Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed Burma VJ director Anders Østergaard for our Director Interviews section of the Website. Burma VJ is nominated for Best Documentary. Danish cinema currently has numerous talented fiction directors – everybody from Lars von Trier, Christopher Boe, Ole Bornedal, and Susanne Bier to Thomas Vinterberg, Kristian Levring, Nicolas Winding Refn and Lone Scherfig – and now Anders Østergaard is bringing attention to the country’s documentary output. Born in Copenhagen […]
Returning to the Anthology Film Archives following an opening night event at Kush Lounge is Cinekink NYC. No rebel posturing here, just an eclectic selection of docs, fiction and experimental works dealing with some form of alternative sexuality. This year’s fest kicks off tonight at Kush Lounge with an opening party and screenings of JX Williams 1964 short, The 400 Blow Jobs. According to the catalogue, “While banished to the Hollywood blacklist, JX Williams wrote and directed over 200 stag films in the 1950s and 60s, including this wicked homage to Francois Truffaut.” Also on the bill: Loretta Hintz’s Sheep […]
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Jason Guerrasio interviewed The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus co-writer-director Terry Gilliam for our Winter 2010 issue. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is nominated for Best Art Direction (Art Director: Dave Warren and Anastasia Masaro; Set Decoration: Caroline Smith) and Best Costume Design (Monique Prudhomme). An elderly man pulls his carriage to the curb and prepares to put on a show. Onlookers watch with a mixture of bewilderment and vague familiarity; the […]
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Jason Guerrasio interviewed Food, Inc. director Robert Keener for our Spring 2009 issue. Food, Inc. is nominated for Best Documentary. As the grill sizzles in the background a waitress rattles off the specials of the day when a voice interrupts her. “I think I’ll have a hamburger,” says the man looking up from his menu. Sitting at a diner counter in Anywhere, USA, the order comes from the most unlikely of […]
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Livia Bloom interviewed Bright Star writer-director Jane Campion for our ’09 Toronto Film Festival coverage. Bright Star is nominated for Best Costume Design (Janet Patterson). Chaste is not a word often associated with the films of Jane Campion. From the boudoirs of The Portrait of a Lady to the rough frontier bedrooms of The Piano (1993), Campion is known for her steamy, sultry visions of intimacy. But in her latest film, […]
Filmmaker Miao Wang, a Beijing native now based in Brooklyn, is currently racing to finish her feature doc Beijing Taxi in time for SXSW, where it’s scheduled to world premiere. She needs to raise $11,000 to cover post-production expenses and is just under half way there with five days left to go at Kickstarter. From the Kickstarter page: BEIJING TAXI is a feature length documentary that vividly portrays Beijing undergoing a profound transformational arch. Through a humanistic lens, the intimate lives of three taxi drivers connect a morphing city confronted with modern issues and changing values. With diverse imagery combined […]
Leading up to the Oscars on March 7, we will be highlighting the nominated films that have appeared in the magazine or on the Website in the last year. Nick Dawson interviewed Il Divo writer-director Paolo Sorrentino for our Director Interviews section of the Website. Il Divo is nominated for Best Makeup (Aldo Signoretti and Vittorio Sodano). If Paolo Sorrentino represents the future of Italian cinema, then the country’s filmic output certainly should be exciting in years to come. The highly accomplished writer-director was born in Naples in 1970, and first became involved in filmmaking in the mid-90s when he […]
Indie film champions are often fond of comparing what we do to indie music. If bands can tour, why can’t we? If bands can sell merch, then we should too. If recording artists can form boutique labels, then why can’t film distributors? Like, for example, Oscilloscope, the film label of Beastie Boy Adam Yauch. At Flavorwire, Judy Berman takes this assumption to task in a piece called “Why is Indie Film Dying While Indie Music Thrives?” She bases her assessment of indie film’s slow-motion death on Edward Jay Epstein’s “Can Indie Movies Survive?”, which I found to be a pretty […]
The following interview of Quentin Tarantino originally appeared as the cover story of Filmmaker‘s Summer, 2009 edition. Quentin Tarantino fans have been waiting for almost a decade now for a project he’s discussed in interviews — a World War II-set, Dirty Dozen-style “men on a mission” movie. Big-name actors have been brought up, an epic-length storyline has been mentioned, and many imagined this project to be a return to the macho camaraderie of Tarantino’s first film, Reservoir Dogs, with the warehouse expanded into the world at war. Of course this project’s journey to the screen has had as many plot […]
In the new issue of Filmmaker, Esther Robinson penned “The Big Art/Little Debt Plan,” which discusses the relation of filmmakers to risk, their films, and their money. She reached out to several filmmakers by email, and their responses helped shape her article. We are running several of the responses Esther received here on the blog. Below is the one from Paola Mendoza, director of Entre Nos. What strategies did you employ to stay no/low debt during your production? My strategy was pretty simple: I refused to go into debt. While making art is the essence of who I am, I […]