The Southern Documentary Fund has just announced ten projects that will receive $10,000 production grants, unrestricted funds supporting projects in varying stages of productions. Half the grants go with aspiring and emerging makers, while non-first-time filmmakers include Julie Dash, whose highly influential Daughters of the Dust was the first feature directed by an African American woman to receive general theatrical release in the U.S. Says Southern Documentary Fund Executive Director Kristy Garcia Breneman in a press release, “This year’s applicant pool was rich with Southern talent, telling a vast range of powerful stories from across our region – we were […]
I just completed my second feature film, This Is Not a War Story. It’s a narrative hybrid film, complete with combat veterans denouncing war and Tom Waits wailing on the end credits. The film went from a microbudget experiment in 2017 to a Warner Media/HBO release in 2021. The supporting cast is composed entirely of non-actor veterans. We shot for 41 spread-out days, (with no bone-crushing overtime) and with a crew of eight-to-12 dedicated crewmembers functioning as a collective, in the model of a worker co-op. Our schedule was designed around two-week shooting periods, strategically scheduled over a course of […]
Friday, March 13, 2020, two days after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Jamin O’Brien had a check in his hand. The producer was headed to christen a new venture, an adaptation of the nonfiction bestseller The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace to be directed by Chiwetel Ejiofor. “I was literally going to deliver the deposit check for our production offices, which were going to open Monday, when we were shut down,” says O’Brien. Now, a little more than a year later, O’Brien is preparing to navigate the world of post-COVID film production for the first […]
The seven-episode Ouverture of Something That Never Ended has garnered millions of views since it was posted on YouTube in November. Sponsored by Gucci, the series marks the latest collaboration between director Gus van Sant and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, HKSC, following the features Paranoid Park and Psycho. (Overture is co-directed by Van Sant and Gucci creative director Alessandro Michele,) Shot on location over a three-week period in the fall, the series was Doyle’s first chance to work under new Covid-19 protocols. Extensive testing and social distancing were among the steps taken during the production. With over 100 films to his […]
Duplicity in all its forms lurks just below the surface in Erin Vassilopoulos’s debut feature, Superior, which had its world premiere at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival last weekend. Expanded from a short she made in film school, Vassilopoulos’s feature concerns two fraternal twin sisters (Alessandra and Ani Mesa) unexpectedly reuniting after six years apart. The film opens in October of 1987, with Marian (Alessandra), a touring musician on the run from a secretive past, returning to her hometown to spend a few days with her sister, Vivian (Ani). The two sisters haven’t spoken in six years, spending the interim leading […]
In February of 1964, Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston at the Miami Beach Convention Hall to become the heavyweight champion of the world at the age of 22. He spent the night celebrating with Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke. Within two weeks of the fight, Clay announced his membership in the Nation of Islam and changed his name. Within a year, both Cooke and Malcolm X were shot dead. By the summer of 1966, Brown had retired from football at the age of 30. Based on the 2013 play by Kemp Powers, One Night in Miami offers a fictitious […]
Aean McMullin [pronounced Ay-In] spends his time traveling from helicopter pads in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, working with gang members in Compton and sitting in the cacophony of LA traffic (even during the pandemic) all the way from his one-bedroom apartment in Glendale to the seaside city of Long Beach—a whopping 30 + miles. A key location assistant manager from the small town of Godfrey, Illinois, McMullin received quite the culture shock upon his arrival five years ago to the city of Angels. “[My] impetus to get out of Godfrey was because there was nothing to do,” McMullin […]
What do you do when you’re a week away from finishing a documentary project about the world’s biggest and most renowned TV series and the world decides to end? It all began very normally about a year ago. AMC approached the company I work for, IKA Collective, with the concept of creating a docu-series focusing on real-world stories that mirror the fictional worlds of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. The show’s creators, Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould were enthusiastic about the idea, and before long I was on my way to Green Bank, West Virginia to document electromagnetic sensitivity; […]
Philippe Garrel is in recognisably a “late” stage of his career as a filmmaker. He has moved past the point of going for broke. His characters, avatars for any given idea he may be preoccupied with, border on the archetypal. The settings are stripped down, reduced to their essence. His concerns, by this stage, are variations on a few basic themes. He is a commanding narrative presence, the authorial space in which he is most free to assert himself idiosyncratically. With all this in mind, viewers’ mileage may vary. Those of us who take pleasure in the relaxed vibes of […]
Four of the best performances I’ve seen so far this year are all in the same movie, Yuval Adler’s riveting thriller The Secrets We Keep. Noomi Rapace, who also co-produced the film, plays Maja, a Romanian immigrant in post-World War II America who lives a quiet life with her physician husband Lewis (Chris Messina). Their placid existence is upended when Maja becomes convinced that her neighbor Thomas (Joel Kinnaman) is a Nazi who tortured her years before during the war. When Maja kidnaps Thomas and locks him in her basement, the film becomes a morally thorny and extremely suspenseful thriller […]