George Bernard Shaw’s famous adage, “Those who do do, those who can’t, teach. He can do, does. He who cannot, teaches,” fails when it comes to film schools. Scratch the surface of most film school faculty lists, and you’ll find filmmakers who not only do but are also doing. Developing scripts, raising financing and shooting while on sabbatical, university-ensconced independent filmmakers have one foot in the ivory tower and one foot in the shape-shifting world that is today’s independent film production. Inevitably, then, they bring their hard-fought wisdom into the classroom, which means they must also grapple with one tough […]

Brandon Harris — whose insightful, politically sagacious and ruefully funny blend of memoir and criticism has graced the pages of the New Yorker, n+1 and Filmmaker, where you’ll recognize him as a Contributing Editor — has just released his debut book, Making Rent in Bed-Stuy, a cultural memoir on neighborhoods, race, millennial culture and filmmaking. Appropriately, he has also programmed a series of relevant films this weekend at New York’s Metrograph Theater. Running through the 12th, the films include Spike Lee’s Crooklyn (next to Do the Right Thing my favorite 40 Acres joint, actually), Jay-Z: Fade to Black, and Sebastián Silva’s […]

Over the last year Filmmaker Contributing Editor Brandon Harris has been making his first feature, Redlegs, and it receives a sneak preview next Thursday at Brooklyn’s reRun, sponsored by the Brooklyn Arts Council. It then opens for a week on May 25 at that same venue. Check out the trailer below. (There’s also a Tumblr blog, where Harris is promising “goofy, poignant and otherwise unmissable stuff.”)

For almost two decades I’ve been traveling to the International Film Festival Rotterdam immediately following Sundance, struggling to keep my jet lag at bay while I attend a few Cinemart meetings, hit the informal but productive Cinemart cocktail hours, and delve into the fest’s always excellent and eclectic program. This year several fellower Sundancers made the trip as well, including sales agent Ryan Kampe, producer Adele Romanski, the IFP’s Amy Dotson, the Sundance Institute’s Anne Lai, and director Terrence Nance, whose An Oversimplification of Her Beauty was programmed here and was one of the Park City’s true discoveries. Above is […]