An observational documentary that utterly transports you to a forgotten corner of the American West, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash’s Sweetgrass is billed as a glimpse at the final sheep drive the state of Montana ever hosted. Shot in muddy, early aughts DV, this often funny, occasionally terrifying and almost always beautifully composed film follows a pair of modern shepherds who travel mostly on foot with three thousand sheep over a two hundred mile Montana expanse that cuts across the seemingly unending Absaroka-Beartooth Mountains. Without the use of voiceover narration or title cards, the film allows you to soak in […]
To try to recall your favorite films from an entire decade (and then to limit them to only ten titles) is to immediately set yourself up for uncertainty and ridicule: first off because it’s hard enough to remember what you saw ten days ago, much less ten years ago, and secondly because to limit the list to ten is to leave hundreds of excellent films out, titles that you’ll undoubtedly get bludgeoned to death with through later feedback (“You blithering idiot~pretentious snob~Hollywood tool! How could you leave out Judd Apatow~Jean-Luc Godard~Abbas Kiarostami~McG,” read the heated responses to already posted lists). […]
Topping the Korean box office is no small feat for a first-time filmmaker, given the perennial offerings of sassy romantic comedies and vivid, attention-grabbing genre flicks from this nation’s impressive stable of film artists. It’s even more improbable when you’ve made a no-frills documentary (not so popular in South Korea) for less than $150,000 about the relationship between an elderly farmer and his aged ox. But a few months after it hit the market at the 2008 Pusan International Film Festival, where it won the best documentary award, Lee Chung-ryoul’s Old Partner became one of the most successful indies in […]
I am reprinting below a letter I received from Joana Vicente, Acting Director of the IFP, which publishes this magazine. Please consider joining the IFP and taking part in its activities over the coming year. It has been a time of many changes in the independent film scene; both scary and exciting. Through it all, independent filmmakers of all stripes keep pushing forward, making great work that moves, inspires, and amuses countless people around the world. It has been a year of changes at IFP as well. After 12 years at IFP’s helm, Executive Director, Michelle Byrd, stepped down to […]
Anthony Kaufman’s current Village Voice piece, “New York’s Independent Film Community Goes from Boom to Bust: My Big Fat Greek Collapse,” has some good quotes that speak to the changes the indie film world has gone through this past decade. I’m not one to periodize things too much by saying that things were once X and now they are Y. Independent film has always been too multi-headed a hydra, and the business plans that a distributor talks about were often ones that didn’t have much to do with the majority of actual makers. That said, on decade’s end it’s clear […]
Absurdists at heart, Belgian animators Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar have spent two decades perfecting their hilariously antic brand of fantastic, faux-naïve humor. After graduating from La Cambre, the School of Visual Arts in Brussels, the duo created a popular hand-animated series entitled Pic Pic Andre Shoow, about the adventures of a magic pig and an evil, beer-swilling horse, which first debuted as an award-winning short film in 1988, and was then expanded into a three-part festival fave. In 2000, the pair decided to revisit a stop-motion short Aubier had made as his graduation film, using the most rudimentary materials […]
Several days after Paramount surprised the indie world with the announcement of a new division aimed at producing $100,000 micro-budget films, the studio’s Paramount Digital Entertainment (PDE) arm announced the pick-up of Barbara Schroeder’s indie doc, tallhotblond, Best Doc winner at the Seattle Film Festival. The film was repped by New York-based Submarine Entertainment and, reports Jeremy Kay in Screen Daily, the deal “is the first of its kind for the division.” He continues, PDE “will make the film available through download-to-own digital distributors including iTunes and Amazon following the broadcast premiere on MSNBC on December 13.” More: “talhotblond is […]
Is the sky no longer falling? Off the huge success of the low-budget Paranormal Activity, Paramount has decided to launch a division dedicated to movies budgeted at less than $100,000. According to the Los Angeles Times the studio plans to finance as many as 20 micro-budget movies annually starting in 2010. The division will not acquire films at film festivals or markets and its $2 million annual budget will be taken from Paramount’s existing production budget. Though studios have tried and failed at doing boutique arms in the past, Paramount says not all of the projects in this division will […]
Opening with a blistering, misogynistic monologue by Caleb (a terrific Adam Scott), a newly unemployed construction worker who’s recent breakup has left him with an unquenchable hate for all things feminine, The Vicious Kind seems to announce its intentions very quickly: dramatizing the bitterness of a young, damaged man and the toll his misanthropy exacts on his small, middle class New England family over one long holiday weekend as his virginal brother (Peter Frost) and his gothy, bright eyed girlfriend (Brittany Snow) also return for Thanksgiving. However, as it slowly unwinds, The Vicious Kind reveals a family torn apart by […]
So you didn’t get into Sundance…. I’m sorry. Trust me, I feel your pain. As a producer I’ve received both the acceptance calls as well as the rejection ones. (Actually, the rejection call is sometimes not even a call, but a form email or letter.) In some cases, I’ve known that the film probably didn’t have much of a shot, although in others, the rejection came as a shock — one that threw our director and production team into a quandary over the film’s future direction. So, what do you do if your film didn’t get into Sundance? The first […]