6580 Results for “production”
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Sarah Friedland
Filmmaker and choreographer Sarah Friedland describes herself as “working at the intersection of moving images and moving bodies,” an apt encapsulation of an evolving artistic practice spanning experimental film, video installations and, now, features. Realized from 2017 to 2022, Friedland’s Movement Exercises Trilogy consists of three short films exploring the ways in which movement contextualized within specific settings encodes personal, social and political meanings. The first of the trilogy, Home Exercises, depicts older adults navigating the tasks and habits of daily living. Drills focuses on the choreographies of school and workplace preparedness exercises, referencing 1917 Boy Scouts drills as well […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Mackie Mallison
In short, experimental portraits of Asian American immigrant families, including his own, the mixed American Japanese filmmaker Mackie Mallison features conversations with older relatives conducted by their younger kin. In It Smells Like Springtime (2022), the subject is Chinese American jeweler Ada Chen—how her relationship to her parents and her work intertwine with rampant stereotypes she faces in the United States. With Live From the Clouds (2023), the focus is on the filmmaker’s Texas-based extended family and the long distance that separates them from their relatives in Japan. Incorporating home movies, animations, voiceovers and superimpositions, Mallison’s nonfiction work brings family […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Ben Brewer
“I’m not a big visual effects guy,” says Ben Brewer. “I just think of it as a democratizing tool. There’s no reason why we have to watch Star Wars—anyone with a laptop and access to YouTube can literally make Star Wars.” Or, in Brewer’s case, A Folded Ocean, which premiered at this year’s Sundance in the midnight shorts program. Ocean presents a couple who swoon around each other with an almost unbearably cloying closeness that goes from metaphorical to literal when they wake up one morning to find themselves fused at the arm. The two grow increasingly inseparable, a process […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Playing Politics: Developing the Best-Selling Board Game Shasn
I have made two feature documentaries in my home country of India. The second, While We Watched, came out on the same day as “Barbenheimer” and just finished a month-long run at the IFC Center in New York. The first one, An Insignificant Man, which I co-directed with Khushboo Ranka, ran in theaters across India for nine weeks. However, my most commercially successful project isn’t either of these—it’s a board game, Shasn (“Governance,” created by Zain Memon), that was born out of An Insignificant Man’s impact campaign and has been sold in more than 75 countries across the world today, […]
by Vinay Shukla on Sep 20, 2023 -
Faye Tsakas
Before the pandemic, Faye Tsakas worked for the distributor FilmRise and then the production company Passage Pictures. “I had a lot of loans coming out of school,” she explains of her pragmatically motivated choice to work in development, acquisitions and packaging. “I had a great time working on steady jobs that allowed me to learn about how the industry worked and to interact with filmmakers. I spent many years paying off loans and saving money and was sent to festivals in my acquisitions job—almost like a paid film school.” After she lost her job during the pandemic, Tsakas moved in […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Jane M. Wagner
During the winter holiday break in 2015, Jane M. Wagner found herself unable to defeat a difficult boss in Nintendo 64’s Diddy Kong Racing. Viewing YouTube tutorials on how to advance to the next level, Wagner was introduced to the concept of speedrunning—the act of progressing through a video game in record time via advanced techniques or by taking advantage of glitches in the game’s code. A financially lucrative endeavor thanks to Twitch viewers’ support, speedrunning found one of its greatest overachievers in Narcissa Wright, a transwoman known for speedrunning through games in The Legend of Zelda series with unprecedented […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Juliana Barreto Barreto
Juliana Barreto Barreto’s two most recent projects—Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt and Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama—demonstrate the versatility of her work as a production designer. Jackson’s film, an expressionist portrait of Black life in Mississippi, called for Barreto to employ a “macro yet hyper-close frame” when it came to designing the film’s lush visual landscape; for Earth Mama, however, Leaf provided Barreto with “a bible of research” so that she could nail the specificity of Oakland, California, circa 2006. Both films are distinct yet not entirely dissimilar, centering on Black women who navigate tumult while being enriched […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Bright Moments: St. Clair Bourne’s Formative Years on Black Journal
St. Clair Bourne was a photographer, journalist, publisher of the newsletter Chamba Notes, founder of Black Documentary Collective and BADWest, mentor, teacher, cameraman, producer and pioneering documentary director. Bourne’s filmmaking career includes work for public television, beginning at Black Journal in 1968 through 1999’s Paul Robeson: Here I Stand, as well as films made through Chamba Mediaworks, his production company, focusing on people and subjects from all aspects of Black social and political life, including Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, John Henrik Clarke, Chicago blues music, Northern Ireland, education and religion, among hundreds of topics. MoMA’s restoration of his 1983 film The Black and the Green, which […]
by St. Clair Bourne on Sep 20, 2023 -
Rachel Walden
Rachel Walden’s 17-minute Lemon Tree, which premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in May, centers on a young boy (Gordon Rocks) whose innocence crumbles during what should be an idyllic autumnal road trip with his father (Charlie Chaspooley Robinson). After stealing a magician’s white rabbit at a county fair (a scene scored to 311’s rap-rock tune “Down”) and winning a hefty sum from a scratch-off ticket, dad celebrates a rare winning streak by plunging into a drug- and booze-induced bender (preceded by Cake’s ’90s alt-anthem “The Distance”), forcing the son to face his father’s unobscured parental follies. Walden’s sole previous directorial […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023 -
Alex Prager
Alex Prager was 20, playing drums in an LA band and having what she calls “a life crisis.” “I thought, ‘This cubicle I’m in, these jobs I have to take on the weekend to pay for my rent and food, aren’t ever going to change. How can I make sure this is not the life I end up with?’” At the Getty Museum, a William Eggleston photograph of dust-covered brown shoes underneath a bed provided an unexpected answer. “I had a physical reaction [to the photograph],” she recalls, “like I had found meaning in my life.” Six months of street […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 20, 2023
