6575 Results for “production”
-
Ana Lily Amirpour
“Making a film is like putting on a perfume — you see who it attracts,” says Los Angeles-based writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour, whose “Iranian vampire spaghetti western” A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night has been amassing passionate devotees since its premiere at Sundance this year. “I make films to make friends,” Amirpour continues. “It’s just me, lonely, trying to figure out how to be a human being. When making a film, something in your brain caves: you invite people in and those people are part of it for a while. And then you’re done, it’s over, and you have […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 17, 2014 -
Maine Course
Ready for a big change, back in 1997, I packed up my L.A. apartment, loaded the cat into a pet carrier and hopped on a flight to the East Coast. It was May, and I was joining the team at the Maine Photographic Workshops for the summer to help edit a new publication devoted to toy camera photography. The Workshops were a major advocate of the Diana and the Holga, cheap plastic cameras used by amateurs and pros alike to create unpredictable, often stunning, black-and-white photos. In the tiny plane between Boston and Portland, I tried to ignore my BlackBerry’s […]
by Holly Willis on Jul 17, 2014 -
Irregular Beats: Roberto Minervini on Stop the Pounding Heart
The third film in Roberto Minervini’s “Texas trilogy,” Stop the Pounding Heart, is his first to get American distribution. His debut feature, 2011’s The Passage, followed a terminally ill woman driving through the state in search of a faith healer, while the following year’s Low Tide focused on a mother and her solitary son in small-town Texas. The three films are realized by Minervini in collaboration with his cast, non-actors whose characters and story lines are drawn from their own life experiences. Sara Carlson was a supporting player in The Passage, while Colby Trichell had a bull riding scene in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 17, 2014 -
Separate Bedrooms
In conversation below with fellow writer/director Todd Solondz, Ira Sachs calls his latest work,Love is Strange, “a middle-aged film” — not because it’s focused on midlife issues, but because “it has perspective on both what youth felt like as well as what aging can lead to.” That’s a beautiful formulation by Sachs on this warm and generous New York movie that charms by unexpectedly opening its perspective across both neighborhoods and generations. Love is Strange opens with a flurry of activity as two older gay men — a music teacher (Alfred Molina) and painter (John Lithgow) — take advantage of […]
by Todd Solondz on Jul 17, 2014 -
Memories of Underdevelopment
With a few exceptions, independent movies are rarely developed like studio-produced ones. Certainly for ultra-low and micro-budget independents, the process is much less formal and far less cash-infused. Multiple paid rewrites until a script shines; thinking through all the creative and logistical problems with top-line producers before firing up the camera; packaging the right combination of talent and money that works best for the material at hand — studios and larger production companies have salaried executives responsible for this undeniably crucial work. But in the independent world, when overtaxed producers perform these tasks, it can be unreliable in its timeline […]
by Kishori Rajan on Jul 17, 2014 -
Charlotte Glynn
Straddling the doc and narrative factions of American independent cinema is difficult, but Charlotte Glynn does it with ease. A Pittsburgh native invested in representing her hometown on screen, Glynn has made a pair of festival-traveling pictures in the Steel City showcasing a dexterous and unusual filmmaking sensibility. “I want to tell the stories of people who generally don’t have stories told about them,” Glynn says. “Disabled people, boys who are not typically masculine, working class women; that’s what I do.” Her feature doc Rachel Is, about the difficulty of placing her developmentally disabled younger sister in an appropriate assisted […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jul 17, 2014 -
Tall Enough and The Short Films of Barry Jenkins
In an article by Esther Robinson in our upcoming Summer issue, Barry Jenkins speaks to the delicate work-work balance incurred by many a filmmaker — that is to say, what he does to financially support his filmmaking career, and how that job tends to detract from passion projects. Jenkins is fortunate enough that his particular day job, as ringleader of the production company Strike Anywhere, allows him to regularly create content, even if of the branded and not feature-length variety. Over at Fandor, resident video essayist Kevin Lee takes a look at Strike Anywhere’s catalogue, and the work Jenkins has produced in the six […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Jul 16, 2014 -
Nine Lessons for Self-Distributing Filmmakers with No Money and No Experience
This article by Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez about the distribution of their Detroit firefighter documentary Burn originally appeared in our Fall, 2013 print edition. It is appearing online for the first time. “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” — Mark Twain As filmgoers are increasingly flooded with new media options to keep them at home, the prevailing theory is that the days of theatrical releases for independent films are in their last slow throes. We disagree because we just spent the last year filling 300- to 2,000-seat theaters in 170 cities with our firefighter documentary Burn. We […]
by Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez on Jul 15, 2014 -
Latinbeat: Five Vettings and a Funeral
Once again, this festival of both rarefied and salt-of-the-earth films from all over Latin America graces the Big Apple at the Walter Reade Theater, once again with a delicious menu that does the Film Society of Lincoln Center proud. I’ve been drawn to Latinbeat since now-retired FSLC Program Director Richard Peña established it in 1997. It has consistently displayed not only fine titles but also a less apparent connective tissue that has been expertly if unconsciously simulated, one affording us more than single plotlines, and which provokes a pleasurably heady and arty stretch. Now in its 15th edition, the films […]
by Howard Feinstein on Jul 11, 2014 -
“Everything Seems to be Licorice”: Land Ho!’s Martha Stephens and Aaron Katz on Shooting in Iceland
Land Ho!, co-written and co-directed by Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens, is an odd-couple two-hander like Katz’s previous Cold Weather and Quiet City, and a progressively rural odyssey like Stephens’ Pilgrim Song, accented by the hues of regional color familiar from both directors’ palettes. But given the film’s Icelandic setting, perhaps another frame of reference is also called for. In interviews, the filmmakers frequently discuss the remoteness of the Icelandic landscape, its incongruity with the day-to-day lives of their characters, and, above all, its mysterious and “otherworldly” beauty. In Iceland, where I currently live, this view is not necessarily reflective […]
by Mark Asch on Jul 10, 2014
