In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, award-winning director of When the Mountains Tremble, Pamela Yates — whose memoir of Guatemala’s struggles, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, revisits the footage and topics of her debut — and Bernardo Ruiz, whose film Reportero airs on POV on January 7 at 10:00PM, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Through the course of the discussion, Yates and Ruiz share where they’ve been, […]
In celebration of the 25th season of PBS’ groundbreaking documentary series POV, Filmmaker is running a four-part conversation series between two non-fiction directors with close ties to the show. A few weeks ago, award-winning director of When the Mountains Tremble, Pamela Yates — whose memoir of Guatemala’s struggles, Granito: How to Nail a Dictator, revisits the footage and topics of her debut — and Bernardo Ruiz, whose film Reportero airs on POV on January 7 at 10:00PM, sat down to talk about a variety of issues that arise from their work. Through the course of the discussion, Yates and Ruiz share where they’ve been, […]
If you’re heading off to Sundance in a few weeks (or just wincing at the January film releases), you may want to make a stop off in Queens. First Look, the annual showcase of new international cinema, opens today at the Museum of the Moving Image and offers filmgoers many compelling reasons to shake off the post-holiday doldrums and to leave the Netflix cave. It also suggests the expansiveness of independent cinema worldwide. Curated by Dennis Lim (editor of Moving Image Source, the Museum’s multimedia magazine) and the museum’s film curators, Rachael Rakes and David Schwartz, the series presents a […]
With each passing year, it seems more and more archaic to refer to television’s current landscape as a ‘Golden Age.’ How long exactly can a ‘Golden Age’ last before we start to consider it a permanent phenomenon? For a decade and a half now, we’ve seen a steady stream of pioneering shows that have changed the mainstream standard for quality television. Yes, many of these shows exist on the fringes of TV – are supremely low-rated or in constant threat of cancellation. And yes, the medium is still undoubtedly in a state of flux, as everyone scrambles to figure out […]
It’s a late fall Sunday afternoon and Rick Macomber is setting up his Canon C300 on a bridge near Harvard Square to shoot some inserts for a music video. The video is for the band Air Traffic Controller, and the plan today is to shoot two sequences of a couple that illustrate “happier times” in their relationship. Rick will first be shooting them crossing the bridge, and then they’ll move to Harvard Square to shoot some additional scenes. With his production company Macomber Productions Rick has been shooting music, promotional and wedding videos since 1995 and has been using DSLRs […]
When I was a doorman at San Francisco’s Punchline and Cobbs comedy clubs, I never would’ve thought that three years later, I’d be making my first feature film about a comedian. I went to film school in Poland, from where my parents emigrated. While there, I made several short films, which went on to play at international film festivals in France, Albania, Poland, and the U.S. Before I went to Poland, while working with my father in China, I passed on his proposal to expand his furniture-making empire, as he called it, in order to pursue filmmaking. Eventually, back in […]
It’s the end of the year and everyone’s doing year-end lists, so why not me? Here’s my top ten camera news and developments in 2012: 1. The end of film Film’s been having a tough time of it, but did anyone in 2011 think that 2012 would be the year that film would roll over and die? This was the year that Kodak went bankrupt, Fuji announced they would cease production of motion picture film, and the major film companies announced the timetable for moving toward 100% digital distribution. It was also the year that a James Bond movie was […]
My feature film The Lost Children will have its New York City premiere with the Film Society of Lincoln Center in January, 2013. The premiere will not be a film screening alone. It is presented by Convergence: Film Society of Lincoln Center, which is an arm of the FSLC devoted to immersive and transmedia storytelling. Like many organizations in New York City, FSLC is reaching out and exploring new storytelling methods. The 50th anniversary of the NYFF included its first ever series of panels on transmedia. This year, the Tribeca FF is accepting basically any type of project. And the […]
The last half of my 20s and the first half of my 30s were spent in Los Angeles working in mainstream television (That 70s Show) and film (Jesus People). I never made much money, but I did get to live out my dreams of visiting Kathy Griffin’s house, serving crumpets to my favorite comedic actress, Lisa Kudrow, and brushing my leg up against my favorite dramatic actress, Holly Hunter. In the mid-90s, I took for granted the fact that gay characters were becoming well represented on television. After all, my favorite TV shows were thirtysomething and My So-Called Life and […]
If you had asked me in the early days of Filmmaker which director would go on to be the one creating a micro-budget, self-sustaining business model, I’m not sure I would have answered “Ed Burns.” His The Brothers McMullen was realized for pennies and broke through the mainstream with Fox Searchlight at its back, and from that point on, Burns seemed to be set for the mainstream studio world. He acted in Saving Private Ryan, married supermodel Christy Turlington, and embarked on a follow-up feature starring Cameron Diaz. But here we are, nearly two decades later, and Burns is not […]