6576 Results for “production”
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Cecilia Aldarondo
“In 2008, my mother found a box of decaying 8mm home movies and several hundred slides in the garage, and she called me in Minnesota and said, ‘Do you want this stuff?’” So began Cecilia Aldarondo’s first feature Memories of a Penitent Heart, currently in postproduction and on track for a festival launch next year. The home movies and slides shed light on Aldarondo’s uncle Miguel, who died in 1987 of AIDS. His status in a Puerto Rican family intolerant of homosexuality was always a shadowy matter, and Aldarondo — who had vague memories of attending his funeral as a […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2015 -
Load and Play: Killers, Wage Slaves and Varda in the Sun
Agnès Varda in California Several directors of or related to the French New Wave flirted with Hollywood, from those who actually completed studio pictures (François Truffaut, Jacques Demy) to those whose efforts crashed and burned (most famously Jean-Luc Godard, whose proposed gangster picture with Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton remains one of the most tantalizing unmade films of all time). None of them managed to turn their detours in Los Angeles into as singular a cycle of films as Agnès Varda, whose two periods in the city (in the late ’60s and early ’80s) yielded five highly personal works […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 23, 2015 -
Learning from Experience
Digital cameras have made it possible for more first-time documentary directors than ever to realize their visions, but there aren’t yet enough experienced producers ready to help those directors translate their talents into viable careers. “If you’re a director with an ambitious vision, you’re going to need help,” producer Amanda Branson Gill says. “In the narrative world, there are huge, built-in teams of people to support you. In documentary, we have this idea of the lone wolf. But you’re going to need a good partner, someone with whom you share the burden and who makes it possible.” A creative producer […]
by Chris Boeckmann on Jul 23, 2015 -
Streaming for Dollars
Since the advent of YouTube and Vimeo, filmmakers have rolled the dice, releasing their shorts online for free in the hopes that their work will court the right set of eyeballs. Nowadays, even at banner institutions like The New York Times and The New Yorker, more and more curated short-form distribution opportunities are cropping up online that hint toward visibility and prestige for the films, along with, sometimes, financial returns for the filmmakers. Last December, The New Yorker introduced “The Screening Room,” a streaming platform where they rolled out three shorts acquired at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival: Person to […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jul 23, 2015 -
Picture Lock
As the pioneering Wexner Center for the Arts celebrates the 25th anniversary of its Film/Video Studio Program, we invited curator Jennifer Lange to pen this guest essay on the program’s history and upcoming retrospective. When Spalding Gray called the Wexner Center for the Arts “the spaceship that crash-landed on the prairies,” he was referring to the building itself, an icon of deconstructivist architecture designed by Peter Eisenman. As radical and unconventional as the building may have seemed at the time, the plans for what would take place inside its labyrinthine walls make Grey’s characterization all the more fitting, even prescient. […]
by Jennifer Lange on Jul 23, 2015 -
Dispatches from Cannes and the Los Angeles Film Festival
Cannes by Aaron Hillis The same way New Yorkers love to bitch about living in what they also proclaim to be the world’s greatest city, the Cannes-accredited can spend nearly two weeks in the south of France watching nothing but prestigiously vetted films and have the nerve to call it a “so-so year.” But if that was a too-common sigh, it’s partly because the festival’s main competition had few unanimous hits, which is neither unusual nor taking stock of the parallel pleasures within the Un Certain Regard, Directors’ Fortnight and Critics’ Week sections, or out-of-competition premieres of innovative multiplex fare […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 23, 2015 -
Going Mobile: The Alpha1 Mobile Film Lab
In 1932, the Russian filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin convinced Soviet authorities to give him three decommissioned train carriages to turn into a mobile film studio. The “film-train” would travel across the USSR’s expanse, bringing with it 32 spots to sleep, six editing tables, a projection room and a film-processing lab. Equipped to handle all aspects of production and projection from beginning to end, the film train would record local issues and expose problems that the people would need to solve: in Medvedkin’s words, the portable facility would act as “a kind of special fire brigade to put out problem fires.” These […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 23, 2015 -
Corrective Lens
While promoting The Act Of Killing — his punchy, audacious, madly performative, deeply troubling masterpiece about the legacy of genocide in Indonesia 50 years later — Joshua Oppenheimer didn’t much let on that there was a second, complementary feature in the works. While editing the first film, and before his secondary subjects in the government and paramilitaries knew what a bold, damning document he had fashioned, Oppenheimer shot a round of elegant, formally restrained interviews with his earlier subjects through the offices of his collaborator, Adi Rukun, an optometrist whose older brother had been murdered. Among a range of substantial […]
by Ray Pride on Jul 23, 2015 -
Shifting the Gaze
Patricia White, a scholar of feminist film and professor in the Film and Media Studies program at Swarthmore College, recently published a book titled Women’s Cinema, World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (Duke University Press, 2015). The book explores the work of women directors globally, arguing that not only are many of these directors shaping a 21st-century arthouse aesthetic, but also that they are transforming film politics and projecting “a transnational feminist social vision.” The book invites us to rethink both women’s cinema and world cinema and uses the notion of projection as a “vision of futurity.” Writing in the introduction, […]
by Holly Willis on Jul 23, 2015 -
IFP Announces Selections for Project Forum at Independent Film Week 2015
The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) announced today the full slate of 140 projects selected for its esteemed Project Forum at the upcoming IFP Independent Film Week, running September 20-25, 2015 at Lincoln Center in New York City. Under the curatorial leadership of Deputy Director/Head of Programming Amy Dotson and Senior Director of Programming Milton Tabbot, IFP Project Forum is a meetings-driven forum connecting filmmakers who have new narrative and documentary projects in development, production, or post-production with key industry executives interested in identifying projects with which to become involved at the development, financing, or distribution stages. A primary outcome for […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 22, 2015
