While at CPH:DOX I attended a seminar titled “An Interactive Audience” spotlighting new works in transmedia. One of the projects discussed was 17,000 Islands, a work commissioned by the festival’s own DOX:LAB, directed by Indonesia’s Edwin (Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly) and Norwegian transmedia doc director Thomas Ostbye, and produced by interactive producer Paramita Nath. The project, in which Edwin (pictured) and Ostbye make a film that is then “destroyed” by its viewers over the internet, sounded fascinating, so afterwards I pulled Edwin aside to learn more. First, here’s the description of the project from the CPH:DOX catalog: 17000 […]
The US in Progress market begins tomorrow. I fly to Wroclaw, Poland, in a few hours. Translation: I am frantically packing, burning DVDs, and researching European distribution companies. An Introduction: I’m a longtime film worker and first-time filmmaker. I’m in the final stages of finishing my first feature. I’m 33 years old, I have two daughters, and I live in central Pennsylvania. For over 12 years I have been a full-time alchemist attempting to fuse well-rounded family life with a career in film. This is an uncertain science and the results have been inconclusive. But A Song Still Inside, my […]
Chiefly known for his Hollywood output, which includes films such as Robocop, Basic Instinct, Total Recall and Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven is part of a distinguished lineage of European expats who have made the dream factory great. But the latest project from Verhoeven is the furthest thing from Hollywood one could possibly imagine. This manifests itself not so much in stylistic terms — Tricked (Steekspel) is in fact a soap opera of a comedy — as in the film’s creative process, which saw it being openly crowd-scripted by whomever wanted to contribute. After the first five minutes had been written, the […]
Competition in the performing arts is a staple of non-fiction television and documentary at the moment, but few works step back from the American Idol-style face-off to depict the literal beginnings of their performer subjects. One film that does is Judd Ehrlich’s Magic Camp, a documentary about Tannen’s Magic Camp, a week-long event for budding young magicians where kids learn both stagecraft and sleight-of-hand from an illustrious group of visiting professionals. Ehrlich attended Magic Camp when he was young, and when he became a documentary filmmaker — his previous credits include Mayor of the West Side and Run for Your Life — he knew he had to return to […]
In this third part of the series about the production of the low-budget indie movie Game Changers, filmmakers Rob Imbs (director) and Benjamin Eckstein (cinematographer) discuss shooting with the Sony PMW-F3, shooting in S-Log, lighting issues, and the lenses used to shoot the movie. Filmmaker: Ben, you already owned the Sony PMW-F3, was the decision simply to use the camera you had? Eckstein: I’ve been fortunate that I own almost all the gear that I use on a day-to-day basis. From the beginning when talking to Rob, it was not really a discussion of “Are you trying to get the […]
In Dogtooth, an authoritarian father’s carefully constructed sham world falls apart after one of his sheltered daughters watches Rocky IV and Jaws. In Electrick Children (above), a 15-year-old Mormon girl (played by “25 New Face” Julia Garner) gets pregnant after listening to a rock ‘n’ roll song on an unmarked blue cassette tape. The narrative similarities essentially end there but, given their equally unorthodox takes on coming of age in cloistered environments, the two are oddly complementary. Split between rural Utah and fabulous Las Vegas, Electrick Children‘s visual world is entirely at odds with what its doe-eyed protagonist is used to on her big-sky homestead: neon lights, dingy […]
Matt Ross’s directorial debut is an inventive look at an affair between a married account (Marin Ireland) and a novelist (Chris Messina) that unfurls within the walls of 28 hotel rooms across the country. Dictated by checkout times and the call of the “real world,” their truncated encounters are marked by a growing sense of urgency, as their physical connection turns emotional. Ireland and Messina shoulder the challenge of being the sole recipients of Doug Emmett’s lens with magnetic grace, crafting their characters’ dimensions in varying increments of restraint and ebullition. 28 Hotel Rooms, currently streaming on iTunes and VOD, […]
In diagnosing a cultural affliction without so much as mentioning a possible cure or even treatment, Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral coldly suggests that it’ll only continue to spread. The outlandish-but-believable premise – involving a high-end clinic that harvests and sells celebrities’ infections to their obsessed fans – brings to mind both Children of Men and, of all things, Idiocracy for how depressingly realistic its vision of the near future ends up being. We want to think that something like this could never happen, but there’s more than a little evidence to the contrary. The fact that nearly every element of the […]
What do you get when you hand RZA the keys to his own film project? As fans of the multi-tasking Wu-Tang Clan leader will be thrilled to know, you get a balls-out, rap-infused martial arts spectacle, filled with the mad love of a lifelong kung fu fan. A project nine years in the making, RZA’s directorial debut, The Man with the Iron Fists, sees the 43-year-old artist star alongside Lucy Liu and Russell Crowe, bringing to life a mashed-up actioner that blends Chinese mysticism with the U.S. slave trade and more. The impetus for the film’s production came when RZA […]
With their Stranger than Fiction series at New York City’s IFC Center, Thom Powers and Raphaela Neihausen have been curating, programming and advocating for documentary film going on eight years now. Their Tuesday-night events are typically packed, drawing audiences with not only great films but human interaction — Q&A’s with directors, collaborators, and even the film’s subjects. Three years ago, when Powers and Neihausen wondered why there wasn’t a major, all-doc festival in New York, they realized that the challenge of launching one was a natural fit for them. The resulting DOC NYC is now in its third year (November […]