Dee Rees’s debut feature, Pariah, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this month with a free screening and Q&A hosted by the Academy Museum. Rees, who first appeared in Filmmaker when she was selected for our 2008 25 New Faces, was interviewed upon the film’s release by Brandon Harris. That interview, originally dated November 18, 2011, is reposted below. The free screening of Pariah is viewable until May 20. — Editor With Pariah, a buoyant tale of a young, middle-class New York lesbian’s tough coming-of-age amid the class and cultural proxy battles that simmer within black America, lauded newcomer Dee Rees […]
If you’ve been following A Year Without Rent on a regular basis, you no doubt are aware that the second month has been plagued by a rash of last-minute cancellations that, among other things, stranded the car in long-term parking at an airport. It was expensive. It’s been a frustrating month, and that frustration boiled over the other day in a blog post titled “Get Your Shit Together”, the basic premise being that a lot of filmmakers, being so hell-bent on being artists, forget that they’re essentially running a small business. And, like a small business owner, they have employees […]
From an email from director, actress and producer Amy Seimetz: I am making my next feature– Sun Don’t Shine. I have started a ChipIn site for it. 10% of the funds raised will be donated to a shelter for abused women and children in Florida, which I volunteered at in high school. Feel free to donate what you can or pass it along. You can read more about the film and donate here. …And yes– our donation to the shelter is a hint to the plot. Here’s more from the film’s website, which contains a blog with updates on the […]
(Lord Byron opens on Friday, May 6, 2011, at the reRun Gastropub in Dumbo. Read Zack Godshall’s “Revolution and Apocalypse: The Lord Byron Manifesto” if you haven’t already, then visit the film’s official website to learn more.) Zack Godshall’s Lord Byron was not shot on the Canon 5D (aka, the everybody’s-using-it-so-you-should-too-consumer-grade-Digital-SLR-camera-of-the-very-moment !). Instead, Godshall used a Sony Z1U that he purchased all the way back in 2005 (the horror!). This means that the movie’s images were captured at a 29.97 frame rate, as opposed to the more cinematic 23.98. Which is to say that this 2011 narrative feature has a […]
“Matthew, don’t allow yourself to ask “Why is he doing this to me?” Wonder why is he doing this to himself.” The blown-to-hell chaos of productions like Apocalypse Now, Fitzcarraldo and Jaws are often evoked as legendary examples of disasters turned into classic motion pictures, but after reading Matthew Modine’s Full Metal Jacket Diary, I get the feeling that was par for Stanley Kubrick. It’s one thing to hear stray anecdotes about life on his films, but it’s something quite different to swim through a first-person account of an entire project — an account that isn’t even a memoir but […]
Few documentary filmmakers’ careers are as fascinating to follow as that of Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room), and that’s not just because of the consistent quality of his films, but because of the astonishing rate at which he produces them. In the midst of three other projects — an untitled Wikileaks documentary in pre-production; The Road Back, about Lance Armstrong, in post-production; and the newly completed Magic Bus, about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters — Gibney was at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival with his sports documentary Catching Hell, which […]
Tonight at the W Hotel Union Square the winners of the 10th Tribeca Film Festival‘s competition categories were announced, with the grand prize in the international narrative competition going to Lisa Aschan‘s She Monkeys (pictured), an evocative Swedish thriller about the burgeoning, sexually explosive rivalry between a pair of teenage girls engrossed in the world of competitive equestrian acrobatics. Both a daring coming of age tale and an increasingly tense thriller, the Danish born Aschan’s directorial debut made its North American premiere at Tribeca after winning the best new Nordic film prize at last year’s Goteberg Film Festival. Alma Har’el stunningly […]
As someone who is couch surfing with family and non-blood relatives throughout Europe and the States since I can no longer afford to pay rent, staying in high-end digs on a beautiful beach and lounging around in 80-plus weather during the day while covering the Miami International Film Festival recently was equal parts ironic and surreal. So it was something of a happy accident that while visiting my Tucson-residing best friend from high school I stumbled upon a poster advertising the Arizona International Film Festival. Since I was in town anyhow I figured I might as well check out a […]
Although Clio Barnard’s new film The Arbor chronicles the rough-and-tumble life of celebrated British playwright Andrea Dunbar (Rita, Sue and Bob Too), an alcoholic who died from a brain hemorrhage at age 29, it is anything but conventional in its aims and methodology. Shot in and around Brafferton Arbor, a street on the Buttershaw Estate in Bradford, Yorkshire, where Dunbar lived and worked while raising her three children, The Arbor reconstructs the late writer’s gritty milieu through the testimony of her eldest daughter Lorraine and other family members, whose words are lip-synched by professional actors in evocative set-designed environments. Barnard, […]
The ending of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out hits you in the chest like a hammer. It’s not supposed to be this way; American studio movies don’t end like that. But of course it’s the heartbreaking denouement that has partially helped to make the film endure in the 30 intervening years since its commercially disastrous release, though one can certainly fathom how it alienated audiences at the time (for the record, some critics were passionate defenders; it’s just that most viewers don’t savor being implicated in the spectacle of violence as it is quickly transformed into tragedy). As De Palma […]