Jon Taplin is in India, where he attended the Big Bollywood Conference and thought about filmmakers, their content and the country’s class and religious divisions: Mumbai is a big confident city with some of the wealthiest men in India building houses that would have embarrassed the Maharajas for their opulence. I heard that there are more than 100 members of Parliament worth over $1 billion. This may of course be an urban myth,but the perception that the powerful live in a different world seems well founded. Of course this is no different than the U.S., but what does stand out […]
Sharing a booth at the SXSW trade show were the teams behind the forthcoming Digital Bolex RAW-file camera and Beyond the Bolex, a new documentary film by Alyssa Bolsey, whose great grandfather invented the celebrated and influential camera. I stopped by the booth on the last day of the conference, and spoke very briefly to one of its inventors, Joe Rubinstein, above. In my video, Rubinstein says he expects the release of the camera soon. Red Shark News has reproduced a post from the Digital Bolex forum by member James M, who also stopped by the booth and provides more […]
Microbudget film doesn’t venture into the expensive world of science fiction too often, and certainly not the brand that features hordes of orcs and other fantasy creatures. But that’s exactly where Emmy-winning director Kohl Glass, whose short film Der Ostwind played at Sundance in 2007, wanted to go with his debut feature, Orc Wars. The film, which has wrapped and is currently gathering its finishing funds on Kickstarter, features ex-Marine John Norton (Rusty Joiner) who buys an isolated western ranch that turns out to contain a portal to another world; when orcs use it to threaten an elf princess (Masiela Lusha) […]
In the follow-up to his widely acclaimed 2008 international breakthrough Gomorrah, 44- year-old Italian auteur Matteo Garrone tells the partially comic, mostly tragic story of Luciano (Aniello Arena), a Neapolitan fishmonger whose simple life and aspirations are turned upside down when the possibility of instant fame and fortune as a contestant on the Italian iteration of Big Brother goes from mere dream to tangible reality. As his increasingly delusional family cheer him on, he chases the stardom that his friend and former roommate Enzo (Raffaele Ferrante) has already won, but with less than stellar results. As things go from bad to worse […]
Louise Rosen is a media executive with more than a quarter-century of experience. She formed Louise Rosen Ltd. in 1996 “to specialize in setting up international television pre-sales and co-productions on behalf of independent documentary and non-fiction producers.” She has done everything from research and budgeting to distribution and management. Among her credits are Oscar, Emmy, Sundance, Prix Italia, and International Emmy award-winning projects. Suffice to say, she knows a thing or two about documentaries and getting your film made. Luckily for filmmakers without Rosen’s breadth of experience (or those who do, but can still learn a thing or two), […]
Last week, Filmmaker and the MIT Open Documentary Lab kicked off their collaborative series of interviews with digital storytellers with a conversation with Zeega. (For an introduction to this entire series, read “Should Filmmakers Learn to Code,” by MIT Open Documentary Lab’s Sarah Wolozin.) In the second part in this series, Elaine McMillion talks about her work, mainly focusing on her interactive documentary Hollow, a “hybrid community participatory project and interactive documentary” that uses HTML5 to depict a West Virginia community via video, photography, soundscapes and interactive data. From her website, McMillion describes herself thusly: Elaine McMillion is a documentary storyteller […]
“There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” -Bruce Lee If you are pursuing something as ambitious as acting or filmmaking, you know that one of the most valuable assets you have is your time. I work full-time as a doctor, and if you work full-time like I do and you want to make it big in the film industry, you’ve got to learn how to make sacrifices and budget your time. For instance, I performed surgery this morning, did an interview at noon, and edited some scenes of […]
Livia Manera and William Karel don’t take many stylistic chances in their new documentary. But why would they? Granted extraordinary access to Philip Roth, one of the world’s greatest living writers and a man who’s never granted an abundance of interviews, the directors simply sat their subject in front of a camera and let him talk. Philip Roth: Unmasked finds the decorated author reflecting on every major development in his long career, from his prizewinning 1959 debut Goodbye, Columbus to the stardom that followed the publication of 1969’s Portnoy’s Complaint to the remarkably fruitful spell which has seen him publish […]
My film partner and I reached our crowdfunding goal for our documentary film project, The Keepers, last month. I previously wrote about some of the issues and questions about crowdfunding and documentary ethics that came up during our long campaign. This piece is a useful follow-up that explains how we were actually able to beat the odds and raise half of our goal in the final week. This was written with the hopes that other indie filmmakers can apply what we have learned to reach their own fundraising goals. What they say is true By now it’s common crowdfunding lore […]
The Miami International Film Festival wrapped its 30th edition this past weekend, unspooling 138 films across 10 days. The program was strong enough across its myriad sections that many longtime observers were calling it the best iteration of the festival in memory, with a smattering of noteworthy films pulled from the mega festivals sprinkled across a wide reaching selection of work new and old. While light on significant premieres, sandwiched as it is between True/False and SXSW, it is a well-oiled machine, organized and efficient, with well-attended screenings that start on time in multiplexes, microcinemas and beautiful movie palaces such […]