Winter 2012
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The Art of First Impressions: How to Cut a Movie Trailer
by Stephen Garrett on Jan 13, 2012
Stephen Garrett on crafting a winning trailer -
Sundance 2012
Robot and Frank (director, Jake Schreier) I got into film because I was spectacularly mediocre at everything else. I loved art and performance, but wasn’t much of an actor, was a pretty bad keyboard player and couldn’t draw at all. When I got to try out filmmaking at an NYU summer high school program, it was the first time where the things I made vaguely resembled the ideas I had in my head. That doesn’t really explain why Robot & Frank had to be a film, except that in my hands it would have made for a really cheesy song […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 10, 2012 -
Released
On Aug. 19, 2011, Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. entered an Arkansas courtroom for the final time. This was the last place these men, known better as the West Memphis Three, thought they’d be on this summer day — Baldwin and Misskelley were currently serving life sentences and Echols was on death row. But 18 years and 78 days after being sentenced for murdering three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark., there was finally a glimmer of hope that the state would recognize that these now mid-30-year-old men were not the killers and let them go free. […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 10, 2012 -
Super 8
1 Webdocs With the official partnership of entities as ahead-of-the-curve as IDFA DocLab and Power to the Pixel, among a dozen others, Belgian director Matthieu Lietaert (whose own online project We R Democracy nabbed the BIPS at Sunny Side of the Doc 2010) has put together an offline guide to navigating the field of Web-based documentaries. Titled Webdocs, it covers everything from crowd sourcing to storytelling in a format that includes interviews with 30 cross-media makers and producers, as well as in-depth analysis of six highly successful webdocs. The book is jam-packed with practical information and advice from those on […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 10, 2012 -
Load & Play
Charlotte: A Wooden Boat Story Antidote Films – Available Now “The separation of craft from art and design is one of the phenomena of late-twentieth-century Western culture,” writes Peter Dormer in The Culture of Craft, cited on the website to Jeffrey Kusama-Hinte’s new documentary, Charlotte: A Wooden Boat Story. In his directorial follow-up to Soul Power, Kusama-Hinte (also a producer whose credits include The Kids are All Right and the board chairman of IFP) captures, in loving 16mm, a Martha’s Vineyard boatyard whose work is an elegy to those vanishing values of hand-crafted perfection cited by Dormer. Charlotte follows boat […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 10, 2012 -
Thessaloniki International Film Festival
Rome fell. Athens fell. Unelected representatives of European banks were installed in Italy and Greece, elections distant down the road. Interesting times in the south of Europe, with a rush of drama in the outside world to match the 100-plus films slated during 10 eventful days of November’s 52nd edition of the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. The event was trim, yet taut, light wind in its sails from a two-year budget infusion from the European Regional Development Fund. Photo exhibits, publications, masterclasses and retrospectives still accompanied the international competition, the Balkan Survey and Open Horizons programming sections. If one weren’t […]
by Ray Pride on Jan 10, 2012 -
Abu Dhabi International Film Festival
Taking place in one of the world’s strangest, most transcendently inauthentic cities, the Abu Dhabi Film Festival (Oct. 13-22, 2011), started in 2007 as the Middle East International Film Festival and began to make a name for itself internationally after acquiring former San Francisco and Tribeca festival director Peter Scarlet. As a programmer, Scarlet is know for his strong taste in Middle Eastern selections (perhaps making him a natural for the post) and, as a festival director, someone who never saw a velvet rope he didn’t like, which makes for some hard-to-penetrate party bouncers. In the third year on the […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 10, 2012 -
Marrakech International Film Festival
Less than three hours before this departing journalist had to hail his morning airport shuttle, he’s rumored to have been onstage at a five-star Moroccan hotel nightclub, loosened by too many free scotch whiskeys, guest performing a White Stripes song (supported by a mostly Canadian gig band with scantily clad, former cheerleaders as backup dancers) for an audience best described as “the 1 percent.” Cannes may have its prestigious world premieres and swingin’ Riviera yacht parties, but who knew that the height of film fest luxury — and if you seek it, decadence — lies in the North African desert, […]
by Aaron Hillis on Jan 10, 2012 -
CPH:DOX Film Festival
Any great film festival needs to do two things. The first is establish an identity, a curatorial purpose that draws attendees by promising them something defined, different and necessary. And the second, far harder thing to do is to constantly upend that identity, throwing enough curveballs so that visitors know they’ll be challenged on every trip. Finishing it’s 9th year this past November, Copenhagen’s CPH:DOX does both these things brilliantly. Positioned just before the mammoth doc bellwether IDFA, CPH:DOX takes as its mission the challenging of staid notions of the documentary form itself. CPH:DOX director Tine Fischer told Sight and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 10, 2012 -
Hits & Misses
Will 2011 be remembered as the year the indie film biz rebounded after nearly two years of contraction, consolidation and caution? Or was it merely a brief minor upsurge, hardly enough to sustain the numerous companies, executives and filmmakers trying to make a go of it? The beginning of the year started bright, even dazzling. Independent films like Black Swan, The King’s Speech, The Kids Are All Right and Winter’s Bone were big at the Oscars and the box office. And at Sundance, more than 40 films were acquired during and immediately after the fest. It looked like independent films […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jan 10, 2012
