Documentary

OF CRISES, FALL DAYS AND NEW POSSIBILITIES AT THE WOODSTOCK FILM FESTIVAL

Several familiar faces, including my own, spoke at the Woodstock Film Festival on a panel entitled “The Changing Face of Independent Film.” I moderated, and the panelists were directors Rick Linklater and Ira Sachs; Cinetic’s John Sloss; and Big Beach’s Peter Saraf. As four of the five of us attended the Indiewire/MoMA/Zipline summit on the crisis in independent film production and distribution, I began by asking what the term “crisis” meant for them. Sloss spoke about the vanishing studio specialty divisions and with them the erosion of the indie film business model that requires a marketplace with well-funded buyers. He […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 7, 2009
PICTURING NOLLYWOOD

One of the most reprinted articles we’ve run at Filmmaker was South African producer Jeremy Nathan’s 2002 piece on “No Budget Nigeria,” the thriving Corman-esque film scene otherwise known as Nollywood. Now, artist Pieter Hugo has released a book containing his stunning square-format photos featuring portraits of performers from these films. It’s called, appropriately, Nollywood. In an essay about the images, Federica Angelucci explains Hugo’s approach, which is to compose photographs that play off the mythologies created by the films. An excerpt: Movies tell stories that appeal to and reflect the lives of its public: stars are local actors; plots […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 4, 2009
Antonio Campos, Afterschool

EZRA MILLER IN WRITER-DIRECTOR ANTONIO CAMPOS’ AFTERSCHOOL. COURTESY IFC FILMS. To call Antonio Campos a precocious talent would be to understate his abilities. Amazingly, the 26-year-old writer director, a native of New York City, has already spent half of his young life making films. Campos directed his debut short, Puberty (1997), at the age of 13 as part of a New York Film Academy program, and over the course of his teens made numerous shorts – both fiction and documentary – including First Kiss (2001), Pandora (2002) and Who’s Your Daddy? (2004). At 21, he had his short film […]
by Nick Dawson on Oct 2, 2009
THE TRUTH: WANTED AND DESIRED

In a week of stories surrounding Roman Polanski’s arrest in Zurich on a warrant for his three decade old conviction on a sex charge involving a 13-year-old girl in the U.S. and retired prosecutor David Wells‘s sudden admission that he fabricated the comments he made in Marina Zenovich‘s documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, it got me thinking of Zenovich’s answer to our yearly question to Sundance directors the year she screened the film there in 2008. The question: “If you had 10 percent more of anything, what would it be and why?” I wish I’d had a 10 percent […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Oct 2, 2009
Michael Almereyda, Paradise

A STILL FROM DIRECTOR MICHAEL ALMEREYDA’S PARADISE. COURTESY POST FACTORY FILMS. As he himself puts it, writer-director Michael Almereyda loves to make movies like a fighter likes to brawl, and over the course of his directorial career he has sought out an intriguing variety of creative challenges. Born in 1959 in Overland Park, Kansas, Almereyda spent his formative years in the Los Angeles area, where he discovered cinema and became a voracious moviegoer. Almereyda attended Harvard as an art history student, but dropped out in order to pursue his film career. He made his debut with the short film A […]
by Nick Dawson on Sep 24, 2009
FINAL DAYS FOR FILMMAKER STIMULUS PLAN SUBSCRIPTION OFFER

Please forgive this commercial interruption, but we’re in the final three days of our Filmmaker magazine Stimulus Plan, our annual subscription drive, and I hope that if you have not already taken advantage of this offer that you’ll consider doing so. It’s a fantastic deal, offering not only a year of Filmmaker for only $10 but also our digital edition (which contains all back issues through 2005) free. The offer runs until September 24. Below is the note I posted in our newsletter a few weeks ago detailing the offer in a bit more detail. And for those who have […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 21, 2009
“DEAR DIARY” — TORONTO’S WAVELENGTHS 6: FLASH POINT CAMERA

In a personal touch, all the filmmakers whose work was showcased in the sixth and final Wavelengths program were present for their screening. German director Ute Aurand presented a reverie on her childhood and family called Snowing Chestnut Blossoms, while American Jim Jennings, apparently a neighbor of mine in Brooklyn, showed a collection of images in Greenpoint that not only documented the quirky, spunky personality of that environ but also reminded me of two pair of boots in that little shoe repair shop with the orange-awning that are just about ready to be picked up.Coleen Fitzgibbon’s FM/TRCS (1974) is an […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 20, 2009
“GHOST STORIES” — TORONTO’S WAVELENGTHS 5: UNE CATASTROPHE

Glowing phantoms of days and films past haunted the fifth Wavelengths avant-garde film program at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, a series of meditations in which, as film programmer Andréa Picard described, “personal expressions of historical and collective memory confront spectres from the past.” Une Catastrophe (pictured), Jean-Luc Godard’s trailer for the Viennale is a companion piece of sorts to the Alonso BIFICI trailer that screened the night before. At once forward-looking and nostalgic (it excerpts and pays homage to Sergei Eistenstein‘s Battleship Potemkin, among other films) Godard’s piece is happily available online here. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Thai director […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 19, 2009
Bob Byington, Harmony and Me

JUSTIN RICE IN WRITER-DIRECTOR BOB BYINGTON’S HARMONY AND ME. COURTESY HARMONY AND ME, LLC. From Richard Linklater and Robert Rodriguez to Bryan Poyser and the Zellner brothers, Austin is a hotbed of gifted directors, and Bob Byington now emerges from there as another talent to be reckoned with. A native of Lincoln, Nebraska, Byington studied at UC-Santa Cruz before going to graduate school at the University of Texas, where he used his American Studies major to indulge his newfound love for the movies. In 1995, he cut his teeth as a production assistant on the indie hit The Last Supper, […]
by Nick Dawson on Sep 18, 2009
“BRICK WORK” — TORONTO’S WAVELENGTHS 4: IN COMPARISON

Ironically, a strange, brilliant one-minute trailer for the Buenos Aires Festival International de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) by Argentine director Lisandro Alonso opened the fourth Wavelengths program of avant-garde cinema at the Toronto International Film Festival. In the piece, officially titled S/T (pictured above), an unblinking owl stared in luxuriously saturated color, while pounding drums created a masterful musical score. The work was being asked to function not primarily as advertising but as cinema — and experimental art cinema at that. S/T was followed by In Comparison, a 16mm film by accomplished filmmaker and installation artist Harun Farocki. Born in the […]
by Livia Bloom Ingram on Sep 16, 2009

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