The Academy Awards are still a long way off, but the recent Gotham Awards, the Spirit Award nominations, today’s New York Film Critics Circle Awards and now the Oscar doc longlist mean that awards season is truly kicking into gear. The 15 docs still in Academy Award contention are: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Never Sorry LLC Bully, The Bully Project LLC Chasing Ice, Exposure Detropia, Loki Films Ethel, Moxie Firecracker Films 5 Broken Cameras, Guy DVD Films The Gatekeepers, Les Films du Poisson, Dror Moreh Productions, Cinephil The House I Live In, Charlotte Street Films, LLC How to Survive a […]
Concluding its latest edition on yet another rainy late fall afternoon in Bydgoszcz, Plus Camerimage awarded its top prize, the Golden Frog, to War Witch, the celebrated story of a sub-Saharan female child-soldier. The film, also a prize winner at Berlin and Tribeca, beat out a list of fest circuit heavyweights such as The Master, Cloud Atlas, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Argo, Laurence Always, Hyde Park on Hudson and Holy Motors, which won the runner up Silver Frog from Joel Schumacher’s main competition jury. Fifteen prizes were handed out at the closing ceremony at Bydgoszcz’s Opera Nova, a 56-year-old modernist opera house which […]
The credits roll, there is applause, and not too many people walked out. The festival premiere of your debut film is over. You relax, a year’s worth of stress magically departing your body. Sure, there will be tough times ahead; distribution is difficult. But, for the moment, you congratulate yourself on a job well done. But don’t relax too much, warn a trio of festival heads. Your next big job as a director looms sooner than you think. The audience Q&A you’ll lead in just a minute or two is surprisingly important when it comes to your film’s future life. […]
Upon discovering his “inner hippie” many years ago, Duncan Bridgeman left a successful career in music production — for artists like Paul McCartney, no less — and committed himself to “taking things out of their boxes,” he said in a recent conversation with Filmmaker. His desire to challenge musical convention introduced a new artistic medium altogether to his work: film. Bridgeman joined forces with Jamie Catto, from the electronica band Faithless, to create the multimedia project “1 Giant Leap.” True to their name, the pair traveled to over 20 countries, where they shot film of musical performances and interviews that […]
Following on from the Bay Area Boom article about the San Francisco Film Society’s Filmmaker360 program, we are profiling the 13 finalists for the SFFS’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking grant. The winners of this award will be announced on December 8. DANIEL GROVE AND REZA SIXO SAFAI, A BETTER PLACE THAN THIS Synopsis: A happy-go-lucky prison guard, Para Dastur has a charismatic demeanor that hides a very grim truth: he is Singapore Changi Prison’s resident hangman. Not just an anonymous executioner, Dastur takes it upon himself to console the condemned and help them come to terms with fate, shepherding them until he utters the final […]
Today is round two of the Sundance announcements, comprised of Spotlight (notable festival films that premiered in 2012), Park City at Midnight (midnight movies) and New Frontiers, the experimental strand of the fest, which includes both films and installations. We now have a few days to parse the program announcements from the past two days, and the lineups for the Premieres & Documentary Premieres and Shorts sections will be announced Monday and Tuesday of next week. SPOTLIGHT Regardless of where these films have played throughout the world, the Spotlight program is a tribute to the cinema we love. Fill […]
David Lynch is a very popular director the world over, but perhaps no place more than Poland. His work is greeted with the same fanfare as the latest disposable, multiplex-bound spectacle in this central European country, his rock star status never more in evidence than at the 20th annual Plus Camerimage. The international film world’s most significant festival focusing mainly on the work of cinematographers (they headline the competition here and are the subjects of press conferences, interviews, workshops, tributes), it moved two years ago from its former host city of Lodz (pronounced “Wod-ge”), home of the national film school […]
Online video’s come a long way in the seven-and-a-half years since the launch of YouTube, but it’s no secret that the landscape’s still constantly changing for filmmakers, both independents and studios. The big question, still, is how to best monetize online viewing, as a few recent developments have illustrated. Karin Chien has a great piece in the current issue of Filmmaker (available for subscribers here) about how some YouTube stars have built up massive audiences that have, in turn, supported them financially and empowered them to deal with Hollywood on favorable terms. But we all know that going viral can […]
So, I am in Amsterdam, attending my first IDFA, a fest I’ve been dreaming of attending since I first started working in documentary. IFP has 11 films in the fest, and four works in progress in the Forum, so I’m here for moral support, promotion of IFP, and reconnaissance. What is happening in documentary in the rest of the world? In advance of my arrival, I was most anticipating being a part of the Forum, “IDFA’s international co-financing and production market, Europe’s most important breeding ground for new documentary work.” The Forum presents works in progress to the international funding […]
Following on from the Bay Area Boom article about the San Francisco Film Society’s Filmmaker360 program, we are profiling the 13 finalists for the SFFS’s Kenneth Rainin Foundation Filmmaking grant. The winners of this award will be announced on December 8. RYAN COOGLER, FRUITVALE Synopsis: Based on a true story, Fruitvale follows Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old Bay Area resident, who crosses paths with friends, enemies, family, and strangers on New Year’s Eve 2008. Bio: Ryan Coogler is a 26-year-old filmmaker based in the Bay Area. He earned his MFA at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts in 2011, where he made several short […]