6579 Results for “production”
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Las Cruces Days: Making Sundance Grand Prize-Winner In the Summers Using New Mexico Tax Credits
Alessandra Lacorazza’s In the Summers is a film of moments spread across years—moments quiet and seemingly insignificant, as well as larger events whose significance is downplayed at the time only to be properly understood years later. It’s the story of two teenage girls who, each summer, are sent by their mom to spend a few weeks with their charismatic yet irresponsible father, whose ability to love and be a parent is continually undermined by his addictions to drugs and alcohol. Winner of the Grand Jury U.S. Dramatic Competition prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, In the Summers finds a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2024 -
Authentic Spaces
On the first shoot day of the TV series Reservation Dogs, the call sheet had a banner announcement for a “Blessing Ceremony at Call.” At 8:00 a.m., the parking lot of our Tulsa location, a strip mall clinic we had turned into an Indian Health Services Center, was filled with the usual trappings of a film set: trailers, catering tents, frayed nerves. But the entire cast and crew (both on- and off-set personnel) was also gathered, arranged in a loose circle around a smaller band of Indigenous community leaders, elders and Sterlin Harjo, the creator and show runner. Wotko Long, […]
by Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Tafv Sampson on Mar 18, 2024 -
Notes from Inside the Ecosystem: Joanne McNeil on Apple Vision Pro
From the late aughts until pre-pandemic times, Apple’s presence in my life seemed concise and easy to recognize. It manufactured the phone in my pocket and the laptop I worked on. I picked an iPhone and a MacBook over the alternatives for the usual reasons: because Apple products were reliable and well-designed with intuitive user interfaces. The company, as a product manufacturer, appeared to have a vastly different purpose than the neighboring Silicon Valley empires extracting and monetizing data like Google and Facebook. Something changed in recent years. Now, when I think of Apple, I think of the AirTags I […]
by Joanne McNeil on Mar 18, 2024 -
Every Six Hours
The film and TV industry has been through a lot these past four years, including the start of a pandemic and two strikes. Then, there’s inflation, one of the causes of another issue: skyrocketing food prices. That means that on-set catering, an oft-overlooked but important part of any production, has been hit with a triple whammy. There are other matters as well—food quality, increasing focus on dietary restrictions, waste. As productions get back to work post-strikes, caterers—and those who hire and eat from them—are juggling a return to normal and new challenges. Set caterers are responsible not only for lunch—which, […]
by Matt Prigge on Mar 18, 2024 -
A Blurring of the Real: Damon Packard, Documentary Archival Footage and Generative AI
A crowd of people, animals and AI-generated beings sleeps in a movie theater. Faces are lit by the explosions of an atom bomb on screen. All we hear is the loud snoring of hundreds of people and the sounds of their bodies moving; a nondescript rodent crawls on the floor. We cut to the 70mm IMAX projection room, where the projectionist is also sleeping. The camera moves very slowly, but each shot morphs within itself at a faster pace. These two visual rhythms are layered on top of each other. The explosions on screen intensify; a panic sets in. We […]
by Deniz Tortum on Mar 18, 2024 -
Did You See (and Hear) That? Why Home Viewing Can Be Dark and Inaudible
If the most frequently used pejoratives for contemporary films—“dim,” “muddy,” “inaudible”—are to be believed, we’ve entered a literal dark age of cinema, with cinematographic and sonic tools pushing filmmakers to ever-greater depths of audiovisual obscurity. For more than a decade, Christopher Nolan has incurred the wrath of audiences who prefer their dialogue clearly audible.1 Five years ago, the Game of Thrones episode “The Long Night” propelled the topic of the visual “New Darkness” into mainstream discourse. That this seemingly unsustainable state of affairs has persisted for as long as it has is, to many outside observers, perplexing. Why haven’t we […]
by Devan Scott on Mar 18, 2024 -
“We Were a Bit Like a Circus That Came to Town”: Sara Summa on Arthur&Diana
Filmed during a genuine road trip between Germany, France and Italy, Arthur&Diana, the sophomore film from writer-director Sara Summa is fueled by experimentation. Summa and her real-life brother Robin play the titular sibling duo as they embark on a trip from Berlin to Paris in order to renew documentation for the car which carries them, itself a cherished familial relic. In tow is Diana’s two-year-old son, Lupo, also embodied by Summa’s own child. As they drive through Europe and encounter faces old and new—a magnetic young hitchhiker, the pair’s zany Parisian mother, Diana’s partner and co-parent—it becomes clear that their […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 17, 2024 -
“I Didn’t Want It to Get Too ’80s”: Rose Glass on Love Lies Bleeding
Equal parts romantic horror movie, revenge thriller and twisted, small town family drama, Rose Glass’s second feature after Saint Maud, is a midnight movie for the arthouse crowd, complete with Hollywood stars (Kristen Stewart, Ed Harris, Dave Franco, Jena Malone) doing wild and crazy things all in the name of intense body horror. Set in the late 1980s, the film stars Katy O’Brian as Jackie, a woman making her way through the American Southwest en route to a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas. In New Mexico, Jackie picks up a job as a waitress at a tacky shooting range run by […]
by Erik Luers on Mar 15, 2024 -
“The Frame Is a Proscenium”: Graham Swon on An Evening Song (for three voices)
Set in 1939 and told through the intertwining perspectives of characters enmeshed in a bizarre love triangle, writer-director Graham Swon’s sophomore feature An Evening Song (for three voices) is as visually robust as it is dramatically intimate. The story revolves around married couple Richard (Peter Vack) and Barbara (Hannah Gross)—a pulpy crime writer and a prodigious novelist, respectively—who move to a rural Midwestern town after years of city living. Shortly after arriving, they hire a local young woman named Martha (Deragh Campbell) who the couple find independently alluring despite (or perhaps largely due to) her striking innocence and pious nature. […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 15, 2024 -
“I Don’t Feel Comfortable Making Cinema That Gazes From Afar”: Tatiana Huezo on The Echo
Located within the Mexican municipality of Chignahuapan in the state of Puebla, the rural village of El Eco acts as a microcosm for various stages of life and the oft-small moments that herald them in filmmaker Tatiana Huezo’s documentary of the same name. The Salvadoran-Mexican filmmaker weaves together intimate scenes among three local families, exploring themes of gender, labor and generational shifts in attitude amid a sprawling and bucolic—yet unpredictably volatile—stretch of Mexico’s highlands. The Echo is Huezo’s fifth feature, marking her return to nonfiction storytelling after helming her 2021 debut narrative film Prayers for the Stolen. With this transition, […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 14, 2024
