Desiree Akhavan
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Appropriate Behavior | Director Desiree Akhavan
Attention, our audience’s and our own — it’s a valued commodity these days. We struggle to command our audience’s attention, for them to discover our work and then, once they’ve discovered it, to actually focus on it. Meanwhile, we struggle to focus our own attention, to fight our society’s weapons of mass distraction so we can not just see our work to completion but fully discover the meanings within it. What role does attention play in your work? Can you discuss an instance where you thought about some aspect of attention when it came to your film? My editor and […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 17, 2014 -
Second Annual NYU Purple List Announced
Last year, in order to spotlight the talents emerging from NYU’s graduate film program, students Ash Bhalla and Shandor Garrison created the Purple List, the university’s answer to the Blacklist. The notable success of the 2012 Purple List was Shaka King’s stoner comedy Newlyweeds, which premiered this January at Sundance and was picked up for distribution by Phase 4 Films. The 2013 list was announced this morning, and was chosen by a panel of judges including Sundance Labs’ Rachel Chanoff, IFP’s Amy Dotson, actor Peter Dinklage, filmmaker Karyn Kusama and cinematographer Andrij Parekh. The scripts honored by the 2013 Purple […]
by Nick Dawson on Mar 14, 2013 -
First Impressions
I’ve never been good at first impressions. The first time I met my ex-gf, I got incredibly drunk and vomited in front of her. The first time I was interviewed for a magazine, I told the story of how I got drunk in front of my ex-gf and vomited. And here I go again, making a bad first impression. That’s probably why I have first-day-of-school nerves about attending my first Independent Film Week. Excited and ready to go, but I’m also a bit unsure of how I’m going to approach the situation. Cool and aloof? Eager and personable, milking it […]
by Desiree Akhavan on Sep 13, 2012 -
PHOTOBLOGGING THE “25 NEW FACES” IN TACOMA
The funny thing about film festivals is that there never seems to be enough time to talk about the films you’ve just seen. Distribution strategies, yes, industry gossip, most definitely, but the actual creative decisions and approaches involved in making the films themselves – barely! So the Grand Cinema’s mini-festival celebrating Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in Tacoma, WA, last month felt like a truly rare treat. Bringing together 14 of the actors and filmmakers or filmmaking teams on the list, including myself and Katherine Fairfax Wright, my directing partner on Call Me Kuchu, The Grand Cinema scheduled […]
by Malika Zouhali-Worrall on Sep 5, 2012
