Documentary

SUNDANCE PREMIERES, SPECTRUM, FRONTIER AND MIDNIGHT

Sundance has just released the remaining titles for this year’s festival. There are a lot of movies I’m excited to see on the list. I’ll write more about them in the next few days, but, for now, here’s the official spam: PREMIERES500 Days of Summer / USA. (Director: Marc Webb; Screenwriters: Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber)—When an unlucky greeting card copywriter is dumped by his girlfriend, the hopeless romantic shifts back and forth through various periods of their 500 days ‘together’ in hopes of figuring out where things went wrong. Cast: Zooey Deschanel, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. World Premiere Adventureland / USA […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 4, 2008
SUNDANCE ANNOUNCES 2009 COMPETITION LINEUP

Moments ago the Sundance Institute announced the lineup of films screening in the competition categories for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, which will take place Jan. 15-25 in Park City, Utah and neighboring regions. Some of the titles that jump out for us are Joe Berlinger‘s Crude, R.J. Cutler‘s The September Issue, Ondi Timoner‘s We Live in Public and Tom DiCillo‘s When You’re Strange on the doc side and Cary Fukunaga‘s Sin Nombre, Lee Daniels‘s Push and Ross Katz‘s Taking Chance on the dramatic side. Descriptions of these titles and all the others selected are below. The films screening in […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Dec 3, 2008
SPIRIT AWARD NOMINEES ANNOUNCED

Ballast, Frozen River and Rachel Getting Married lead in nominations for this year’s Film Independent Spirit Awards with six apiece. The awards will be handed out Feb. 23. BEST FEATURE Rachel Getting Married The Wrestler Wendy and Lucy Ballast Frozen River BEST DIRECTOR Tom McCarthy, The Visitor Jonathan Demme, Rachel Getting Married Courtney Hunt, Frozen River Ramin Bahrani, Chop Shop Lance Hammer, Ballast BEST FIRST FEATURE Afterschool Medicine for Melancholy Synecdoche, New York Sleep Dealer Sangre De Mi Sangre JOHN CASSAVETES AWARD Prince of Broadway Take Out The Signal Turn the River In Search of a Midnight Kiss BEST SCREENPLAY […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Dec 2, 2008
SUNDANCE ANNOUNCES NEW FRONTIER SELECTIONS

The first wave of Sundance selections has just been announced by the festival with this list of filmmakers who will appear in the fest’s New Frontier program. (Congrats to Filmmaker contributor Mike Plante, whose Lunchfilm series made the cut!) Said Sundance programmer Shari Frilot, “New Frontier is best understood both as a physical space and a metaphor for discovery. It is a convergence of art, film, and technology where creative alliances are formed around innovative methods of cinematic storytelling, and where audiences are drawn in to a story through visual, aural, and tactile stimuli.” This year’s films and filmmakers are […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 1, 2008
MONEY, THAT’S WHAT I WANT

Expertly timed to premiere today, on so-called “Black Friday” when many parents rush to the stores to buy the latest must-have gifts for their sons and daughters is Lauren Greenfield‘s documentary Kids + Money. Greenfield is the photograher and author of the seminal Girl Culture, a book chronicling the reality of being a teenage girl in America today. Visit any filmmaker, screenwriter, production designer, of costume designer who has worked on a teen film and you’ll find this book on their shelf of reference materials. Next Greenfield made Thin, a photo essay and also documentary film about girls with eating […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 28, 2008
Avi Nesher, The Secret

ANIA BUKSTEIN AND MICHAL SHTAMLER IN DIRECTOR AVI NESHER’S THE SECRETS. COURTESY MONTEREY MEDIA. Avi Nesher seems to have had two careers as a filmmaker rather than just one. Nesher’s dual identity partly stems from the fact that the Israeli writer-director spent most of his childhood and teenage years in New York and only returned to the country of his birth after attending Columbia University. Once back, Nesher wasted little time in establishing himself as one of the brightest young figures in Israeli cinema with hits like The Troupe and Dizengoff 99 (both 1979). In 1985, Rage and Glory, Nesher’s […]
by Nick Dawson on Nov 26, 2008
Ellen Kuras, The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)

THAVISOUK PHRASAVATH AND ORADY PHRASAVATH IN DIRECTOR ELLEN KURAS’ THE BETRAYAL (NERAKHOON). COURTESY CINEMA GUILD. Since she first came to prominence almost twenty years ago, Ellen Kuras has established herself as one of the most talented directors of photography working today. Film was not Kuras’ primary focus when she was younger; the New Jersey native initially attended Brown to study anthropology but became interested in photography after taking a class at the nearby Rhode Island School of Design. Though she won a Fulbright Scholarship to go to the esteemed Lodz Film Academy, Kuras instead began working in film, taking numerous […]
by Nick Dawson on Nov 21, 2008
TAYLOR GREESON ON MEADOWLARK

Taylor Greeson’s Meadowlark was a happy discovery for me while sitting on this year’s “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” Gotham Award panel. I didn’t know Greeson and hadn’t heard of his film. But I, along with the panel, responded to his formally ambitious mixture of crime-reconstruction film and personal documentary. Here’s the program note. “When I was twelve years old, my brother was murdered, I lost my virginity to a twenty-year-old man, and I was ordained with the priesthood in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.” So begins Meadowlark, Taylor Greeson’s quietly devastating […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 20, 2008
JAKE MAHAFFY ON WELLNESS

Jake Mahaffy is one of my favorite filmmakers in this week’s “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” series this week at MOMA. We selected him as one of our “25 New Faces” in 2005, and I’ve watched his shorts and his Sundance Lab project with interest since. His second feature, Wellness, won the Grand Prize at SXSW this year, and its emotional, political and spiritual themes only become more relevant by the day. Mike Ryan beautifully wrote about the film at Hammer to Nail. An excerpt: One of our greatest American philosophers, William James, writes about the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Nov 20, 2008
SHORTLIST FOR BEST DOC

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced the 15 titles on the shortlist for Best Documentary feature for the Academy Awards (airing Feb. 22). They are: At the Death House DoorThe Betrayal (Nerakhoon)Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah SeneshEncounters at the End of the WorldFuelThe GardenGlass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve PartsI.O.U.S.A.In a DreamMade in AmericaMan on WirePray the Devil Back to HellStandard Operating ProcedureThey Killed Sister DorothyTrouble the Water I’m pleasantly surprised to see Ellen Kuras‘s The Betrayal made the cut (I really didn’t think the Academy had it in them) but […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Nov 18, 2008

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