Documentary
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Immersive Storytelling for The Lost Children Pt. 2
Part 1 of this series laid out the overall plan for The Lost Children Premier event at Film Society of Lincoln Center in January 2013. In this post, I’m going to focus on some thinking behind the live immersive portion of the event. As I’ve been working on this, I’ve been thinking a lot about this term “immersive.” Any great piece of art can be immersive. Any time you get sucked into an amazing movie to the point that you forget you’re actually watching a movie, that is immersive. I remember having that experience with No Country for Old Men. But here, I’m […]
by Mark Harris on Jan 2, 2013 -
Immersive Storytelling for The Lost Children
My feature film The Lost Children will have its New York City premiere with the Film Society of Lincoln Center in January, 2013. The premiere will not be a film screening alone. It is presented by Convergence: Film Society of Lincoln Center, which is an arm of the FSLC devoted to immersive and transmedia storytelling. Like many organizations in New York City, FSLC is reaching out and exploring new storytelling methods. The 50th anniversary of the NYFF included its first ever series of panels on transmedia. This year, the Tribeca FF is accepting basically any type of project. And the […]
by Mark Harris on Dec 23, 2012 -
Tom DiCillo Remembers Howard Brookner and Burroughs
One of the projects currently up on our curated Kickstarter page is a restoration of Howard Brookner’s documentary, Burroughs, on the legendary Naked Lunch novelist. Brookner died of AIDS in the ’80s, with this and the feature Bloodhounds of Broadway (which costarred Madonna) to his credit. Brookner was a great director poised to have an exciting career, and now his nephew Aaron Brookner is raising funds on Kickstarter to restore the original Burroughs film as well as 300 hours of additional archival material discovered in Burroughs’ NYC home, The Bunker. The team behind this restoration submitted to Filmmaker the following […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 22, 2012 -
Sheldon Candis explores The Subculture of Real Life Superheroes
We’ve seen the RLSH phenomenon explored in dramatic films like Kick-Ass and Super, but now Filmmaker 25 New Face director Sheldon Candis looks at it in the form of a documentary short. Here, executive produced by Ashton Kutcher for Thrash Lab’s Subculture Club series and based on San Diego’s XTreme Justice League, is The Subculture of Real Life Superheroes. From the press release: “Superheroes are for both children and adults. With so many varying characters there is at least one superhero everyone can take a liking to. We heard about these guys that live their lives playing the role of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 12, 2012 -
Jessica Oreck and Murmur Launch Interactive Documentary, The Aatsinki Season
When we last checked in with 25 New Face filmmaker Jessica Oreck, she was attending the POV Hackathon, a two-day event at which the documentary television series paired filmmakers with web developers. There Oreck met Mike Knowlton and Hal Siegel of the hybrid studio/technology company Murmur, and in just over three months the team has created The Aatsinki Season, an online counterpart to Oreck’s forthcoming feature documentary, Aatsinki: The Story Of Arctic Cowboys. Launching today, the work is both hypnotic and thoughtful, comprising text, film and flow charts, and allowing the viewer to initiate debate over the ecological issues facing […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 11, 2012 -
Academy Awards Releases Documentary Longlist
The Academy Awards are still a long way off, but the recent Gotham Awards, the Spirit Award nominations, today’s New York Film Critics Circle Awards and now the Oscar doc longlist mean that awards season is truly kicking into gear. The 15 docs still in Academy Award contention are: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Never Sorry LLC Bully, The Bully Project LLC Chasing Ice, Exposure Detropia, Loki Films Ethel, Moxie Firecracker Films 5 Broken Cameras, Guy DVD Films The Gatekeepers, Les Films du Poisson, Dror Moreh Productions, Cinephil The House I Live In, Charlotte Street Films, LLC How to Survive a […]
by Nick Dawson on Dec 3, 2012 -
Five Questions with Drivers Wanted Director Joshua Z Weinstein
New York City’s taxi drivers are as ubiquitous as they are invisible. In his new documentary Drivers Wanted, Joshua Z Weinstein takes the passenger seat — often literally — and trains his camera on the men at the wheel, as well as the gristly mechanics and staff who work behind the scenes at a Queens-based taxi company. Though this may be a niche community, larger economic forces are clearly at play: many of the drivers are bankrupt, broke, or struggling to support their families. From the bustle of the garage, full of camaraderie and occasional conflict, emerge several key characters […]
by Esther Yi on Dec 3, 2012 -
Five Questions with Wagner & Me Director Patrick McGrady
Early in Wagner & Me, a new documentary about the music and legacy of Richard Wagner, English actor and writer Stephen Fry says he’d like to time travel to the 19th century. Once there, Fry continues, he would start a letter-writing campaign, urging the composer to rethink his infamously anti-Semitic essay Jewishness in Music: “I say to him, ‘Listen, you’re on the brink of becoming the greatest artist of the 19th century, and future generations will forget that, simply because of this nasty little essay that you’re writing, and because of the effect it’ll have.” Wagner, of course, did not […]
by Kevin Canfield on Nov 26, 2012 -
Producer Robin Klein on Reviving The Rolling Stones’ Charlie Is My Darling
In 1965, a rough-and-tumble band of rock ‘n’ roll upstarts called The Rolling Stones were just beginning to build their legend, when wily manager Andrew Loog Oldham engaged English documentarian Peter Whitehead to follow the band around for a couple of days during a short stint in Ireland. The result was Charlie Is My Darling, a cinéma vérité snapshot of an era when the cultural revolution was only just beginning to crack the façade of the Old World. We see the young Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts (who gives the film its title) brainstorming […]
by Jim Allen on Nov 23, 2012 -
Hearing Central Pitches at the IDFA Forum
So, I am in Amsterdam, attending my first IDFA, a fest I’ve been dreaming of attending since I first started working in documentary. IFP has 11 films in the fest, and four works in progress in the Forum, so I’m here for moral support, promotion of IFP, and reconnaissance. What is happening in documentary in the rest of the world? In advance of my arrival, I was most anticipating being a part of the Forum, “IDFA’s international co-financing and production market, Europe’s most important breeding ground for new documentary work.” The Forum presents works in progress to the international funding […]
by Rose Vincelli Gustine on Nov 22, 2012
