A typical route for an archetypal, coastal-based independent filmmaker might look something like this. First, one goes to film school, hopefully at either one of the well-known private universities in New York or Los Angeles (Columbia, NYU, USC) with large alumni networks, or at one of the big state schools with laudable programs (Texas at Austin, UCLA). Ideally one makes a killer short that catches the attention and gains the respect of the gatekeepers. These individuals, whether they are agents, sales reps, festival programmers or writers for Filmmaker, may help a new filmmaker get the recognition and reputation within the […]
When South Lebanon-born writer-director Rola Nashef started thinking about her film, Detroit Unleaded, there wasn’t much of a film scene in her home state of Michigan, independent or studio. Now, after several years of tax incentives and high-profile productions, she laughs, “I go to restaurants and hear people talking about their scripts.” But Nashef was inspired by Detroit long before the state’s recent production boom. The city didn’t just provide her debut feature’s location, but also its subject matter — specifically, the tales that come out of its Arab-American community. “Living within an Arab immigrant family, dating within the Arab-American […]
“Like a lot of partner dynamics, a healthy amount of arguing begins most of our working situations,” write Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia from Karlovy Vary, where their evocative debut feature, Ok, Enough, Goodbye, is receiving its European premiere. “There is yelling and calling each other names. Then we settle down and begin actually working. Perhaps what makes our process work is the fact that we are completely unafraid to be brutally honest with each other about our opinions regarding each other’s ideas.” Attieh, born in Tripoli, Lebanon, and Garcia, from South Texas, met in Texas in an undergrad drawing […]
In the middle of writing the follow up to his 2009 feature, St. Nick, David Lowery was stuck. “I reached a point in the script where it became very difficult,” Lowery remembers. “I was trying to make it an action movie, but I wasn’t sure why I wanted to make the story. So I did what I always do when I’m fed up, which is go for a run.” While jogging, Lowery plucked the seed of a scene from his script — a father talking to his daughter one night — and spun it out into something a little different: […]
Alison Klayman remembers the moment people knew she was really making a movie about Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. A Brown University graduate, Klayman had moved to Beijing with the intent of learning Mandarin and becoming a documentary filmmaker and journalist. “I bought my first camera there,” she remembers, “and was doing video for hire, trying to get into television.” In 2008 a friend asked her to make a short video to accompany a gallery show of Ai’s New York photography — shots of the artist and the downtown scene taken during his years living there in the 1980s. “My camera […]
Sophia Takal is engaged to filmmaker Lawrence Michael Levine and their roommate is actress Kate Lyn Sheil. After the three worked on Levine’s debut feature, Gabi on the Roof in July (Takal played the eponymous lead, and Sheil co-starred), Takal decided to make her own movie, which would explore the theme of jealousy. She cast rising star Sheil as an insecure bookstore clerk, Genevieve; Levine as Sebastian, her intellectually patronizing boyfriend; and herself as Robin, the offbeat, emotionally hungry local girl the couple meet when they rent a country cabin where Sebastian will document for his blog the planting of […]
It’s hard to create something original about the remix. Okay, that would seem to go without saying, but I’m not referring to the subject of the remix — I’m talking about the discourse surrounding it. From Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix to Brett Gaylor’s feature doc, RIP: A Remix Manifesto, the creative, social and political issues surrounding the rise of remix culture have been debated with brio. Paradoxically, then, the familiarity we have with the issue of remixing is precisely what makes Kirby Ferguson’s four-part Web series, Everything is a Remix, so compelling. Rather than push a copy-left agenda or hype […]
By the time Andrew S Allen and Jason Sondhi posted their latest short, The Thomas Beale Cipher, on the Internet, they had it all figured out. “There’s a myth about online video that you can just put it up and the masses will discover it, that it’s a meritocracy,” Allen says. “But that doesn’t always happen. There are great films online that only have 200 views.” Allen wrote and directed the animated film, Sondhi produced, and they both knew to do things like post it on multiple platforms at once and to immediately mobilize a community of video bloggers to […]
Blast! director Paul Devlin on the IRS’s battle with documentary filmmakers.