I was one of the judges for this year’s Wookbook Project Discovery and Distribution Award, which grants one lucky film a week-long theatrical run in L.A. with social media, street team and PR support. That run begins this week, September 16, at the Downtown Independent Theater, and the film is Connor Horgan’s character-based post-apocalyptic drama, One Hundred Mornings. All this week we’ll have blog posts from producer Katie Holly and Horgan here at Filmmakermagazine.com. Below is Holly’s first post on the producing of the film. — Scott Macaulay One Hundred Mornings was made for a tenth of the budget that […]
“It’s so strange we remain friends,” said Errol Morris at one point in his dialogue with fellow director Werner Herzog at the Toronto International Film Festival Monday. During their hour-long conversation at the new Bell Lightbox, the two men spoke of many things — filmmaking, of course, but also reading, music, the Warren Commission report, and actors vs. non-actors (Morris: “In my more spurious moments I’ve said that the main difference between SAG actors and real people is that real people can act”). But mostly they engaged in a kind of digressive contemplation inflected by occasional bouts of one-upmanship — […]
Toronto, the IFP Filmmaker Conference hot on its heels, the New York Film Festival, and, for us, the close of our Fall issue — the season has begun. We’ve already begun work on the magazine, and I’m getting ready to go Toronto, where I’ll join Howard Feinstein and Livia Bloom contributing to the magazine and blog. Of course, the best part of any festival experience is the serendipitous discovery, the word-of-mouth gem you were tipped to or the film you randomly walked into that turned out to be great. I hope to be telling you about some of those over […]
Ten years ago, François Ozon’s dark, Hitchcock-tinged melodrama See the Sea caught the attention of American film critics. The New York Times’ Janet Maslin marked him as “an impressive new filmmaker with a flair for implicit mayhem.” In the 12 features since then, Ozon has expressed his mayhem in various genres (musicals, fairy tales, magical realism, period romances, etc.), with different cinematic influences (Chabrol, Fassbinder, Renoir, Pasolini, etc.) and in a range of production scales. But central to all his films is a deep sense of the essentially conflicted nature of emotional relations, be it the comic sadomasochism of Water […]
Here are a few articles, links and videos that caught my eye this week: The shape of documentaries to come may be revealed by Prison Valley, which won the second FRANCE24-Radio France International Web Documentary Award last week. From France 24’s article about the new media doc by David Dufresne and Philippe Brault: Created by David Dufresne and Philippe Brault, the striking multimedia production takes viewers to the heart of Canon City, “a distant place that is home to 36,000 souls and 13 prisons.” Produced by the French company Upian and distributed by Arte.tv, Prison Valley, is an interactive journey […]
I loved Jeff Mizushima’s delicate, entirely charming, and vaguely emo-ish Etienne! when I saw it last year after its CineVegas premiere. I wound up putting Jeff in our “25 New Faces” simply because the film’s sensibility seemed so different to me. I also loved its formally-bold second-half narrative shift and director Caveh Zahedi’s last-reel appearance in a scene that could have been taken from a Peter Handke novel. The film receives its East Coast premiere at the Brooklyn gastropub theater reRun beginning tomorrow for a one-week run. You can reserve tickets here. Here’s what I wrote last year: Writer-director Jeff […]
Not many first-time independent filmmakers land a coveted spot in the Sunday arts section of The New York Times and an interview on The Leonard Lopate Show. But 33-year-old Lixin Fan, a Chinese-born Canadian immigrant who splits his time between Montreal and Beijing, has generated a lot of interest among editors at major dailies and business publications alike for his documentary Last Train Home, a film about the annual New Year’s pilgrimage of 130 million migrant workers from Guangzhou province to their homes and seldom-seen families in the rural provinces. China’s status as an economic powerhouse regularly makes front-page […]
Here is part two of Rachel Libert’s diaries from the Sundance Labs. Read part one here. The busloads of people arriving at the Sundance Resort for the Creative Producing Summit signaled the end of the Creative Producing Lab. Twenty narrative producers, twenty documentary producers and dozens of high-level industry representatives are sequestered in the privacy of the Wasatch Mountains. We’re participating in an information marathon. We are a think tank in which our collective brainpower evaluates the industry and its future. For the Documentary Creative Producing Lab fellows there’s a palpable shift from our tight knit group discussions about the […]
For Claudia Llosa, director of the Berlinale-winning and Academy Award-nominated Peruvian film The Milk of Sorrow, magical realism isn’t a literary genre or filmic device, it’s an element of national identity and consciousness. Her film, easily the most critically-lauded film to emerge from Peru, is set in the rough-hewn mountain settlements on the outskirts of Lima. It concerns a young Peruvian woman (the captivating Magaly Solier) who, having contracted a mysterious disease that is passed on via breast milk to the daughters of rape victims taken by soliders serving Peru’s deposed terrorist regime, sets out to bury her newly deceased […]
Here is the first of two filmmaker reports filed from the just-finished Sundance Producer’s Lab. Reporting back here is Amy Lo. The Sundance Lab was my rehab. In the most transformative, astonishing way. Here we are, Day One, four fellow Fellows and me gathered up from parts east, west and south, hurtling up the hill, forward-pressing and fueled by anxious hope. We come to a sudden stop, a moment to inhale and exhale. High-elevation, low-oxygen. Rising disorientation. The Sundance Creative Producing Lab spans five days of project-focused tough love, naked honesty, catharsis and renewal. All framed by breath-taking mountainous isolation. […]