Filmmaker has a curated page on Kickstarter, where we point you towards projects that we think are worthy of your attention. Here are our recent additions, and to read more about them visit them via Filmmaker Magazine on Kickstarter. Love Spasm: New York underground film icon Nick Zedd has just launched a campaign for what sounds like an ambitious feature set to shoot in Berlin. “The themes of this movie are love, sexual freedom, loyalty, human insecurity and the strategies people employ to survive and maintain relationships within the unnatural constraints imposed upon them by the economic pressures of capitalism, […]
Stephen Chbosky has been influenced by a lot of angsty classics, like The Graduate and Catcher in the Rye. In 1999, he made his own contribution to the canon, releasing The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a young-adult novel whose tough themes helped make it a formidable word-of-mouth success, becoming the best-selling title from MTV Books by 2000. Within seven years, it sold nearly 800,000 copies, while also getting regularly challenged by the American Library Association for its exploration of drug use, homosexuality, and adolescent suicide. A film version seemed inevitable, but Chbosky wasn’t ready to hand over his polarizing […]
Hi, my name is Ian Harnarine and I’m one of Filmmaker magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film” for 2012. My short film Doubles With Slight Pepper won the award for Best Canadian Short Film at the 2011 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and also won the Genie Award (Canada’s Oscar). I am adapting the short film into a feature and was invited back by the festival to compete in their PITCH THIS! competition. I will compete with five other filmmakers that each have six minutes to pitch their feature film idea to a live audience of over 200 industry […]
Hello, Jesse Epstein here. I’m blogging on behalf of “Team Skeeter” at the IFP Independent Film Week. We’ve been here with our feature documentary, Mosquito, which is currently in production. It’s been quite an intense week so far (and it’s only Tuesday!). We had our screening today, had meetings yesterday and today, and more meetings are lined up for tomorrow and Thursday. We’re learning a lot and feeling very grateful to be here with the project. But let me back up… The night before Film Week started I found myself unexpectedly extra-motivated for my two morning meetings because I was […]
Is there such a thing as an opportunity of a lifetime? During the first two days of IFP’s Independent Film Week, it became clear that the answer is yes and no. Yes, a conversation, a short film, a meeting, a festival acceptance, can be the opportunity that changes everything, but a career isn’t just a year or one film – it’s a lifetime of dedication to craft. In his impressively extemporaneous speech, J.C. Chandor (above) recalled not the glories of having his first feature, Margin Call, nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, but the 15 years he spent trying to […]
If independent film is going to prosper well into the 21st century, many would agree that there must be some sort of interdependence between filmmakers, a collective effort that will help everyone to communicate and share resources. Thankfully, there is already a driven group of Americans who are doing exactly that, providing a template that indie film can examine and emulate. It’s the Occupy movement. No matter how you feel about their politics, Occupy has utilized new technology and social media better than many organizations and affinity groups in the United States. And if you look closely at how they […]
I haven’t taken many classes on pitching. Wait. I’ve never taken any classes on pitching. Pitching is meant to be a precise, pressurized maneuver that either takes your project to the next stage or closes another door in its face. It is the subject of much study, stress and numerous overpriced workshops. Naturally, one always feels some amount of pressure before a pitch–similar to what I experienced as a dancer prior to going on stage each evening. Regardless of how many past meetings were nailed or how many accolades were received, one rarely goes into these “performances of passion” without […]
A year ago, I met, fell for and married another filmmaker in three months. We spent the year getting lost in our own world of odd hours, late nights, and bursts of travel–it turns out we are part of a loose tribe of shooters and lovers of the documentary film world. Nowhere has this tribe been more pronounced than at the IFP Labs, where six of the films produced this year involve similar pairs. Some people may cringe at the idea of spending 24/7 with their partner for weeks on end. But to members of our tribe, whose passions often […]
“You’re young, you haven’t done anything, and no one wants to work with you,” our first agent said to us after we graduated film school. He was absolutely right. We were trying to write what we thought were mainstream Hollywood comedies but to our shock, it was hard to get the second screenplay we’d ever written to the biggest comedy stars on the planet. That’s when we decided to write something smaller for two local New York comedians who we thought were hilarious and, more importantly, we thought we could get. Six months later, we had a screenplay about two […]
It was the spring of 2011 and I’d just wrapped an eight-year run as the Film Program Director at the Austin Film Festival. I was looking to produce more when a long time friend, writer/director Kat Candler, came to me with a short script called Hellion. Flash forward to January of 2012 and we’re bringing our six-minute short film Hellion to the Sundance Film Festival. It was truly one of the greatest experiences we’ve had surrounded by an audience that embraced the film. It was a strange experience for me being on what I called “the other side of the badge,” as a […]