On January 1, 2009, a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer shot and killed unarmed 22 year-old Oscar Grant, who was being detained on the BART train’s platform for alleged fighting. With the help of cellphone cameras, witnesses filmed the officer shooting Grant and both the footage and news went viral. When the officer was convicted of only involuntary manslaughter instead of second degree murder or voluntary manslaughter, peaceful protests turned violent and riotous throughout the Bay Area as the city made its anger known. Raised in the Bay Area himself, Ryan Coogler tackles the sensitive topic of Oscar Grant’s life […]
Though it only arrived three years ago, Matt Porterfield’s Putty Hill, with its unique blend of fiction and documentary and its crisp, patient filmmaking, has already become quite an influential and well-loved piece of the micro-budget cannon. Now Porterfield has returned with I Used to Be Darker, a more formally scripted work that follows a troubled young woman (Deragh Campbell) who moves in with her aunt (Kim Taylor), uncle (Ned Oldham), and cousin (Hannah Gross) in Maryland. The film premieres today in US Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival. Filmmaker: Tell me a bit about the development process for […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 20, 9:00pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] Our film wasn’t planned. As the events of Occupy Wall Street began to unfold, and Audrey [Ewell] and I decided to make a film around it, we basically went from working on other projects (our own follow-up film to Until The Light Takes Us, as well as the paying freelance work that pays our rent) to instantly being in production on an unbudgeted and risky film project that used an untested methodology to bring it to life, and that relied on the abilities and collaboration of people we’d never […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 20, 12:15pm — Eccles Theatre, Park City] Talking about sacrifices when you’ve been given the means to actually make your movie seems a bit glib – but you make them all the same, and perhaps spend an exorbitant amount of time fretting about them late at night, hoping they don’t show up on screen. On this film, there were two forfeitures in particular that went hand in hand. First: for budgetary reasons, we couldn’t shoot our movie in Texas. As a filmmaker from the Lone Star State who enjoys making movies set therein, this was somewhat heartbreaking, and […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Sunday, Jan. 20, 11:30am — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] Blood Brother was built on of the sacrifices of many people. Personally, I sacrificed time, money, comfort and security. I think I even sacrificed a bit of my fading youth, as aging seemed to speed up over the course of production. But I can’t confidently call these things sacrifices in light of the true sacrifices made by the lives of those featured in Blood Brother. My passion to make Blood Brother created a willingness in me to pay whatever price necessary in order to tell this amazing story. It […]
San Francisco-based gay filmmaker Travis Mathews built his reputation as one of the leading figures in the latest new wave of gay independent cinema on the back of a series of award-winning intimate, confessional documentary films about young homosexual men, In their Room. His first narrative feature, I Want Your Love, explored gay friends negotiating their way towards and through sexual relationships and featured unsimulated sex. His new film, Interior. Leather Bar, co-directed with the actor James Franco, is just as honest in its depictions. This film within a film begins with a re-imagining of the lost 40 minutes of […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 19, 2:30pm — Prospector Square Theatre, Park City] As I was growing up, I was always told that anything worth doing would take sacrifice. As an independent narrative filmmaker, which was my background before making this documentary, I was accustomed to working from a script and shooting over an intense but short period. It’s an exhausting and unsustainable month or two where you sacrifice your life, but then it ends, and you sort of remake yourself from the rubble… go for a walk, read a book, and begin to feel like some version of yourself after […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 19, 3:00 — Sundance Resort Screening Room, Sundance Resort] Since the tragedy of the Jeju 4.3 Uprising, more than 60 years have been passed without any opportunity to reconsider due to the ignorance from Korea and the world. To bring the terrible memories up into the film caused huge pressure in regards to many things. As well as getting the financial support, the biggest pressure was that I had a duty to make a great enough film to satisfy the local residents in Jeju Island. This tragedy is still ineffaceable pain to them and the period […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Saturday, Jan. 19, 8:30pm — The MARC, Park City] When I first read this question I was immediately struck by how different my answers would be for each of the three films I’ve made. Each answer really shows where I was at in my life during these productions. For Mud, the biggest sacrifice I made was being away from my family. At the time, our son was one, and I missed roughly four months of his life. Despite a few occasional visits during production, I mostly had to block out the fact that I wasn’t getting to be […]
After premiering his short film at the Sundance Film Festival in 2002, director John Krokidas vowed to be back two years later with his first feature film. Krokidas found that it took a bit longer than anticipated to get his film to Park City, but eleven long years later, Kill Your Darlings premieres in competition today at Sundance. The Beat generation has been a popular subject of films lately, but rather than adapt a Kerouac book or Ginsberg poem, Krokidas follows the nascent writers during their days at Columbia University and one particular event that shaped their future work and careers. In 1944, […]