loayza on Mar 31, 2021
