[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, 3:00pm — Egyptian Theatre] Our biggest personal sacrifice would be our time. Both having large families, this is a limited commodity. Fortunately for us, our marriages are still intact. From the writing to shooting, we worked beyond expectation beginning “our own” pre-production months before money was on hand and going well beyond after we were told the budget was broke to ensure we had a solid level of preparation. This cost us personally financially yet has been one of the main contributing factors allowing for the quality we now see in the frame. Basically it’s […]
Catering to virtually every niche, Berlin offers some 70 film festivals each year. Since 2009, the first on the calendar has been the Unknown Pleasures Festival. Held during the first two weeks of January at the historic Babylon Cinema in former East Berlin, it is a work of love run entirely by three enthusiasts of US independent cinema, providing a sorely needed platform for recent American arthouse films. This year’s edition opened on a disappointing note with the German premiere of Michel Gondry’s The We and the I. Typically saccharine and contrived, Gondry’s latest portrays a group of Bronx teens […]
James Swirsky & Lisanne Pajot are the directors, producers and distributors of the Sundance award-winning feature documentary, Indie Game: The Movie. Before we began production on Indie Game: The Movie, we saw Louis C.K. perform in our hometown of Winnipeg, Canada. It was a great show. He was hilarious, and we walked away cemented in the idea that Louis C.K. is one of the funniest people on the planet. Creatively, it’s hard not to be inspired by someone performing at the top of his or her field. However, little did we know, two years later, Louis C.K. would be inspiring […]
Documentary filmmaker Farihah Zaman shares the secrets of the Good Pitch.
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, 8:30pm — Library Center Theatre, Park City] This past summer, I traveled to my hometown of Athens, Georgia, and shot a movie in the neighborhoods and streets of my childhood. Our film’s production office was the recently vacated office of Athens’ local heroes, R.E.M. On weekends the cast and crew partied in local bars and rock clubs (the Manhattan, the 40 Watt Club, the Georgia Theatre). I saw my parents all the time. It was a dream — a second childhood, balmy and green, somehow better than the first. I was so, so lucky. But […]
After collaborating with Cinereach for many years on films including Benh Zeitlin’s four time Academy Award-nominated film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Joshua Marston’s The Forgiveness of Blood, and Tom Gilroy’s The Cold Lands (premiering at the 2013 Berlin Film Festival), Paul Mezey has signed on as Producer in Residence at the not-for-profit production company and foundation. Mezey will support development, production and distribution of Cinereach’s films, as well as being involved in the organization’s grant-making activities and other key initiatives. Mezey is the founder of Journeyman Pictures, through which he has produced a number of critically acclaimed and award-winning […]
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 18, 3:00pm — Yarrow Hotel Theatre, Park City] In making this film, I sacrificed time and plenty of sleep! The organizational nightmare that comes with working almost exclusively with archive has provided its own set of challenges. Creating a whole new working practice for myself and the team these past few films – and by that I mean the migration away from what we all as filmmakers would understand to be the daily routine, the broadly known elements of documentary making – has been tough. Watching thousands of hours or archive and selecting the material was […]
Here’s the secret to compiling a list of films to see at a festival: go through the catalog and figure out what excites you. And then write down those anticipations. That’s all I’ve done here — given the catalog one pass and pulled out 25 films that will be at the top of my list. A number of these films are ones I’ve known of before, including quite a few from filmmakers who made our “25 New Faces” lists as well as those in the IFP Narrative Lab, where I’m a mentor. But there are others from promising young filmmakers […]
Back to reality. That may be the best way to describe both the status of our global economy and the previous 12 months in independent film. Little irrational exuberance; no breakout blockbusters; but a few profitable indie films, perhaps countable on one hand, that stand out as carrots for hundreds of others to try to reach out and emulate. Calmer heads prevailed at Sundance 2012 as sellers and buyers got down to the more complicated business of the current indie marketplace, with its delicate mix of theatrical and VOD platform releasing. No one was throwing money around like it was […]
James Franco presents Kink, a documentary about the San Francisco BDSM film studio, Kink.com. Director Christina Voros is one of our 25 New Faces and James Franco is… well, he’s James Franco. From the production notes: If porn were high school, they’d be the goth table. Director Christina Voros and producer James Franco pull back the curtain on the fetish empire of Kink.com, the Internet’s largest producer of BDSM content. In a particularly obscure corner of an industry that operates largely out of public view, Kink.com’s directors and models strive for authenticity. In an enterprise often known for exploitative practices, […]