6576 Results for “production”
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Ilana Coleman
In Ilana Coleman’s And We Stood Still — finished at CalArts, where she recently completed her MFA — a mother arrives in a small town in Chiapas in search of her daughter, part of a group of visiting scientists that has disappeared. A slow-cinema-style trip to a remote part of the jungle begins as a straightforward reconnoitering quest but becomes more surreal as the 24-minute short proceeds: A naked man robbed by police appears from the trees, visions of soldiers from the present or past appear and the narrative dissolves into a compellingly ambiguous thicket. This is appropriate: The film […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 14, 2017 -
Andrew Fitzgerald
Raised in the small, working-class town of Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, by a family of potters, Andrew Fitzgerald traces his fascination with moviemaking to his background as a young skateboarder. He captured his friends’ skating hangouts on old VHS-C tapes, using multiple VCRs to edit the footage into compilations that imitated the trick-based videos he grew up watching, helping hone his skills as director and editor. Fitzgerald improved as both a skateboarder and a filmmaker while attending Temple University in nearby Philadelphia (where the local skate scene was prominent), before heading to Los Angeles to secure editing gigs. “Editing has always been a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 14, 2017 -
Elan and Jonathan Bogarin
For many people, closing up the family house is a midlife rite of passage, an exhausting and sometimes emotionally perilous event occurring when a parent dies or is no longer able to live alone. It involves not just closing out a mortgage and moving furniture but also diving through sometimes decades of memories, a process that forces one to define the value of a faded, sepia-toned photograph, a closet full of outdated clothing, a box of school yearbooks, or even some ineffable tchotchke collection. For sibling directors Elan and Jonathan Bogarín, just such an undertaking has stretched not months but […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 14, 2017 -
Nellie Kluz
In Chicago-based Nellie Kluz’s documentary shorts — which have played at venues including Rooftop Films, the Maryland Film Festival and online variety show The Eyeslicer — her handheld camera gains benignly curious, nonprying access to events happening largely in public space. Tourists make various pilgrimages, secular (to Cape Canaveral for liftoff) and religious (to see a saint’s remains on display at a church), in the cheekily titled, festival catalogue–baiting Must See. Various players in the tail end of the commodity market for gold in Gold Party include participants in a bizarre pageant show in which businesswomen double as gold-painted models. […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 14, 2017 -
Indie Film is Alive
“It’s going be called ‘Indie Film is Dead,’” I remember Ted Hope saying to me back in 1995. He was referring to an article he was submitting for that fall’s magazine, a many-thousand-word takedown of the business practices and internalized logic of the specialty film business. Hope, a prolific producer who had worked with Ang Lee and Hal Hartley, was a frequent contributor to Filmmaker in our early days, writing pieces like one on how to interview a production designer or another on the job of the production manager. But this piece would be different. Here’s the lede: “The marketplace […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2017 -
Robin Comisar
An encounter between a waiter and a middle-aged mother, out for dinner with her family at a popular seafood chain, doesn’t seem like fodder for the year’s most unsettling, aesthetically assured short, but Robin Comisar’s seven-minute long Great Choice, commissioned by the ever adventurous Miami-based production and exhibition outfit Borscht Corp., is that and more. “Wow, that’s a lot of shrimp,” a perfectly absurd real-life 1994 advertisement for the seafood chain Red Lobster begins — a piece of VHS found footage that Comisar goes on to warp, loop and narratively remix in increasingly bizarre ways. The benign and kitschy 30-second […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 14, 2017 -
Jessica Kingdon
Jessica Kingdon’s father is Jewish-American and her mother Chinese; she never had any particular interest in filming her mother’s country while pursuing her cinema studies degree at Columbia before moving on to a master’s in media studies at the New School. She credits her brother, who learned Mandarin and moved to China for a few years, with renewing her interest. Commodity City — which premiered at this year’s Slamdance Film Festival — and Routine Island, currently in rough-cut assembly, are the first two parts in what’s intended to be a trilogy of short films about China and, in her words, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 14, 2017 -
Friend Zone: Should You Make Movies with Your Friends?
The first article I ever wrote for Filmmaker was a survey and analysis of an ascendant film movement called “mumblecore.” The label was still new enough ten years ago to get quotes around it. I interviewed Joe Swanberg, Jay and Mark Duplass, Ry Russo-Young, Aaron Katz, Matt Dentler, Greta Gerwig, Frank V. Ross, Andrew Bujalski, Anish Savjani and many more. The article was very long, and Scott put it on the cover. I have forgotten everything I wrote in the article, but I have never forgotten a post on Gothamist about it, which read, “Note to film journalists: Don’t interview […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Sep 14, 2017 -
Ja’Tovia Gary
“James Baldwin says, ‘… nothing can be changed until it is faced,’” says filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary, explaining her autobiographical documentary, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. “So, I’m having to have difficult conversations with myself that I wouldn’t be having if it weren’t for this film.” Now in postproduction, Evidence is, says Gary, “a portrait of one woman’s effort to transcend the trauma of her history.” Begun as a biographical film about her mother, the work expanded into an examination of Gary’s entire family lineage and, finally, a kind of personal essay. Gary interviews her parents, 80-year-old grandmother, siblings and […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 14, 2017 -
In the Realm of the Possible: Hal Hartley on Restoring His Early Films and Working in Television
I interviewed Hal Hartley for Filmmaker‘s 25th anniversary issue this past Fall and am posting this piece online today as Hartley is in the final days of a Kickstarter to fund the release of the very films discussed here. If you’re a fan of this paradigmatic indie director please consider supporting! — SM I catch Hal Hartley — whose third feature, Simple Men, was Filmmaker’s very first cover back in 1992 — as he’s spending the day creating bonus features for new DVD and Blu-ray box sets of the three films in his “Henry Fool Trilogy.” As international distribution licenses […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 14, 2017
