Documentary
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“MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA” AT STRANGER THAN FICTION
Since part of the mission of Stranger Than Fiction is to promote “lost gems,” it should come as no surprise that programmer Thom Powers would choose to screen Dziga Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera, a little seen (outside of film schools) Soviet classic that has had a profound influence on everything from Jean-Luc Godard to car commercials. A mish-mash of documentary material and visual effects, Man With a Movie Camera is a rapidly edited documentary experiment — and perhaps the world’s first music video. Last night’s screening featured a modern score arranged by John Walter, an editor and filmmaker […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on May 26, 2010 -
JIM FINN AT ANTHOLOGY
What happens when you take an independent American filmmaker, a fetish for Communist memorabilia, and subtract all irony? Pretty much the films of Jim Finn. From May 27-June 2, the Anthology Film Archives will be playing the shorts and features of Jim Finn. Disclaimer: I have shown his films at film festivals I work for and commissioned Finn to make a Lunchfilm. The Busby Berkeley of propaganda, Finn has made three features with a lo-fi indie style that mixes larger Hollywood genre trappings in a big bowl. The results are funny, but also packed with socio-political commentary. Seems hard to […]
by Mike Plante on May 24, 2010 -
STRATEGIZING YOUR CROWDSOURCING CAMPAIGN
I discovered a couple of excellent posts at the Coffee and Celluloid blog that will help you if you are contemplating or in the process of a crowdsourced funding campaign through a site like Kickstarter or Indiegogo. Written by Joey Daoud, the posts chronicle his experience researching and enacting a campaign to raise $9,000 for his documentary on high-school combat robots, Bots High. The campaign was successful — he raised $9,100 — but, as always, the devil is in the details. In the first post, “How to Figure the True Cost of a Kickstarter Project,” he breaks down not only […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 23, 2010 -
BROOKLYN INTERNATIONAL FILM FEST ANNOUNCES TITLES
The 13th annual Brooklyn International Film Festival (BiFF) will be held June 4th-13th at indieScreen and the Brooklyn Heights Cinema. This year’s BiFF will feature over 100 premieres from 92 countries, including a record 16 films made by Brooklyn filmmakers on Brooklyn sets. For more information, please visit: www.brooklynfilmfestival.org. Some of the feature films to be shown: Gabi on the Roof in July | NY Premiere Director: Lawrence Michael Levine Narrative Feature / United States, 2010 99 min An edgy character-driven ensemble comedy about ex-girlfriends, sibling rivalry and whipped cream set in a city that’s constantly in flux. Bad Day […]
by Jaimie Stettin on May 19, 2010 -
“MY PERESTROIKA” AT STRANGER THAN FICTION
Like history itself, historical documentaries tend to be written by the winners – experts whose “greatest hits” style approach is as comforting as the muzak that plays underneath their interviews. Last night’s Stranger Than Fiction featured director Robin Hessman’s My Perestroika, a documentary so good at breaking the rules of historical docs that it makes you question why anyone ever follows them. Hessman focuses on the Meyersons, an ordinary Moscow couple who teach history at the same school they attended as children. Struggling to articulate what it meant to grow up Soviet to a group of students that did not, […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on May 19, 2010 -
‘LIFE 2.0? AT STRANGER THAN FICTION
For enthusiasts of Second Life, a 3-D virtual world that enables users to interact with each other through avatars, all the hype surrounding Avatar must have seemed kind of overblown. After all, they’d been living their own science fiction fantasies for years, and their virtual world reflects the fantasies of millions of people, not just Mr. Cameron’s. Last night, Stranger Than Fiction featured a screening of Life 2.0, a dreamy documentary that explores what happens when people start living a Second Life. Director Jason Spingarn-Koff explores the phenomena from the inside – his filmmaker avatar straps on a digital camera and […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on May 12, 2010 -
Shirin Neshat, Women Without Men
Shirin Neshat doesn’t shy away from complexity. Her internationally lauded photography and video installation work takes as its primary subject matter the epistemology that informs how we view Muslim women and the real world forces which shape there lived experiences. She challenges stereotypes and received knowledge in all of her works, a quality that has not gone unnoticed by the international art world. A pair of major installations in the late 1990’s, Turbulent (1998) and Rapture (1999), both of which received prizes at the Biennial of Venice, long ago cemented her place as one of the world’s most compelling visuals artists. That claim […]
by Brandon Harris on May 5, 2010 -
“PIN GODS” AT STF
It may be hard to imagine, but there was a time when documentaries about off-brand sporting events and competitions were a rare thing. In this pre-Spellbound era, Pin Gods managed to make a small bowling-ball sized splash at the Toronto festival, only to fall through the cracks of the distribution system (a fact bemoaned last night by one of Pin Gods’ biggest fans, Stranger Than Fiction programmer Thom Powers). A film about what its director Larry Locke calls, “the small dream,” Pin Gods is an endearingly humane look at four men, each one trying to make a life out of professional […]
by Mary Anderson Casavant on May 5, 2010 -
“KIDS” OPENS L.A. FILM FEST; LINE-UP ANNOUNCED
Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids are All Right will open the 2010 Los Angeles Film Festival, which announced its line-up today. The Focus Features release, due out in July, stars Annette Benning, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo and Mia Wasikowska in a story of a lesbian couple and their children, who search for their sperm donor father. The closing night film will be Despicable Me, a 3D comedy-fantasy directed by Chris Renaud and Pierre Coffin. The festival, organized by Film Independent, will be the first held in downtown L.A.’s L.A. Live complex. Rebecca Yeldham is the Director of the festival and David […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 4, 2010 -
NOTES FROM TRIBECA
With Tribeca wrapping up this weekend I thought this would be the right time to give some of my highlights from what I saw this year. Sadly, I didn’t get out to as many movies as I would have liked (but Howard Feinstein did, and he writes about some of them in his preview and at the half way point) but here’s some notes from my vantage point. Best Performance Melissa Leo in The Space Between. Leo plays a grumpy airline stewardess who after her flight is grounded on 9/11 has to watch over one of her passengers, a Pakistani-American […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Apr 30, 2010
