COVID-19
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An Interesting Question
When Penelope Green, an obituary writer for The New York Times, called to speak with me about Benita Raphan in April 2021, I was still in a place between sadness and disbelief. Benita, who was one of Filmmaker’s “25 New Faces of Indie Film” in 1998, had made more than a dozen films across her career (and was in the process of creating a new one), when she died by suicide three months earlier on January 10, 2021. Benita’s decades-long struggle with depression and anxiety, magnified by the isolation and solitude of the COVID-19 pandemic—combined with the loss of her […]
by Alan Berliner on Oct 11, 2022 -
“Contrast is the Toughest Thing to Shift”: DP Nigel Bluck on the Two Nicolas Cages of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
One of New Zealand cinematographer Nigel Bluck’s first breaks as a young DP came shooting 2nd unit on the original Lord of the Rings trilogy. He had one feature film under his belt and little visual effects experience, but Bluck learned on the job and persevered through nine months of bluescreen-draped soundstage work. Two decades later, the now-seasoned Bluck faced another new challenge with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. “I’m not a comedy guy, normally,” said Bluck. “This is the warmest and funniest movie I’ve ever shot.” It’s definitely the Nicolas Cage-iest movie anyone has ever shot. The Oscar winner plays […]
by Matt Mulcahey on May 13, 2022 -
Everything Old is New Again
While independent films have struggled to thrive in our long COVID marketplace, there is one silver lining in the digital distribution universe: Indie films, both familiar and obscure, from five, 10 and even 20 years ago are flourishing with an uptick in video-on-demand sales. “It’s no secret that library titles have been performing very well across the board,” says IFC Films President Arianna Bocco, “and that’s directly a result of the pandemic.” Across the entire entertainment industry, spending on library titles has been “notably strong,” according to an August 2021 report from home entertainment trade association DEG (Digital Entertainment Group), […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Jan 18, 2022 -
“Someday We’re Going to be Shooting Through Coke Bottles Just to Get a Look That Isn’t Too Pristine”: DP Jeff Cronenweth on Being the Ricardos
According to their official credits, Being the Ricardos is the first time Aaron Sorkin has directed with Jeff Cronenweth behind the camera. Unofficially, that collaboration began a decade ago with a shot of an envelope. On the final day of production on 2010’s The Social Network—which earned Sorkin an Oscar for best screenplay and Cronenweth a cinematography nomination—director David Fincher dipped before the final shot to avoid the emotional wrap goodbyes, leaving Sorkin and Cronenweth in charge of the last insert. “It was the shot where [Mark Zuckerberg’s] partner is accepted into the social club and there’s an envelope slid […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jan 12, 2022 -
“Burnout and Fatigue and a Loss of Sanity”: Matthew Heineman on Making COVID-19 Documentary The First Wave
Mass confusion and panic infected much of the world at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic as the deadly virus spread from country to country at an uncontainable rate. As many governments put temporary lockdown and quarantine orders in place (in addition to urging hospitals to boost patient capacity), New York City found itself the epicenter of the pandemic, ambulances constantly roaring as they raced to prevent the next round of deceased patients stored in meat trucks and disposed of in mass graves on Hart Island. With some distance from that horrific spring of 2020, new variants and vaccine hesitancy […]
by Erik Luers on Dec 13, 2021 -
“News Would Disappear Off Social Media”: Nanfu Wang on COVID Documentary In the Same Breath
Given the amount of turmoil, despair, anger, and loss we’ve experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s fair to say that the past two years have been the longest 20 years of our lives. As breaking news changed rapidly and information was uncovered, the severity of the virus came into focus. As dangerous as COVID-19 was (and, given the acceleration of mutated variants, how dangerous it continues to be), just as damaging was the misinformation being spread by various government-sanctioned media and harebrained conspiracy theorists. Nanfu Wang’s latest documentary, In the Same Breath, covers the entire gamut and, per her signature style, […]
by Erik Luers on Aug 23, 2021 -
Sundance Festival Director Tabitha Jackson Announces Details of 2022 Event; Vaccinations Required for In-Person Utah Events
Festival director Tabitha Jackson announced today details of the upcoming Sundance Film Festival, which will take place in Park City, Utah and across various Satellite Screen venues January 20 – 30, 2022. Most significantly, after 2021’s virtual edition, Sundance 2022 will be an in-person event. The festival will require attendees of events in Utah to be fully vaccinated, with further details about health precautions and mask-wearing to be issued in the coming months. The festival will also be larger than last year’s scaled-down edition but still smaller than the pre-pandemic 2020 festival. For further details, read the complete letter from […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 3, 2021 -
Wuhan, Different Everyday: Shengze Zhu on Berlinale 2021 Premiere A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces
Despite relocating to Chicago in 2015, Shengze Zhu has focused on her hometown of Wuhan throughout her career. Her first feature, Out of Focus (2014), is a creative portrait of the school-life of children from low-income families and the troubles they face. Her second, Another Year (2016), uses long takes to document the mealtimes of migrant worker families. Both are set in Wuhan but were made after she first left China in 2010 to study filmmaking in Columbia, Missouri. For Present.Perfect (2019), she widened her lens, creating a montage of live-streamers living across China entirely from desktop recordings of their broadcasts. […]
by Matt Turner on Mar 2, 2021 -
My Job During a Pandemic: Producing 100+ DVDs and Blu-rays in 2020
When I left Kino Lorber’s office on Friday, March 13th, I was expecting to return on Monday. I was wrapping up the DVD and Blu-ray of Jia Zhangke’s I Wish I Knew (2010), getting final proofs of Adam Nayman’s booklet essay and waiting for the test molds (the final check disc the replicator sends for approval before the title goes into manufacturing) to come in. But then the lockdown hit, and the scramble to improvise and adapt to the situation. One of my colleagues lives nearby our office, so he shipped the I Wish I Knew test molds to our […]
by R. Emmet Sweeney on Feb 10, 2021 -
Sundance Hits and Misses, Pandemic Edition
Yes, 2020 sucked. The worst year of our lives finally came to an end, and most independent films and filmmakers, like just about everything and everyone else, suffered. Grand Jury Prize winners were delayed, critics’ favorites were lost and buzzworthy breakouts, briefly the talk of Park City, remained in limbo, waiting for some nebulous future release date when movie theaters might re-open and vaccinated audiences might attend them. Normally, you could look back at a year’s worth of top Sundance titles, examine what became of them in distribution—as Filmmaker usually does—and glean some takeaways about the state of the marketplace. […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Feb 10, 2021
