There’s a moment early in director Brian Vincent and producer Heather Spore’s documentary Make Me Famous when the ’80s downtown New York artist Edward Brezinski is described by the late artist Duncan Hannah as the guy with the flyers. Brezinski would show up at openings, drink the cheap wine and press flyers for group shows at the Magic Gallery (his own barren apartment on East 3rd Street) into as many palms as possible. In a world where the most successful artists managed to self-promote while simultaneously adopting a pose of understated remove, Brezinski’s old-school hucksterism was memorably uncool. As the […]
With only 24 days to capture nearly 30 sketches, the average I Think You Should Leave bit is shot in roughly six to eight hours. That might be for the best. When you’re slopping up steaks or shooting body after body busting out of cheap wood and hitting pavement, probably wise not to linger at a location for too long. Cinematographer Markus Mentzer, who has been behind the camera for all three seasons of the Netflix show, breaks down the newest crop of sketches for Filmmaker. Filmmaker: Your first three camera department credits on IMDB are Out of Time, In […]
Announced as part of the 2023 Locarno International Film Festival lineup yesterday, the trailer arrives for Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude’s film Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Following 2021’s pandemic satire Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Jude’s latest feature takes its title from a quote by Polish poet Stanislaw Jerzy Lec and clocks in at 163 minutes. An official synopsis reads: Part One: We follow Angela, an overworked production assistant who must drive around the city of Bucharest in order to film the casting for a “safety at work” video commissioned by a multinational […]
Fantasia International Film Festival announces today the third wave of titles for its 2023 lineup, with first and second wave titles revealed earlier this spring. The 27th edition of the festival will run from July 20 through August 9 at Montreal’s Concordia Hall Cinema, with additional screenings to be held at the J.A. DeSève Cinema, Cinémathèque québécoise, and Cinéma du Musée. Pre-sale tickets will be available on Saturday, July 15 at 1pm EST. In the meantime, check out the full list of additional titles, panels, events and jurors at this year’s Fantasia, and visit the festival’s official website for more […]
Full Sail University’s accelerated film degree programs provide student filmmakers with the classes, technology, and educators they need to make their way in the industry. Film students learn to balance creative storytelling with technical skills for a comprehensive filmmaking education. Full Sail’s Film Degree Programs Full Sail’s film degrees are hands-on programs that are focused on providing students a wide range of experience in their industry. In the Film bachelor’s program, students tackle every step of the filmmaking process, from scriptwriting and set-building to camera setup and post-production. Each student takes on a key role or a crew role during dedicated film days, where they work together on set and experience a […]
Over the past 15 years, British filmmaker Jeanie Finlay has earned a reputation for nuanced, sensitive and compelling documentary portraits. Her films have told many unlikely stories: the rise and fall of a reluctant Elvis lookalike in Orion: The Man Who Would Be King, two Scottish hip hop fraudsters in The Great Hip Hop Hoax, a pregnant transgender man in Seahorse. Her third feature film, Sound it Out, told the story of the last record shop in the Northeast of England and its owner, Tom Butchart, a school friend of Finlay’s. The morning after the world premiere of Finlay’s latest […]
“It was a highly anticipated scene for me,” Hannah Gross told me with a laugh. “It’s just so absurd. For anyone who has a complicated relationship, spoken or unspoken, with a sibling, it’s the ideal scenario: to get to express your grievances through the safety of these voices.” I’d asked her about a memorable moment near the end of The Adults, Dustin Guy Defa’s follow-up to Person to Person (2017). Gross, Michael Cera and Sophia Lillis star as estranged siblings still reckoning with the death of their mother and still adjusting, unsuccessfully for the most part, to the disappointments of […]
Jody Lee Lipes likes to ask questions—so many, in fact, that the cinematographer says it can sometimes annoy directors. However, Lipes found a collaborator with an equally inexhaustible inquisitiveness in Savanah Leaf. “Savanah wanted to go through every scene together [during prep],” said Lipes. “I loved it because that’s my favorite thing to do. We would talk about a scene for like three hours. We went literally word by word through the script.” Lipes, whose credits include Manchester by the Sea, Martha Marcy May Marlene and I Know This Much Is True, first met Leaf on a commercial. They developed […]
The hyper-industrialization of the independent film space and the shift away from in-person screening to the vertically integrated streaming-sphere means that content curation is increasingly more general (massified), with fewer people participating in the process of sharing films with the public. In general, the U.S. A-list film festival circuit, where independent voices used to be able to thrive in more ragtag and aesthetically diverse ways, is now mostly a self-reflexive bourgeois echo chamber of sanctimonious gatekeepers serving corporate interests and neoliberal logics. Something has to change. Perhaps it’s time to turn away from the independent film industrial complex and toward […]
The restructuring of media conglomerates in the wake of streaming’s stagnating growth has left documentarians on shaky ground. Industry efforts to impress stockholders with cost-cutting measures and broad appeal entertainment have led to some high-profile layoffs in the nonfiction field and the sense among independents that there are few financing and distribution deals for formally experimental projects that challenge viewers’ political assumptions. So, what films are being made right now? What do alternative paths to exhibition look like? And how might thinking through the relationship between commercial and public media present possibilities for a more inclusive documentary culture on and […]