Adele Romanski, producer (The Myth of the American Sleepover) and director (Leave Me Like You Found Me), passed along this link to her latest short production: Mission Chinese, a stylish and bloody revenge fantasy directed by Cole Schreiber and David Parker. The short is a branded-content piece for the New York/San Francisco men’s store, Freeman’s Sporting Club, and is a collaboration between Freeman’s, Mission Chinese (the New York/San Francisco-based restaurant) and Sunday Paper, Schreiber and Parker’s start-up production company, whose work you’ve seen on this site before. It was shot by James Laxton (The Myth of the American Sleepover, Medicine […]
The Internet is transforming social life and the political landscape. The growing pallet of digital media content-production technologies and social networking distribution sites, like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, is redefining the meaning of “democracy” and an individual’s ability to participate in the political process. The annual Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) is a geek and political-wonk fest, a 21st century Woodstock – without the drugs, rain and rock ‘n’ roll – and this year’s gathering was no exception. This is a momentous election year, with a day of reckoning coming in November. The nation is living through what Nobel Prize-winning economist […]
The self-described “grandmother of performance art,” Marina Abramovic has for almost 40 years been one of the leading lights of a still-marginalized form. Born to ex-partisan parents in 1946, in the early days of Tito’s Yugoslavia, she is the fascinating subject of Matthew Akers’ new documentary, Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present. Despite her international renown, the Belgrade-born, New York-based Abramovic failed to enter the public consciousness in the States until her blockbuster 2010 MoMA retrospective. Akers’ film is a sinewy tour through Abramovic’s peculiar life and working process as she embarks upon her most high profile performance yet, one […]
June 8, 2012 (continued) 9pm – The dinner and award announcement are held above the Renault car company’s showroom, which seems like a strange place but the food was absolutely delicious and included the second of three steak dinners I will have while in France. Sophie Dulac, the grande dame of Parisian cinema, and her beautiful entourage arrive. She announces that A Teacher has won and Kim and I do this really cliché slow-motion turn to look at each other, not really comprehending the win until people urge us to go up. Four years of studying French in school finally […]
This morning, the eight edition of the IFP Narrative Labs kicked off in New York City, and the 10 films chosen to participate were unveiled for the first time. Projects chosen came from places as diverse as Vershire, Vermont and Miami, Florida. Each year, 20 indie films with budgets under $1 million — 10 documentary and 10 narrative — are selected for participation in the IFP post-production labs, which gives filmmakers strategic help and guidance regarding the completion, marketing and distribution of their projects. IFP’s Executive Director Joana Vicente said, “We are thrilled to welcome another talented class of emerging […]
I first met writer/director K. Lorrel Manning and actor/producer Michael Cuomo at the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, where we found ourselves the fish-out-of-water New Yorkers in a sea full of Southwest cinephiles. Their SXSW 2011 (sold out) hit Happy New Year is grounded in star Cuomo’s nuanced portrayal of a fictional outsider named Cole Lewis, a sergeant who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and now finds himself battling demons both mental and physical in the psych ward of a veterans hospital. I spoke with the two about their veterans outreach effort, Indiegogo versus Kickstarter, and the best […]
Production designer J. Michael Riva passed away in Los Angeles on June 7. Below he is remembered by Jon Reiss. — Editor When I first met Michael Riva I thought he was a bit nuts. It was thirteen years ago on a pre-school camping trip for our sons and he had outfitted his tent fit for a bedouin princess. This was accomplished without any expense – a brightly-colored French handkerchief over a side table here, a cot and mattress covered by sheer Indian fabric there, and on the “wall” of the tent he somehow managed to jerry-rig a small landscape. […]
Hello internet! My name is Hannah Fidell and I wrote and directed the film A Teacher. It’s screening in rough cut form at US-In-Progress which is being held at the first ever Champs-Élysées Film Festival in Paris this week. Three other American independent films were chosen to compete for various postproduction grants and all are screened for European distributors and sales agents. Being the first time I’ve ever participated in anything like this, the nice folks over at Filmmaker thought it would be a good idea for me to share my experiences. Enjoy! June 6, 2012 8:32pm – Dropped off at […]
Second #5734, 95:34 There is a look of pity on Detective Williams’s face as he delivers his warning to Jeffrey not to “blow it.” At this point, it’s not entirely clear whose side the Detective is on; is his Hollywood stock detective outfit for real, or is he—like the “well-dressed man”—wearing a disguise? His warning to Jeffrey, as he takes him by the arms and looks into his eyes, is like a secret communication, a signal to Jeffrey not to rush things, not dig too deeply because what he might find at the terrible, rotten core of things is not […]
The strength of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival is also its weakness. This year’s 23rd edition boasts 16 doc and fiction flicks from 12 countries – yet most fall firmly in the category of solid ITVS fare (in fact, only three are narrative features). Like with the agribusiness detailed in Micha X. Peled’s Bitter Seeds, about the epidemic of farmer suicides in India, variety is often an illusion – especially when U.S. or U.S. co-productions are in the majority. This is another way of saying that, yes, the chances of seeing a stinker at HRWFF are slim, but there’s […]