In Ruben Amar and Lola Bessis’s Swim Little Fish Swim, Lilas (Bessis) defiantly flees her coddled Parisian life for a nomadic walkabout in New York. An aspiring visual artist, desperate to strike out from the shadow cast by her famous mother (Anne Cosigny), Lilas falls in with Leeward (Dustin Guy Defa), his wife (Brooke Bloom), and their daughter (Olivia Costello). Quick to align herself with Leeward and his band of musicians, Lilas’ presence as an added distraction for her hapless husband unnerves Bloom’s breadwinning nurse. Amar and Bessis spoke to Filmmaker about the method to their collaboration in advance of […]
Quickly after premiering Filly Brown at Sundance in 2012, filmmakers Youssef Delara and Victor Teran moved into production on their newest feature, Snap. As close collaborators for many years on other films, Delara and Teran teamed up again to co-direct and produce Snap. Set in the explosive world of underground dubstep, the film explores the dangerous psyche of a young man as a social worker and her mentor try to uncover his secrets before his violent past erupts. Snap stars Jake Hoffman (Barney’s Version), Nikki Reed (Thirteen, Twilight), Scott Bakula (American Beauty, TV’s Quantum Leap), and Thomas Dekker (Kaboom), and makes its world premiere tomorrow at SXSW in […]
Andrew Cohn and Davy Rothbart have been friends since childhood, when they used to shoot hoops together in their hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Since then, Rothbart has become a contributor to This American Life and an acclaimed writer of short fiction and personal essays, and also had his (Manti Te’o-esque) tale of a phone romance with someone who turned out to be a guy adapted into the 2009 film Easier with Practice. Rothbart and Cohn collaborated a few years ago on FOUND: People Find Stuff. Now It’s a Show, the off-Broadway show based on the magazine Rothbart started. Now they […]
In the battle of the sexes, there has been perhaps no more controversial warrior than the playwright, screenwriter and director Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men). Since the mid-90s, LaBute has made a name for himself by writing movies that are truly, madly, deeply cynical. Adapted by LaBute from his own stage play and directed by Party Girl helmer Daisy von Scherler Mayer, Some Girl(s) stars Adam Brody as a soon-to-be-married writer who takes a cross-country trip to revisit ghosts of girlfriends past. With an all-star cast and a no-holds-barred script, it’s sure to leave people arguing in the lobby […]
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Touba was seven years in the making: five of shooting, two of post-production. It grew out of her second documentary — 2008’s Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love — which followed the legendary Senegalese musician before and after 2004’s Egypt album, whose religious themes raised the ire of the country’s religious argument. Her newest film began life on vibrantly grainy 16mm, following an annual Senegal trek undertaken by hundreds to the city of Touba to visit the home of Sheikh Amadou Bamba, founder of the Mouride Brotherhood. Like her last film, Vasarhelyi’s newest focuses on Islam […]
Bryan Poyser has been a fixture of Austin’s film scene for a decade, even as it’s remained in flux. As a director, he made his feature debut with 2004’s Dear Pillow, in which a teen struggling with sex gets mentored by a fiftysomething ex-porn director. 2010’s follow-up Lovers Of Hate (half shot in Austin) was a perversely comic sexual rondelay in which a demented ex skulks in the mansion where his former partner and her new lover are taking a vacation, spying on both while trying to keep his presence a secret. Poyser’s third feature, The Bounceback, is his first […]
When the filmmaking collective Ornana (led by director Danny Madden) was chosen for Filmmaker‘s “25 New Faces” last summer, it was their charming and inventive animated short about a robot elephant, (notes on) biology, that first attracted our attention and admiration. However, it was group’s radically different follow-up project, euphonia (then still in rough cut), which assured us of Madden and co.’s genius. The 50-odd minute live-action film, which was first planned as a short, tells the tale of a high schooler (Will Madden, Danny’s younger brother) who buys a digital sound recorder and becomes increasingly fixated with capturing the sounds around […]
(Electrick Children world premiered at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival and was picked up for distribution by Phase 4 Films. It opens theatrically on Friday, March 8, 2013. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.) Oh, to read the description of a movie and go into it with one’s thickest guard up, anticipating some exercise in “indie quirk,” only to realize within seconds that, shame on you, that assumption couldn’t have been further from the truth. Rebecca Thomas’s debut feature, Electrick Children, shut me up right quick, for it becomes immediately evident that this is one of those lovely […]
The first our series of interviews with digital storytellers, realized in collaboration with Filmmaker, here are the team behind the interactive storytelling platform Zeega. From the group’s mission statement: Zeega is revolutionizing web publishing and interactive storytelling for a future beyond blogs. With Zeega, you can use any media in the cloud, transform the entire screen into your playground, and share your interactive creations with the world. We’re living in a unique moment. More media than ever is recorded and shared. But the web today is dominated by a few platforms – all stories start to feel the same, trapped […]
SXSW is a festival of contradictions. (Or, “Spring Break for filmmakers,” as Ti West posted on his Twitter stream last night.) Its film program feels homey, intimate, with Janet Pierson and her team evincing a real sense of enthusiasm as well as curatorial play. There are, of course, types of films that are expected and do well at SXSW: cutting-edge genre titles, hip mainstream features, music- and technology-themed documentaries, and low-budget, youth-oriented relationship tales. But within and even outside of those categories, SXSW always turns up some real discoveries. (Last year there were several — Sean Baker’s Starlet, Andrew Neel’s […]