6584 Results for “production”
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Meghan Fredrich
For years, Meghan Fredrich was happily working in advertising, which she majored in at Emerson College, and then, suddenly, she got very sick. The details aren’t important: She saw doctors, went through treatment and eventually began to recover. Instead of feeling revitalized after recuperating, she endured a profound sense of boredom. Fredrich resolved to make a change, and at the age of 30 decided to become a filmmaker: “It was as if I reached a certain point of returning to life with that decision.” The 34-year-old’s debut short documentary, Deborah Harry Does Not Like Interviews, displays skills informed by Fredrich’s […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Bo McGuire
The charmingly Southern and impeccably dressed Bo McGuire doesn’t list the typical influences you might associate with independent filmmakers of a certain age. The self-proclaimed “queer son of a Waffle House cook and his third-shift waitress” from Hokes Bluff, Alabama, McGuire cites Dolly Parton as his biggest inspiration and Reba McEntire’s 1991 music video, “Fancy,” as his first cinematic love. Attracted to perverse adolescent entertainments like Killer Klowns from Outer Space and Return to Oz, the young McGuire would direct neighborhood friends in makeshift productions of Clue. “There was a part of me that’s always been doing this,” McGuire says, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Todd Chandler
Todd Chandler was nearly three years into the filming of his Untitled Safe Schools Project — a documentary about schools’ various responses to gun violence — when the Parkland shootings happened. “The media onslaught was quite challenging for [the project],” says Chandler. “One funder asked, ’Are you going to Parkland?’ I said, ’I’m not going to Parkland, but I’m pretty sure there will be plenty of other filmmakers going there.’” Indeed, the simple version of Chandler’s in-production documentary would have been for him to embed himself at a single school — one like Parkland, for example — and document teachers’, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Haley Elizabeth Anderson
“I want to get as much work out there as possible,” says Haley Elizabeth Anderson about her seemingly nonstop filmmaking activity over the past couple of years. “To be still and not making stuff scares me.” Anderson shouldn’t be scared. This year alone the NYU Tisch grad impressively premiered a piercing short doc at the Tribeca Film Festival (If There Is Light, commissioned by Queen Latifah’s Queen Collective) and, at New York’s Hudson Yards art space, The Shed, Gulf Tones, a three-channel and photography installation about the Gulf Coast. And Anderson has found support for other new projects from organizations […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Lance Oppenheim
While in high school in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Lance Oppenheim would send documentary pitches to New York Times Op-Docs. Some were written treatments, and others were actual shorts, documenting, says Oppenheim, “crazy things happening in my backyard,” like the story of an armed vigilante animal rescue group rescuing discarded dogs being mistreated by their new owners in the Everglades. (A no-go for the Times, The Dogmatic [2012] went on to win multiple awards at regional and student film festivals.) Another short that year was Quicksand, an elegiac portrait of Oppenheim’s grandfather in the final days of Alzheimer’s. “’Good job, not […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Lyle Mitchell Corbine, Jr.
There were several distinct phases in Lyle Mitchell Corbine, Jr.’s journey through cinephilia toward becoming a film director. As a preteen growing up on and around Native American reservations in Wisconsin and Minnesota, places where his parents worked (his dad is a casino executive, his mom a psychologist), he was into action movies and anything Schwarzenegger. Then, at 13, he saw Lost in Translation and “couldn’t stop thinking about it.” He says, “I realized that movies could be impactful in ways I never knew.” Another revelation came at 17 when Corbine, Jr. — now a high school dropout working at […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Faren Humes
Miami-based filmmaker Faren Humes was working as a location manager on Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight in 2015, looking for a Liberty City apartment to shoot in, when the city announced the redevelopment of its Liberty Square public housing complex. The complex consists of hundreds of row houses that stretch for blocks, and the city stated that the development would occur in phases, with residents being shuffled around the complex as old buildings fell and new ones arose. The announcement immediately prompted questions, recalls Humes. “‘How long will this take?’ ‘What if I don’t want to live there during the construction?’” She continues, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Sudarshan Suresh
Sudarshan Suresh’s Mizaru unfolds in one fluid shot, which begins innocuously enough: A young boy and girl in an Indian park, seemingly far from any prying eyes, begin making out. Their fumbling is interrupted by a young boy trying to sell balloons, whom they rudely rebuff; his supervising adults soon come trailing. These enforcers of public morality pull aside the young boy and girl, and then other couples, physically abusing them while waiting for the police to arrive. The impressively choreographed one-take shost moves around the park, surveying an exercise group before returning to the couple and their antagonists, deftly […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Barbara Cigarroa
Hardly a day goes by in the United States without news coverage of the dehumanization and vilification of immigrants attempting to cross the border. Hate speech has inspired recent mass shootings targeted at Hispanics, and fear in numerous communities is at an all-time high. With two lauded shorts and a feature script under her belt, Mexican-American filmmaker Barbara Cigarroa seeks to flip the right-wing narrative, using her work to emphasize the very personal struggles immigrants face on a daily basis. The political is personal in the work of Cigarroa, a filmmaker who spent much of her childhood traveling across the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019 -
Courtney and Hillary Andujar
Identical twins Courtney and Hillary Andujar, who first worked as a production design team and now also collaborate as directors, didn’t start out as a professional duo. Born in San Antonio, Texas, they both attended UT Austin before splitting up — Courtney headed to New York, where she worked in print publishing and graphic design, and Hillary to LA, where she worked with fabrics and construction and learned the specifics of art department budgeting. But the sisters say they were always loosely collaborating, whether that was bouncing ideas off each other or, say, having Courtney design graphics for a film […]
by Vadim Rizov on Aug 27, 2019
