At a recent filmmaking panel hosted by the Massachusetts Production Coalition, filmmaker Chico Colvard offered the following advice to those getting started in moviemaking: read the credits first. The credits of other movies. “I’m fascinated by end credits,” said Colvard. “They’re so revealing. They’re fascinating in that filmmakers use them to continue the story….there’s so much more information there.” The credits can provide you with not just a list of potential cast and crew members. They can also give you the names of accountants and lawyers. More importantly, they can give you the names of possible investors. Other filmmakers might […]
Capturing the subtle ache of youth on screen has never been an easy task – as evidenced by the long tradition of idiosyncratic, auteur-driven “coming of age” features like American Graffiti, The Last Picture Show, and Dazed and Confused. So it’s quite an impressive feat that those same emotions and aesthetics are so naturally evoked in the real-life stories of three adrift youth in the new documentary Only the Young. Following the quiet travails of evangelical skate punk best friends Garrison, Kevin and Skye, this debut feature from filmmaking team Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims is one of the year’s […]
Following on from the Bay Area Boom article about the San Francisco Film Society’s Filmmaker360 program, we are profiling the 13 finalists for the SFFS’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking grant. The winners of this award will be announced on December 8. SUSAN YOUSSEF AND MAN KIT LAM, MARJOUN AND THE FLYING HEADSCARF Synopsis: With her father imprisoned on dubious terrorism related charges, a Lebanese-American teenager in Arkansas searches for identity in the headscarf and a motorcycle. This feature is an extension of the short by the same name that screened at the Sundance Film Festival. Marjoun and the Flying Headscarf is the first […]
Directly following a week of Sundance announcements, the Slamdance Film Festival, which takes place in Park City between January 18 to 24, has revealed its competition lineup. The narrative competition features films from five different countries — including, interestingly, three from Germany — and the film that I will definitely try to catch from that strand is Nadia Szold’s Joy de V., which stars both Evan Louison (the lead in Filmmaker contributor Brandon Harris’ feature debut Redlegs) and the legendary Claudia Cardinale. In the doc section, Where I Am (whose logline reads, “The courageous story of Gay American writer Robert Drake and his […]
The following Q&A is an excerpt from a conversation between filmmaker John Henry Summerour and John DeVore, a writer for The Pulse, Chattanooga’s weekly alternative. (DeVore’s Pulse feature on Summerour can be found here.) Summerour discusses the importance of his personal relationship with the South in making his newest film Sahkanaga (“Great Blue Hills of God” in Cherokee), which is inspired by the Tri-State Crematory scandal. In 2002, it was discovered that over 300 bodies that had been committed to the crematory in Georgia for proper disposal were never cremated and instead buried or left in a shed and the […]
Fifteen years after winning the 1995 Sundance Grand Jury Prize for The Brothers McMullen, Edward Burns proves with The Fitzgerald Family Christmas that you can always return home. In his newest feature film, the Long Island native revisits the joys and trials of an Irish-American working-class family — fertile ground that helped him to stand out as a director and writer of independent film all those years ago. At first, Burns was hesitant to dip again into the well, but The Fitzgerald Family Christmas stands on its own. Two generations of actors with ties to Burns over his 15 years in film reunite […]
Filmmaker Greg Pak (Robot Stories) has released his graphic novel Vision Machine as an iPad app and, in the process, is pointing the way towards new storytelling formats and new production and distribution partnerships. Set in the year 2061, Vision Machine is a dystopian thriller revolving around augmented reality technology not unlike Google Glass. Touching on issues like privacy and digital rights, Vision Machine was funded by the Ford Foundation as an awareness tool, and after it was completed Pak teamed up with ITVS to reimagine it as an iPad app. After learning about Vision Machine from producer Karin Chien, […]
The Academy Awards are still a long way off, but the recent Gotham Awards, the Spirit Award nominations, today’s New York Film Critics Circle Awards and now the Oscar doc longlist mean that awards season is truly kicking into gear. The 15 docs still in Academy Award contention are: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Never Sorry LLC Bully, The Bully Project LLC Chasing Ice, Exposure Detropia, Loki Films Ethel, Moxie Firecracker Films 5 Broken Cameras, Guy DVD Films The Gatekeepers, Les Films du Poisson, Dror Moreh Productions, Cinephil The House I Live In, Charlotte Street Films, LLC How to Survive a […]
Concluding its latest edition on yet another rainy late fall afternoon in Bydgoszcz, Plus Camerimage awarded its top prize, the Golden Frog, to War Witch, the celebrated story of a sub-Saharan female child-soldier. The film, also a prize winner at Berlin and Tribeca, beat out a list of fest circuit heavyweights such as The Master, Cloud Atlas, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Argo, Laurence Always, Hyde Park on Hudson and Holy Motors, which won the runner up Silver Frog from Joel Schumacher’s main competition jury. Fifteen prizes were handed out at the closing ceremony at Bydgoszcz’s Opera Nova, a 56-year-old modernist opera house which […]
The credits roll, there is applause, and not too many people walked out. The festival premiere of your debut film is over. You relax, a year’s worth of stress magically departing your body. Sure, there will be tough times ahead; distribution is difficult. But, for the moment, you congratulate yourself on a job well done. But don’t relax too much, warn a trio of festival heads. Your next big job as a director looms sooner than you think. The audience Q&A you’ll lead in just a minute or two is surprisingly important when it comes to your film’s future life. […]