A joint program between the American Film Festival in Wroclaw and the Champs Elysées Film Festival in Paris, U.S. in Progress is a twice-yearly showcase for American independents that should be on the radar of all indies seeking post financing and services. The events present American independent works in progress to groups of European buyers, with two films each year winning post service packages. It’s the only European event devoted exclusively to American independents. The Wroclaw edition is upcoming, October 23 – 25, and has an August 15 deadline for submissions. (And, there’s no submission fee.) The Paris edition recently […]
Is it possible to be blocked even after you successfully complete your film? If you asked me at the start of this series, “Letters from Blocked Filmmakers,” I would have answered no. You could be frustrated, disappointed or even angry, perhaps, but the realization of an artistic goal should have transmuted that feeling of blockage into something else… Or, at least, that was the rationale behind this column. With “Letters from Blocked Filmmakers,” I wanted to create a space on this site for those whose films aren’t getting made but whose voices are still very much worth hearing. I also […]
Apparently frustrated by Interscope’s tardiness in continuing the production of a documentary on M.I.A. he was directing, Steve Loveridge staged a guerrilla action this weekend by uploading a five-minute teaser to YouTube, embedding it on his Tumblr. “Reblog the shit out of this and maybe they’ll wake up,” he wrote. The action did not go over well. Interscope pulled down the clip, and a Roc Nation exec sent Loveridge one of those entertainment industry “I’m really pissed off but, hey, bro, s’all cool” emails, noting that the upload “screws with” the label’s marketing and PR efforts while assuring Loveridge that […]
Published in 2008, Alix Lambert’s Crime is one of the most fascinating books on the subject, bringing together in one gorgeously-produced volume interviews with various artists and dramatists who have chronicled crime as well as actual criminals themselves. But the book is just one element of Lambert’s practice surrounding this topic. Her Crime has taken the form of gallery shows, theater pieces and now, animated films. This week Lambert and animator Sam Chou will launch Crime: The Animated Series at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. From MoCA: MOCATV presents a screening of short animated episodes from our […]
Still the only lab focusing entirely on what happens after rough cut —- from locking picture to devising a distribution strategy — the IFP Narrative Lab concluded its ninth edition last month. When I created the Lab with the IFP almost a decade ago, the idea was simple. A successful career in film is partly based around making mistakes — and then not making those same mistakes again. But first-time filmmakers don’t have prior experience to draw upon, and in today’s hyper-competitive, content-swamped environment, failure is a luxury many of them can’t afford —— especially when that failure is made […]
English director Ben Wheatley’s [Kill List, Sightseers] latest project, A Field in England was shot in black and white and follows a group of deserters in the English Civil War. But this isn’t your standard historical period piece, being variously described by reviewers as a “monochrome-psychedelic breakdown” and a “17th-century head trip.” Shot in 12 days on a micro-budget, it was also, rather unusually, released on the same day to cinemas, on DVD and Blu-ray, and it also aired on Film4 (a free digital television channel). For those interested in the movie’s production, the filmmakers have created a very informative […]
It’s a golden era for “forgotten musical acts of the ’60s and ’70s” docs. While Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man took home the BAFTA and an Academy Award for Best Documentary earlier this year, following a wave of acclaim after its Sundance premiere, films like Jeff Howlett and Mark Christopher Covino’s A Band Called Death, Jay Bulger’s Beware of Mr. Baker and Morgan Neville’s Twenty Feet from Stardom have ridden the festival circuit praise to their own well-received releases in recent months. Next in line is Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori’s Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, an assured, rather handsome look at the […]
In the final part of our interview with brothers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen, they talk about the importance of music and audio, costume design, and how they found a distributor. After writing the script for The Ward, which was directed by John Carpenter, the brothers decided they really wanted to direct their next script themselves. They spent almost a year trying to raise money, but ultimately decided to shoot Dark Feed with a Canon 7D and the resources they had available. Dark Feed was successfully completed and sold to a distributor, and they are now working on their second low-budget feature, […]
This week Canon announced a new mid-level DSLR, the EOS 70D. The latest in their series of black, semi-pro DSLRs, the 70D has a 20.2 megapixel sensor, a DIGIC 5+ image processor and built-in wi-fi support. Expected to ship in September with an estimated retail price of $1,199, you’d be forgiven if you assumed this latest DSLR will have little impact on the video production field. You might be wrong. Canon remade the video industry with the 5D Mark II, but for the last two or three years their DSLR updates have offered virtually no improvement in video capability or […]
When you put over 20 independent filmmakers in a room behind closed doors, the kind of honesty and frankness about the industry that emerges is hard to find anywhere else. There’s also a lot of humor, albeit ranging from the cynical to the scatological. The words below are some of those tidbits I overheard during my week at the June IFP Narrative Lab that capture much of the essence of the week and are, I think, solid pieces of advice for filmmakers in post: “[Film distribution is] a new diaper to change every day. Your film keeps on pooping.” – […]