Yesterday, The Wrap presented a virtual panel comprised of “legends” (as the panelists laughingly preferred to “veterans”) in the independent film industry to discuss the current financing, production and distribution landscape—and what it might mean for rising writers, directors and producers. Moderated by producer and former agent Cassian Elwes of Elevated Films, guests on the panel include iconic indie producer and co-founder of Killer Films Christine Vachon, Blacklist founder Franklin Leonard, 30West co-president and CEO Micah Green (a company which Green describes as an “investment business focused on the independent arena”) and Rena Ronson, Partner & Head of Independent Film, […]

Moderated by Darrien Gipson, Executive Director of SAGindie, this year’s Wonder Women: Producers discussion at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival was a must-catch, mostly for two glaringly obvious reasons, with the first being the wide diversity of the participants. Alongside white Brits Alison Owen (Elizabeth, Saving Mr. Banks, perennial panelist and SCAD Savannah Film Festival Advisory Board member) and manager/producer Laura Berwick (Belfast, All is True, and Sir Kenneth’s longtime rep), there was the English-Jamaican writer/actress/producer Nicôle Lecky (Mood, The Moor Girl) and American actress/producer Jurnee Smollett (Lovecraft Country, Birds of Prey). Then there was the second reason—the presence of “grande dame” of indie […]

When Casey Neistat, along with his brother Van, made Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2006, he had already made over 300 shorts that had played at film festivals, museums and online. Three years later he launched an HBO series. But Google Neistat now and the information panel for the 40-year filmmaker offers a single blunt ID: “American YouTuber.” It was only in 2010 that Neistat began posting his work on YouTube and in 2015 that these postings became daily, a profusion of content (and subscribers — 12 million) that have made him a progenitor of a newer generation of […]

Gender and inclusivity are two key buzzwords floating about the film world these days, but how are these ideas being implemented? Are they being implemented? And are these issues always binary, black and white? Talking to filmmakers who aren’t Caucasian, male and/or cis, you don’t get clear-cut answers. You don’t always get encouraging answers, though you sometimes do. One gets the impression that this is an industry struggling with ideas that may change it radically, and that some people — even well-meaning allies — are still glomming onto old traditions. These issues were confronted directly during IFP Week, particularly at the […]

At YouVisit Studios in midtown Manhattan, Ben Leonberg, Scott Riehs and Alice Shindelar, three recent graduates of the film MFA program at Columbia, bring their education to bear in rather unexpected ways. They are still, in a sense, filmmakers — Leonberg a creative director, Shindelar a writer/director and Riehs a creative producer, each aspiring to one day make a feature. But as their day job they practice filmmaking of a very different type: together they conceive, write and shoot commercial content that YouVisit calls “interactive virtual experiences.” They work in 360-degree video and with virtual-reality headsets. They experiment with new […]

“I want to make films on the other side of fashion, on the other side of taste,” whispers a melancholic starlet into a velvety black void. It’s the 1930s, and the alluring actress — known in Europe as “La Divina” — has been brought to Hollywood to vamp in commercial confections alongside an American matinee idol. She doesn’t fit in. She wants to play real roles, like Dorian Gray or Christ. Her nervy agent is bewildered. “That’s art!” he scoffs. “Who’s gonna to pay for that?” Brooke Dammkoehler’s 45-minute La Divina (1989), a buoyant pastiche of Golden Age melodrama by way […]

Led by IFP founder Sandra Schulberg, who serves as its president, the nonprofit IndieCollect is working to conserve independent cinema. In just two years, the company has rescued and archived more than 3,500 film negatives, according to Schulberg, the president of IndieCollect. IndieCollect recently located the master picture and sound elements for eight of the shorts Vachon and Haynes produced in the ’80s and ’90s with Barry Ellsworth under their non-profit Apparatus banner. Apparatus backed a number of other directors, including Suzan-Lori Parks, Mary Hestand, Susan Delson, Brooke Dammkoehler, Larry Carty, and Evan Dunsky. Now the company has launched a Kickstarter campaign with hopes of raising […]

The following article appears in our Spring, 2016 print edition and is appearing from behind our paywall today for the first time. Will 2016 be remembered as the year that Amazon and Netflix gobbled up the indie film market? Probably. While the two online behemoths could always change their strategies in the next several months, the ramifications of their first quarter dominance stretched far and wide, sending shockwaves through the business. But there were other changes afoot, as well. Here are five industry trends that continue to linger long after Park City. 1. The Enduring Impact of Amazon and Netflix Okay, Amazon […]

Is TV usurping independent film? That was one of the main takeaways in a recent Filmmaker Magazine article written by producer Mike S. Ryan (“TV is Not the New Film”). With veteran producers, writers and directors heading to HBO, Netflix and Amazon in droves; with audiences affixed to the latest show recaps; and with film festival programmers dedicating more slots to episodic storytelling, it sure seems so. But if you talk to working indie-film professionals, the question appears to be slightly off the mark. Maybe we shouldn’t be asking whether long-form storytelling is supplanting indie film, but how it’s enabling […]

In Still Alice, based on Lisa Genova’s novel, Julianne Moore plays a Columbia University linguistics professor with early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, a diagnosis that threatens to erode her relationship with her family as well as the city she has long called her home. With a supporting cast including Alec Baldwin, Kristen Stewart and Kate Bosworth, Still Alice promises a realistic depiction of the disease by one of America’s finest actresses, and it’s a return to character-based human dramas by the directorial duo of Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, whose films include The Last of Robin Hood, the Sundance Grand Prize-winning Quinceañera […]