Originally published in the Summer 2010 issue. Only a few months after we selected her for last year’s “25 New Faces” list, writer-director Lena Dunham went into production on her second feature Tiny Furniture. Shot by fellow 2009 “25 New Faces” Jody Lee Lipes and produced by Filmmaker contributing editor Alicia Van Couvering and Kyle Martin, the film wound up winning the Grand Prize at 2010’s SXSW Film Festival and was picked up by IFC for distribution this fall. The film was shot on the Canon 7D, and we asked Lipes, focus puller Joe Anderson and Technicolor colorist Sam Daley […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Nov 17, 2011Over at Deadline Hollywood, Nikki Finke reports on The Weinstein Company’s announcement today that they will be appealing the MPAA’s “R” rating that they have bestowed on Amir Bar-Lev‘s doc The Tillman Story. The MPAA says they have given the rating based on the film’s excessive language. Granted, the Tillmans do throw out a lot of F-bombs in the film (and you may recall that the original title was I’m Pat F______ Tillman, which in fact are the last words Pat Tillman said before he was killed) but there’s a difference between a Kevin Smith profanity-laced film and this family’s […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Aug 11, 2010Select stories from our Summer issue are now available, including this year’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. (Read the press release here.) You can now read online our interviews with Amir Bar-Lev on his new doc, The Tillman Story; Gaspar Noe talks about his psychedelic look at the afterlife in Enter the Void; we look at the latest innovations in DSLR cameras; and some of our friends give their favorite apps, program and Web services. Plus, Lance Weiler’s Culture Hacker column focuses on transmedia while Anthony Kaufman’s Industry Beat looks at the realities of the Do It With Others […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jul 20, 2010It’s tempting to get distracted. It happens to filmmakers all the time. Concern over gear, building audiences, developing social media strategies, new tools, new services. The promise of transmedia (the ability for a story to live beyond a single screen, device or medium) offers such rich storytelling potential. But for some it will become yet another distraction. Case in point: After a recent speaking engagement I was approached by a group of filmmakers. Some were trying to figure out the value of transmedia while others said with a sense of pride that they’d designed the perfect transmedia experience, as if […]
by Lance Weiler on Jul 20, 2010Beginning with the dying moments of a young drug dealer in Tokyo, Gaspar Noé travels deep into our subconscious to explore what happens after we Enter the Void.
by Brandon Harris on Jul 20, 2010In his gripping documentary, The Tillman Story, Amir Bar-Lev investigates the cover-up of the death of football star turned Army Ranger Pat Tillman.
by Jason Guerrasio on Jul 20, 2010
Filmmaker and its friends recommend our favorite apps, programs and Web services.
It’s been nearly two years since Canon, Nikon and Panasonic started putting high-definition video technology into some of their medium-priced DSLR cameras. They did this without realizing how useful these new cameras could be to the professional filmmaking community. Tim Smith of Canon USA recently joked in an interview that most of the filmmakers he’d met did not know where to find the still-photograph function on their new cameras. In a way he’s right, but at this year’s NAB it was apparent that it is camera manufacturers who need to figure out how to make videography an even more efficient function on […]
by Roberto Quezada-Dardon on Jul 20, 2010Susan Youssef SUSAN YOUSSEF. At the IFP Narrative Lab, a mentor said of Susan Youssef’s first feature, Habibi Rasak Kharban (literally, “Darling, Something’s Wrong with Your Head”): “It’s a classic story, like Romeo and Juliet.” True, but the roots of Youssef’s story go back far further. The film is an adaptation of the 12th-century Sufi parable Majnun Layla, which was itself based on a 7th-century Arabic story. Over the years, the tragic tale of undying love between a woman and the wandering poet her family forbids her to marry has formed the basis for countless works of art, from Shakespeare’s […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 20, 2010