6562 Results for “production”
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Rodrigo Reyes
Growing up in Mexico City, Rodrigo Reyes was, in his words, “solidly middle-class.” When he was six, his family moved to the small California town of Merced, and for the first time, he considered his own identity as a Mexican. When the family returned to Mexico, Reyes realized that (as he explained in an email), “There was a part of me that was solidly American and did not fit in back home either.” His films — including 2011’s experimental Memories of the Future and Purgatorio, a Journey Into the Heart of the Border, his latest documentary — are centered around […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 15, 2013 -
Chloé Zhao
Chloé Zhao was born in Beijing, attended high school in London and studied political science at Massachusetts’ Mount Holyoke College. So, at first blush it seems anomalous that her debut feature, Songs My Brothers Taught Me, currently readying for a fall shoot, tells a Native American story set on the Lakota Pine Ridge reservation in North Dakota. But, says Zhao, the story’s themes are ones with personal resonance. She admits, “I get asked a lot, ‘Why are you doing this?’” Zhao says that her rebellious adolescence in China, which led to her wanting to study abroad, is what connected her […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 15, 2013 -
Michael Tyburski & Ben Nabors
Five years in the making, William and the Windmill, winner of the 2013 SXSW Grand Jury Documentary prize, is the first feature completed by the production team of Michael Tyburski and Ben Nabors. On this film, Nabors is the director and Tyburski the cinematographer, but their partnership extends past fixed production roles or types of work. Half of their week goes to commercial work, they estimate, while the other half is committed to a wide variety of personal projects. “We don’t respond well to the idea that people say, ‘I do this to pay the bills,’ because we care very […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 15, 2013 -
Jason Osder
Jason Osder didn’t initially set out to be a filmmaker. A philosophy and sociology major during undergrad at New College of Florida, he entered the University of Florida’s graduate documentary program on a lark. “I didn’t do it out of a love of documentary, I did it out of a desire for knowledge,” Osder said on the phone from his home in Washington D.C. recently, where he is an assistant professor in George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs. “But once I got there and started my studies, I really got more passionate about documentary, what it means […]
by Dante Pilkington on Jul 15, 2013 -
Mohammad Gorjestani
Born in Tehran, Mohammad Gorjestani moved to the states in 1988 when he was four and attended Cupertino High School in California. “Apple was right across the street,” he says, “but I grew up in a poor neighborhood. We barely got by.” Now, Gorjestani runs his own Bay Area commercial production house, MKSHFT, and in January he debuted a 30-minute short, Refuge, for ITVS’ Futurestates series. In the spring he launched an app for Esquire magazine through a software start-up he co-founded, Volio. And next year, he hopes, there will be his first feature, Somehow These Days Will Be Missed, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 15, 2013 -
Lyric R. Cabral & David Felix Sutcliffe
“As audiences watch (T)ERROR,” writes Lyric R. Cabral in an email, “I want them to think, ‘How can filmmakers be showing us this?’” Based on the work sample we saw, mission accomplished. The documentary Cabral is directing with David Felix Sutcliffe about an active FBI counterterrorism sting operation crackles with a you-are-there immediacy even as its twists feel like the work of a master fiction storyteller. (T)ERROR’s tale is of an FBI target and the government informant he realizes is setting him up, and Cabral and Sutcliffe’s access to their subjects is simply jaw dropping, as is their ability to […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 15, 2013 -
Lauren Wolkstein
Lauren Wolkstein has been on Filmmaker’s radar for a little while. In 2010, her Columbia University graduate film program thesis project, Cigarette Candy, picked up the Best Short Award at SXSW. The following year came another short, The Strange Ones, which she co-directed with fellow Columbia grad Christopher Radcliff. It’s a brilliantly unsettling drama about two travelers, a man and a boy, who create fear at a roadside motel. Cigarette Candy drew from stories she heard from her dad, an Air Force colonel who served in the Gulf War, but The Strange Ones was a more spontaneous collaboration. Wolkstein was […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 15, 2013 -
Jeremy Teicher
Young feature filmmakers tend to make early works that are enmeshed in veiled autobiography and personally revelatory, if not broadly appealing, psychodrama all too easily (see the broad majority of film cycle formerly known as mumblecore films). Not so for Jeremy Teicher. His first feature, Tall as the Baobab Tree, couldn’t be more of a departure from the type of first film that one might expect from a New York City-born, New Jersey-bred, Ivy League-educated 25-year-old. The narrative follow-up to This is Us, a Student Academy Award-nominated doc short Teicher began while still an undergrad at Dartmouth, the film is […]
by Dante Pilkington on Jul 15, 2013 -
Nandan Rao
With his fingerprints on more than a few notable American festival circuit darlings in the last few years, and a distinct visual style that he brings to each project, no matter how disparate, you’d think Nandan Rao would be using his burgeoning reputation as an ace microbudget lenser to get work on bigger and fancier films by other filmmakers. Fact is, he couldn’t care less. Rao, 26, who first came to attention for photographing Sophia Takal’s breakthrough 2011 feature Green, claims that after shooting his close collaborator Zach Weintraub’s debut Bummer Summer while both were still students at New York […]
by Dante Pilkington on Jul 15, 2013 -
Iva Radivojevic
“I want to tell stories in a different way,” says New York-based Iva Radivojevic. That different way is hinted at by the title of her website, Iva Asks. Indeed, the question, not the answer, is at the root of Radivojevic’s searching, beautifully allusive filmography, which includes dozens of short essay videos, provocative film writing and, now in post-production, her first feature documentary. As the website explains, Iva Asks has three goals: “1) Traveling, discovering and getting lost; 2) Filming, documenting and assembling stories; 3) Talking to strangers and peeking into their lives.” Iva Asks began as a way for Radivojevic, […]
by Dante Pilkington on Jul 15, 2013
