6560 Results for “production”
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Five Questions with Daylight Savings Director Dave Boyle
The indie film world doesn’t commonly produce sequels (Linklater and Solondz being the obvious exceptions), and it’s even rarer to see one come as quickly as Daylight Savings does. Returning to the characters he first explored in last year’s Surrogate Valentine, namely singer-songwriter Goh Nakamura, playing a fictionalized version of himself here, Savings premieres tonight in SXSW’s 24 Beats Per Second section. Valentine made waves at Southby last year, and paired with Boyle’s still-fresh 2009 offering White on Rice, the young director is quickly establishing himself as a prolific and exciting voice. Filmmaker: What inspired you to follow-up Surrogate Valentine […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Mar 10, 2012 -
Five Questions with Pilgrim Song Director Martha Stephens
A winding, ephemeral jaunt through the Appalachian backwoods, Pilgrim Song is so well-executed and carefully made that it almost appears effortless. The film follows James, a recently unemployed music teacher who decides to spend his first days of unemployment questing down Kentucky’s Sheltowee Trace Trail. Through a series of vignettes, director Martha Stephens gets at the psychological roots for James’ trek, roots which have as much to do with a desire to escape as with loftier transcendental ideals. In the film’s latter half, as James forms an unexpected bond with a single father he meets along the trail, Pilgrim Song […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Mar 9, 2012 -
David Doernberg, 1967 – 2012
Production designer David Doernberg, who brought a sensitive, finely crafted and observant touch to many excellent independent films, died in New York on Friday after a battle with cancer. Doernberg began his career in the late ’80s/early ’90s working on music videos for bands like Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo and Superchunk. He quickly moved into independent features as a propmaster for films by Hal Hartley (Amateur), Daisy von Scherler Mayer (Party Girl) and Eric Schaeffer (If Lucy Fell). Soon after he became a production designer, bookending his career with films by Kelly Reichardt. He designed her 1994 debut film, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 5, 2012 -
THE 18TH ANNUAL SEDONA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
Although in the winter most Stateside independent filmmakers set their sites on Sundance and SXSW, while international directors target Rotterdam and Berlin, the cold hard reality is that the majority of cinema’s craftspeople aren’t going to have their labors of love accepted into even one of these fests. (Forget about being wined and dined by the Weinsteins.) That’s the bad news. The good news is that as indie fests increasingly become less populist and more Miramax-ish, regional festivals around the globe are looking to step up to the plate. I’ve covered a number of these homegrown events, many times basing […]
by Lauren Wissot on Mar 4, 2012 -
TRUE/FALSE 2012, PART ONE
Film festivals encourage connecting dots that don’t necessarily exist, a logical by-product of seeing four films a day. In covering this year’s installment of Columbia, Missouri’s True/False Film Festival (a lovely documentary festival whose actual atmosphere I’ll discuss in the next post), I’d like to accordingly divide the films into two broad categories. In the second post, I’ll talk about (very loosely/speciously categorized) personal, dewy stories of love; in this initial dispatch, I’d like to discuss films which look at lives regulated by top-down political decisions and climates. The most obvious example is Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s staggeringly well-controlled Abendland (“evening land”), […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 4, 2012 -
Una Noche at the Berlinale
Two weeks ago I was on the phone to a lab in Canada, who were holding our film, telling them that 6 lab rolls of Una Noche were missing. The movie was supposed to premiere in Berlin in a matter of days. I proceeded to go through every frame of footage in the NYC lab double-checking to see if the shots were there. They were not. I did not tell anybody. I did not want to believe it myself. When the colorist, Martin, told me that we might have to use black slates with “missing shot” written on them, my breathing spontaneously […]
by Lucy Mulloy on Mar 2, 2012 -
An Interview with Nick Flynn About Being Flynn
As a child growing up in Scituate, Massachusetts, Nick Flynn (pictured here at left and below with director Paul Weitz) was often left to explore on his own, and he got into varying degrees of trouble. Flynn’s parents were divorced and he had no contact with his father, living instead with his mother, who worked in a bakery. She remarried to a 21-year-old Viet Nam vet, and, after their divorce, Flynn wound up living with her and a new boyfriend — a member of one of the largest drug smuggling rings in New England. Around the age of 18 Flynn […]
by Alix Lambert on Mar 2, 2012 -
Justin Kurzel, The Snowtown Murders
For his harrowing debut feature, Australian director Justin Kurzel (Blue Tongue) took on a sensationalistic serial-murder case that rocked the northern suburbs of Adelaide in the early aughts. Known across the country as the “bodies in barrels” case, the Snowtown murders spurred controversy and launched a lengthy investigation that resulted in the conviction of a charismatic drifter, John Bunting, along with three accomplices, including a teenage boy he had taken under his wing. Attached to the project by Warp Films Australia’s Anna McLeish and Sarah Shaw, and working from a script by Shaun Grant, Kurzel brings psychological verisimilitude and a […]
by Damon Smith on Feb 29, 2012 -
Festival Cinematography Notes: Of Sundance, Berlin and the Canon 5D
Blogging from last year’s Sundance I wrote that “if I could give an award to the camera delivering the most impact on screen at Sundance 2011, it would go to RED One.” That was then. In the 12 months since, ARRI’s Alexa has all but conquered TV series production in the U.S., and now you can add a dozen low-budget indie films at Sundance too, like the bittersweet romcom Celeste and Jesse Forever, starring Rashida Jones and Andy Samberg and photographed by David Lanzenberg. Sony’s new budget-friendly F3 made a splash at Sundance as well, responsible for Spike Lee’s Red […]
by David Leitner on Feb 29, 2012 -
FILMMAKER READERS RECEIVE DISCOUNT TO ONLINE SCREENING OF “RETURN”
The IFP and Focus World are hosting a screening of the highly recommended drama Return, by Liza Johnson, on the online screening platform Constellation tonight. Filmmaker readers receive 25% off, and Johnson will be participating in a post-screening Q&A. From last week’s newsletter, here are the details. (And if you haven’t subscribed to our newsletter, why not? It’s free, and I write something special for it most weeks.) On the heels of its theatrical release earlier this month, IFP will be co-presenting with Focus World a special interactive screening of the feature film Return on Tuesday, February 28th – presented […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 28, 2012
