The Cinema Eye Honors is always one of the most enjoyable and lively awards shows of the year, and arguably the most intimate; at no other awards show is there such a sense of an entire community coming together. This year, the short film that prefaced the awards — which was compromised of pictures of all the nominees — ended with the words, “We are Cinema Eye. We are on each other’s team.” And that sense of unity and people pulling together was underlined in the opening words of AJ Schnack, who called on the filmmakers present to stand together […]
Fandor, the online streaming service, announced today that indie stalwart Ted Hope would make the transition from board advisor to CEO come January 30th. The appointment follows Hope’s resignation from his role as Executive Director of the San Francisco Film Society last October. In December, Hope penned a highly trafficked post on his blog about how he could no longer produce films for a living. The financial imperatives driving the current film production business, he said, would force him to choose quantity over quality. Those who were left wondering what his new day job would be now have their answer. […]
In an independent landscape of shaky, handheld cinematography, loose improvisation and bare-bones sets, the precise and punchy dark comedies of Zach Clark stand out. Recalling the days in which low budgets meant inventive art direction, heightened emotions and a rebellion against a default naturalism, Clark’s third movie, White Reindeer modulates the director’s deadpan, quasi-Sirkian camp into something more delicately bittersweet. Anna Margaret Hollyman plays a suburban real estate agent who returns home one holiday season to find her husband murdered. Learning he had a mistress, an African-American stripper, she journeys into a world where kinky fantasy is really just another […]
Today it’s fairly easy to order films with Jewish subject matter from Eastern European countries — but think back 22 years. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a number of so-called Jewish films began production in the former Soviet Union and its satellites. In 1990 the huge San Francisco Jewish Film Festival successfully tested the waters of glasnost by holding the event in Moscow. As a result Wanda Bershen, then director of the broadcast archive at New York’s Jewish Museum, approached Richard Pena, who was at that time program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. […]
Launching a film festival is no easy feat, and it’s even harder when you’re doing it in an area with little film industry infrastructure, plenty of political and social instability and a global reputation as a haven for Islamic extremists. But those odds against a strong festival in the southeastern Pakistani province of Sindh, which includes Karachi, actually make it all the more urgent for its organizers to create a successful event. Assad Zulfiqar Khan, an independent filmmaker who studied at the London Film School in the U.K., is among those spearheading the festival, and he spoke with me about […]
Originally discovered by E.V. Grieve and reposted by Gothamist, this short video of Iggy Pop touring the East Village in 1993 contains an interesting nugget of script development wisdom. I was watching the video this morning purely nostalgically — checking out my neighborhood 20 years ago — when I came across, at around the 10-minute mark, a short bit about the shooting of Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes. Pop says his segment with Tom Waits — a one-day, 16-hour shoot — was his best shooting experience ever. When the interviewer asks if the shoot was improvised, Pop says there was […]
The cover story of our 2013 Fall issue, All is Lost proved a herculean exercise in filmmaking. Nearly dialogue free, J.C. Chandor’s sophomore feature plots its arc from the timeless motif of man versus nature, miraculously abstaining from repetition. Chandor exhibits a clear confidence in silence, allowing the surroundings and sun-stained face of Mr. Robert Redford to propel the story forward. Despite its effortless looks, making the movie was surely no cakewalk. In this behind the scenes video from HitFix, key players including underwater d.p. Peter Zuccarini, production designer John P. Goldsmith and editor Pete Beaudreau discuss their experiences in realizing […]
Along with Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time, a book — an essay comprised of diary excerpts, actually — I recommend to all aspiring directors is Richard Stanley’s “I Wake Up Screaming.” It originally appeared in the 1994 third edition of the film anthology Projections, and it’s now published (with permission, the site claims) at the director’s unofficial website, Between Death and the Devil. “I Wake Up Screaming” documents Stanley’s attempt to make an ambitious Namibia-shot art horror-thriller called Dust Devil years after an earlier production fell apart. The movie Stanley went on to make instead, […]
It is perhaps indicative of how low-key this year was that when I first scribbled out a list of things that were “big” in 2013 I discovered that half of them were on last year’s list! In many respects 2013 proved to be a year of tentative advances and waiting, rather than one of incredible new tools to play with. Which is not to say that some interesting products weren’t announced and delivered. Sony shipped the F5 & F55, as well as the 4K upgrade for the NEX-FS700, and at the other end of the spectrum Blackmagic shipped its $1,000 […]
This list of 2013 top posts is broken in two — the first contains the top ten posts here at Filmmaker published during this calendar year. The second are the top ten older posts, the ones that keep on bubbling to the top of our Google Analytics. (A true 2013 top ten would be a mixture of these two lists.) So, to close out the year, here is what you read most at our site. 10. 13 Steps to Directing Famous Actors on a Microbudget Film. Director and Slamdance co-founder Dan Mirvish has two articles on this year’s list. In […]