6576 Results for “production”
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Meet Me in Montenegro at the Munich Film Festival
Meet Me in Montenegro is a romantic comedy about two lovers, a Norwegian dancer and an American filmmaker, who meet by chance during a visit to Berlin. The film is based on the real-life romance between co-writers, producers, and editors Linnea Saasen and Alex Holdridge, who both also star in the film as the fictional portrayals of their real-life characters. On the eve of the German premiere in Munich, I sat down with Saasen, her co-producer Ineke Hagedorn, and co-actress Jenny Ulrich. The Orchard has recently released the film in the U.S. and Canada, and it’s also available on digital […]
by Taylor Hess on Jul 27, 2015 -
Nick Berardini + Jamie Gonçalves
Nick Berardini’s Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle — which launched its festival life at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival — is a lucidly outraged investigation into the safety of the allegedly nonlethal TASER stun gun, whose potentially fatal effects have repeatedly come under investigation. University of Missouri broadcast journalism major Berardini first learned about the issue in 2009, while working the night shift at Columbia, Missouri’s NBC affiliate. Hearing over the police scanner that Stanley Harlan had been tased by an officer and died in nearby Mobley (followed by statements from his parents contradicting the police narrative), he drove […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2015 -
Andrew Hasse + Megan Brooks
Describing the dynamic in the editing room of Ben Dickinson’s stunning tech-scene social satire, Creative Control, editor Andrew Hasse says, “Ben and I know each other so well and have this common language and film-school training, and Megan brings an intuitive, no-nonsense, outsider’s perspective. Sometimes Ben and I would work on a cut and say, ‘We got it.’ Then Megan would watch it and say, ‘Really?’ She kept us honest, and we knew it wasn’t right until we all agreed.” “Megan” is Hasse’s editing partner, Megan Brooks, and this year the cutting team has credits on two striking independent films […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2015 -
Tayarisha Poe
“I like stories about people who do something that everyone agrees is wrong but no one thinks they are wrong in doing it,” says Philadelphia-based writer, director and photographer Tayarisha Poe. “And because I like these stories, I’m watching stories about men, and usually white men, because they’re the ones who can get away with it. But that’s not me and my experience.” Poe’s charismatic and complex anti-heroine, Selah, is an African-American teen who gets away with it. The subject of not just Poe’s forthcoming debut feature, Selah, and the Spades, but also of an innovative online story told through […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2015 -
Anna Rose Holmer
When pitching her first feature, The Fits, in Venice last October at the Biennale College Cinema, producer-turned-director Anna Rose Holmer twitched. Describing a pivotal moment in the script — when the first of a group of high school teenage dancers experiences, while dancing, a sudden epileptic fit — Holmer allowed her right shoulder to jerk sharply backward, swaying for a moment on one foot before grounding herself on stage and continuing to describe her story. It was a blink-and-you-missed-it moment. And if, for a second, some in her audience — Venice Film Festival Director Alberto Barbera and a group of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2015 -
Reinaldo Marcus Green
Whether set in poverty-stricken Cape Town or Red Hook’s police-surveyed streets, Reinaldo Marcus Green’s short films about teenage youths experiencing accelerated trips into adulthood are at once specific and universal. A former student athlete with Major League Baseball aspirations (two professional tryouts didn’t pan out), Green taught students in inner city schools before working for five years as a director of talent acquisitions in diversity on Wall Street. “I had been given this golden opportunity to make double what I was making as a teacher, while still being within the education field,” Green says. “It was a financial decision for […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2015 -
Ian Samuels
“I moved to L.A. a few years ago,” recalls filmmaker and animator Ian Samuels, “and it was a transition. Being in your twenties, navigating your social life, career, relationships — I made a lot of mistakes. And I wound up giving that baggage to Myrna.” Hovering just around 3 feet, Myrna — the star of Samuels’s breakthrough short, Myrna the Monster — is a melancholy, squeaky-voiced (by Kathleen Hanna) creature who just happens to share the same social anxieties as any normal-size humanoid struggling to make a connection in the big city. Whether carting her clothes to the Laundromat, chilling […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2015 -
Ted Fendt
At New York University, which he attended for film production, Haddonfield, N.J., native Ted Fendt learned French (a skill that has helped partially finance his films) and met his d.p. Sage Einarsen and sound man Sean Dunn. With this regular micro-crew, Fendt has graduated from two student films he describes as “not very good but with a few interesting gags” to three increasingly strong, idiosyncratic shorts that develop a drolly anomalous voice. Broken Specs, Travel Plans and Going Out (the latter premiered at this year’s New Directors/New Films) were all shot on 16mm in Haddonfield, with Fendt’s non-actor 20-something friends, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2015 -
Viktor Jakovleski
Since 1989, the Mexico City suburb of Tultepec has celebrated the region’s centuries-old fireworks proficiency with an annual nine-day event. The mildly alarming English-language label “National Pyrotechnic Festival” only begins to suggest the palpably dangerous footage captured by Viktor Jakovleski in ¡Brimstone and Glory!, which will be the Court 13 collective’s first official feature following Beasts of the Southern Wild. Vivid mayhem — crowds running recklessly through on-the-ground detonations, huge papier-mache-and-wire bulls festooned with fireworks, a GoPro strapped to the head of someone clambering up and down an alarmingly huge “castillo” (castle) to strew it with fireworks — alternates with […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2015 -
Anthony Onah
“The basic impulses that drew me to science are the same ones that animate me as a storyteller. I’m deeply curious about who we are as people and how we work, where we came from and where we’re headed.” That’s Nigerian-American filmmaker Anthony Onah discussing the path that led him from studying biochemistry and neuroscience at Harvard to filmmaking. Accepted for graduate study at Cambridge in genetics, he wound up redirecting to UCLA’s film school and beginning a career in independent film. In the years since, the young filmmaker has received support — as indicated from the dizzying mosaic of […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2015
