Documentary
-
2010 Cannes Film Festival | By Livia Bloom
“You know the kind of movie where people laugh and cry?” asked a filmmaker character in Kornél Mundruczó’s Tender Son: The Frankenstein Project (seeking American distribution). “I want you to cry.” “I am crying,” responded the would-be actor before him, his face frozen solid. The internalization of emotion, and the tiny, subtle ways it can creep into the features and postures of even the most stoic characters was explored in some of the best work at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. At first glance, the protagonist of A Screaming Man (pictured above) (Un homme qui crie, seeking distribution), by […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Jun 2, 2010 -
REMEMBERING FLORENT
Director (The Look) and producer (the upcoming Valerie Plame story pic, Fair Game) David Sigal has made a documentary about Florent, the legendary and now shuttered New York meatpacking district restaurant. Scheduled to premiere at the New York Food Film Festival in June, Florent: Queen of the Meat Market is previewed at Nowness, which writes: Until its closure in June 2008, New York bistro Florent was that rare place where you could simultaneously eat a burger, catch a drag act and—if you were lucky—glimpse Calvin Klein. Named after its owner, the indefatigably flamboyant Florent Morellet, during its 23-year existence the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 1, 2010 -
“I Was Only Trying to be Objective — That Was My Conflict:” Charles Burnett on Killer of Sheep
With Killer of Sheep entering the Criterion Collection today in a new 4K restoration, we are reposting James Ponsoldt’s interview with its director, Charles Burnett, from our Spring, 2007 issue. “When I stumbled across a 16mm print of Killer of Sheep at film school in North Carolina, it was like finding gold. I had never seen an American film quite like it…raw, honest simplicity that left me sitting there in an excited silence. It echoed throughout George Washington, the first film that David Gordon Green and I made together.” — Tim Orr, cinematographer (All the Real Girls, Raising Victor Vargas) […]
by James Ponsoldt on May 27, 2010 -
“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
