25 New Faces of 2011
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Rania Attieh & Daniel Garcia
“Like a lot of partner dynamics, a healthy amount of arguing begins most of our working situations,” write Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia from Karlovy Vary, where their evocative debut feature, Ok, Enough, Goodbye, is receiving its European premiere. “There is yelling and calling each other names. Then we settle down and begin actually working. Perhaps what makes our process work is the fact that we are completely unafraid to be brutally honest with each other about our opinions regarding each other’s ideas.” Attieh, born in Tripoli, Lebanon, and Garcia, from South Texas, met in Texas in an undergrad drawing […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Alison Klayman
Alison Klayman remembers the moment people knew she was really making a movie about Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. A Brown University graduate, Klayman had moved to Beijing with the intent of learning Mandarin and becoming a documentary filmmaker and journalist. “I bought my first camera there,” she remembers, “and was doing video for hire, trying to get into television.” In 2008 a friend asked her to make a short video to accompany a gallery show of Ai’s New York photography — shots of the artist and the downtown scene taken during his years living there in the 1980s. “My camera […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Rola Nashef
When Michigan-born writer-director Rola Nashef started thinking about her film, Detroit Unleaded, there wasn’t much of a film scene in the state, independent or studio. Now, after several years of tax incentives and high-profile productions, she laughs, “I go to restaurants and hear people talking about their scripts.” But Nashef was inspired by Detroit long before the state’s recent production boom. The city didn’t just provide her debut feature’s location, but also its subject matter — specifically, the tales that come out of its Arab-American community. “Living within an Arab immigrant family, dating within the Arab-American community, the restrictions Arab […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Carlen Altman
Carlen Altman is strictly low-brow. She loves Leslie Nielsen, Ja Rule and Weekend At Bernie’s; she runs a jewelry company that stocks Jewish Rosaries (jewishrosaries.com); and was seduced into performing by the success of her first public access show, Sunday Night Live, which ran on the campus channel of SUNY-Binghamton College. “It got taken off the air because we did this skit about a rape clinic, which did not go over well,” says Altman. “It was a competitive rape group, like who had been raped the most times… It was funny though.” Born and raised in New York, Altman’s parents […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jul 17, 2011 -
Sheldon Candis
The URL for Los Angeles-based filmmaker Sheldon Candis’s website is cinephileacademy.com, speaking to not only the USC grad’s artistic interests but also his fusion of film and life. As a child born in Baltimore, “I was one of those kids who loved movies,” he says, “and would watch them on my grandfather’s old VHS player.” Then, he’d spend time with one of his uncles, and those hours too, “even for a nine-year-old, felt like a movie.” Learning Uncle Vincent is the film arising from those childhood memories — spiked with a healthy amount of imagination. “‘It’s about a young child […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Brent Hoff
Before completing Dirty White Boy, his screenplay about the last days of rapper Ol’ Dirty Bastard and his relationship with VH1 p.a.-turned-manager Jarred Weisfeld, Brent Hoff had 24 partially written scripts on his hard drive. “One of them was over 200 pages long,” he says. “I came up with lots of ideas, but I never completed them.” But when Hoff heard that producer Todd Hagopian had bought Weisfeld’s life rights along with those of ODB’s mother, he knew that he was the guy to write — and finish — that story. “I worked at VH1,” says Hoff, “and I met […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Gingger Shankar
“I became a film composer by accident,” admits Gingger Shankar, who was called in one day by a music supervisor to work on some cues for The Passion of the Christ. A vocalist and musician raised in Los Angeles and India, Shankar has performed on stage with everyone from Peter Gabriel and Frank Zappa to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Smashing Pumpkins. But contributing music that would accompany the cinematic image? “I was swimming in the deep end,” she says. Her work on John Debney’s The Passion of the Christ score impressed the folks at the Sundance Composers Lab, and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Damon Russell
The line separating documentary and narrative film aesthetics has never been more porous than it is now. Damon Russell is a filmmaker whose work lives right on that line. The Atlanta, Georgia native, who shuttles between Atlanta and New York as projects come and go, made a short film that was partially shot in the notorious western Atlanta ghetto, “The Bluff.” After seeing Russell’s film, a Bluff resident named Curtis Snow, whose livelihood revolves around armed robbery and drug pushing, sought out Russell to make a film about his life. Snow on Tha Bluff, which world premiered at this year’s […]
by Brandon Harris on Jul 17, 2011 -
Kirby Ferguson
It’s hard to create something original about the remix. Okay, that would seem to go without saying, but I’m not referring to the subject of the remix — I’m talking about the discourse surrounding it. From Lawrence Lessig’s book Remix to Brett Gaylor’s feature doc, RIP: A Remix Manifesto, the creative, social and political issues surrounding the rise of remix culture have been debated with brio. Paradoxically, then, the familiarity we have with the issue of remixing is precisely what makes Kirby Ferguson’s four-part Web series, Everything is a Remix, so compelling. Rather than push a copy-left agenda or hype […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 17, 2011 -
Mark Jackson
Trained as a cinematographer in Italy, Brooklyn-based Mark Jackson says he doesn’t watch many movies. “My grandfather is the reason I make films. He introduced me to the magic of observation and that’s where the vast majority of my inspiration comes from. People watching, followed by embellishment,” says Jackson, whose feature debut Without is currently making the festival rounds. “The other bits come from reading the news.” Comprised of shots that make you feel as if you’re glimpsing the most private of moments, a fly on the wall for one young woman’s haunting meltdown, Without may suggest some of the […]
by Brandon Harris on Jul 17, 2011
