6580 Results for “production”
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Editor’s Letter
I can’t think of a better film to grace the cover of the final issue of Filmmaker’s 30th anniversary year than Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama. From its opening scenes, it impresses as a work of classic independent cinema—social realism shot through with unexpected creative flourishes and informed by the personal life experience of its maker. A version of this film might have been made in each of Filmmaker’s three decades, but with different emphases, of course, and perhaps under very different circumstances. The story of this one—a U.K./U.S. production backed by Channel 4 and A24—was told last issue by Anthony […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 27, 2023 -
Life (And Work) After Film School
When I graduated film school after years of grueling work, I really felt like my university should have rolled out a cannon and launched me directly at the Hollywood sign. With my diploma in hand, the industry was my oyster. I knew everything there was to know—I thought. Instead, it was as if somebody had forgotten to aim the cannon properly, because it felt like I was hurled at a brick wall, Looney Tunes style. As stars and birds circled my head, I thought, “Now hang on—wasn’t film school supposed to be a literal launchpad into the industry? Didn’t I […]
by William Connor Devlin on Jun 27, 2023 -
“The Nature of Global Capitalism is Such that [Stories About] Gay Sexuality Are More and More Difficult to Finance”: Passages Director Ira Sachs in Conversation with Stephen Winter
The following interview with director Ira Sachs by director Stephen Winter was published in Filmmaker’s Summer, 2023 issue and is being reposted today as Sachs’s film Passages arrives in theaters from MUBI. There are acclaimed films about filmmakers set during production—Fellini’s 8 1/2, Truffaut’s Day for Night and Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore, to name three. But there are far fewer set during what might be an even more psychologically fraught time: post-production. For some directors, it’s when a film wraps that things become unstable. The ersatz family of cast and crew retreat, the militarized schedule lessens somewhat and […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jun 27, 2023 -
A New Kind of Cinematograph: New Filmmakers at the AI Film Festival
We see a childhood photograph nearly centered in the frame on a black backdrop. In the photograph, a boy of three or four years of age smiles inside the bathtub with his two dogs. A few seconds later, the black screen around the photograph becomes part of the photograph; the image expands and the rest of the room is revealed. Everything looks familiar and slightly off at the same time. The tiles are slightly skewed, as if the wall has melted. The shape of the bathtub looks normal but perhaps larger than usual. There are suddenly three more dogs in […]
by Deniz Tortum on Jun 27, 2023 -
YouTube Film School
“How much time will you need for the shot-up?” the assistant director asks the DP. The DP looks at the grip crew for answers and responds, “Uh, 10 minutes?” “Shot-up in 10,” the AD announces to the crew. The DP isn’t sure how much time she’ll need because she isn’t sure how to use the lights she just rented. She had seen someone use them once before on set but had never used the new LED lights herself. So, to figure out how to use them on the fly, she does what many Gen-Z filmmakers do when we have questions—we […]
by Jacob Pincus on Jun 27, 2023 -
Peak TV is Over—What Comes Next?
Remember “Peak TV”? It was a good run, starting more than a decade ago with the launch of filmmaker-driven shows such as Lena Dunham’s Girls on HBO, David Fincher’s House of Cards on Netflix and Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake on Sundance Channel, not to mention episodic heavyweights like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Mad Men and The Walking Dead, all of which supplied steady work for a plethora of indie writers and directors. But that party is over—or at least taking a break. If the corporate mergers and media layoffs of the past year weren’t enough of a […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jun 27, 2023 -
Highlights from the Inaugural Edition of DC/DOX
“It’s so great that this festival is back again!” In one form or another, I kept hearing that phrase between June 15 to 18 at DC/DOX, a brand-new festival in the Washington, D.C. metro area. Sky Sitney, DC/DOX’s co-founder, was also a founder of the 1990s-born Silverdocs, a partnership between American Film Institute and Discovery Networks mourned by the entire doc community after it passed. Silverdocs morphed into AFI Docs when Discovery bailed, but AFI Docs was run out of AFI’s Los Angeles office and often seemed out of touch with DC. Meanwhile, Sitney co-founded a mini-festival, Double Exposure, with […]
by Patricia Aufderheide on Jun 23, 2023 -
“How Do You Evoke the History of Violence in a Space Without Showing It?”: Hannah Peterson on The Graduates
“She plans to continue working with ‘first-time performers in live settings’ and is developing a feature she hopes will be in production in the next year,” is how the profile of writer/director Hannah Peterson concluded for our 25 New Faces of Independent Film list in 2018. The Graduates, about a group of students returning to their high school one year after a mass shooting, is that feature, having just made its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival, winning Best Cinematography in a U.S. Narrative Feature for director of photography Carolina Costa. Co-starring John Cho, Maria Dizzia and Mina Sundwall, The […]
by Erik Luers on Jun 20, 2023 -
Tribeca Festival Announces 2023 Competition Winners
The Tribeca Festival announced competition winners for its 22nd annual edition during an awards ceremony yesterday at Racket NYC. Awards were presented in the following categories: Feature Film, Short Film, Audio Storytelling, Immersive, Games, Human / Nature, AT&T Untold Stories, and Tribeca X. So Young Shelly Yo’s Smoking Tigers and Guto Parente’s A Strange Path swept U.S. and International Narrative categories, while Andrew H. Brown and Moses Thuranira’s Between the Rains won two out of four awards in the Documentary Competition. Several of this year’s award winners have been covered on the Filmmaker site, including The Gullspång Miracle (Best Editing […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jun 16, 2023 -
Trailer Watch: Noah Schamus’s Summer Solstice
World premiering tomorrow at the Provincetown Film Festival is Summer Solstice, the debut feature of writer/director Noah Schamus, which previously was included in the 2022 US in Progress work-in-progress coproduction forum. The filmmakers have just released a teaser trailer — watch it above. And here’s the description from the Provincetown program book. Leo, a trans man, and his cis and straight friend, Eleanor, go away for an impromptu weekend trip, during which they uncover old secrets, new challenges, and find the answer to the age-old question: can bad sex and good friends mix? Writer-director Noah Schamus’s funny, melancholic feature debut […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jun 15, 2023
