While in Rotterdam for the festival I caught up with director and producer Tommy Pallotta, who recently a) finished a new doc, American Prince, that will premiere at SXSW next month; b) moved to Amsterdam where he is engaged to Femke Wolting of the cross-media production studio Submarine; and c) left Facebook. The first two life events, of course, are far more interesting than the third, but Pallotta’s departure from the world of social networking is what we decided to talk about for the purposes of this short interview for the blog. As a director/producer, Pallotta has always explored the […]
The Purchase Brothers are a pair of independent filmmakers and commercial directors whose online short, Escape from City 17, premiered this weekend and is the first in a series based on the Half Life computer game. On YouTube the short has already reached almost one million views, and the film’s production values on what they say is a $500 budget are quite impressive. From their website: The Escape From City 17 short film series is an adaptation based on the Half Life computer game saga by Valve Corporation. Originally envisioned as a project to test out numerous post production techniques, […]
Thanks to Jamie Stuart for this link to Unfolding the Aryan Papers, a 17-minute short available online that is a riff on a planned but never made film by the late Stanley Kubrick. As the film is described on the site, “Unfolding the Aryan Papers is as much about a film that never happened as it is a portrait of the chosen lead actress Johanna ter Steege.” It was commissioned by Animate Projects and the BFI with the Stanley Kubrick Archives, University of the Arts London. From the artists’ statement: It begins with images of Johanna taken in 1993 by […]
Because our Winter, 2009 issue went up online during the Sundance Film Festival, I think some of what’s in it has been slightly overlooked by the blogosphere. One article I want to point you towards is Lance Weiler’s “Virtual Discovery.” It looks at some of the ways that creators are building audiences by embracing collaborative models of marketing and even production. Weiler also discusses the importance of data portability — the ability for filmmakers to take the aggregated info about their audiences from online platform to online platform. Why is this important? From the piece: The real strength of data […]
CLIVE OWEN AND NAOMI WATTS IN DIRECTOR TOM TYKWER’S THE INTERNATIONAL. COURTESY COLUMBIA PICTURES. German writer-director Tom Tykwer, arguably one of the most exciting auteurs in world cinema, has been immersed in movies since he was a child and always seemed destined to become a director. Born in the town of Wuppertal in 1965, by the age of 11 Tykwer had picked up a Super 8 camera and begun making films. At the age of 14, he got a job at Cinema, the local arthouse theater, where he would stay after hours, repeatedly watching Blade Runner. After completing his compulsory […]
The line up for this year’s New Directors/New Films was announced moments ago. The opening film will be Cherien Dabis’s Amreeka and Lee Daniels’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning film Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire is the closing film. The full list of titles are below. ND/NF will be held at NYC’s Museum of Modern Art and The Film Society of Lincoln Center March 25 – April 5. OPENING NIGHT Amreeka Cherien Dabis, USA/Canada/Kuwait, 2009; 96m Cherien Dabis’s humanist miracle of a first film chronicles the bittersweet adjustment to a multicultural way of life after Muna, a single […]
As I posted below, New York has run out of money to fund its film and televsion tax credit program. In a New York Post article entitled “TV and Film Tax Credit Program, Hollywood on the Hudson, Runs Out of Money,” Governor Patterson’s office is quoted as saying that the budget due to be presented in April does not include further funds for the program. From the Post: When the program was begun in 2004, the state budgeted $425 million to fund its share of tax credits through 2013. But the funds were used up faster than expected, due in […]
Filmmaker David Lowery keeps one of the most literate film blogs out there, Drifting: A Director’s Log, and one topic that has popped up from time to time is his feature film, St. Nick. The film will be premiering at SXSW next month, and now Lowery has posted the first trailer. Check it out. ST. NICK trailer from ST NICK on Vimeo.
Emerging U.S. producers have until Friday to put together their application for the Sundance Creative Producing Initiative, perhaps the only non film-school program of its kind. It is described on the web page like this: SUNDANCE CREATIVE PRODUCING INITIATIVE The Sundance Creative Producing Initiative is a year-long creative and strategic fellowship program for emerging American producers with their next project. The program was conceived to develop and support the next generation of American independent producers. For over 27 years, the Sundance Institute has offered in-depth year-round programs for feature screenwriters and directors. In an increasingly competitive and complex marketplace, the […]
Stripped from the version of the economic stimulus bill being sent to the Senate for vote are two provisions that affect the film community. First, a bill offering a tax break for film production that appeared in the House version was cut, and, second, increased funding for the National Endowment for the Arts was eliminated. Jim Puzzanghera reports in the Los Angeles Times, explaining that the film provision consisted of a bonus depreciation tax break allowing investors to take an immediate 50% write-off on projects begun in 2009. (Here I need the help of some of our regular tax-break-savvy readers […]