Ari Folman‘s Waltz With Bashir took home four awards including Outstanding Achievement in Direction at last night’s Cinema Eye Honors, which highlight the year’s achievements in non-fiction. Handed out by the event’s creators — filmmaker AJ Schnack and Thom Powers, documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival — at the Times Center in the New York Times building, James Marsh‘s Oscar winning doc Man on Wire was awarded the evening’s big award, Outstanding Achievement in Non-Fiction, along with two other prizes. Yung Chang‘s Up the Yangtze won the Debut Feature award as well as Audience Choice. The full list […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Mar 30, 2009Here’s the second of our guest blogs from Sundance Lab-supported filmmaker Gayle Ferraro, who is blogging from the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. Day 2 The days keep getting better and I am feeling like I have known my fellow filmmakers and the Sundance folks for a long time. It is funny how that happens before you know it. We filmmakers all have code names, an affectionate shorthand, for the people we have all spoken with — the rat guy, the French guy with the cell phones, the water guys…. For the first part of the day I was […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 27, 2009Gerald Peary is not a cell phone person. He has witnessed a quarter century of films and criticism, from when Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris drew their lines in the critical sand to the currently expanding blogosphere. Gerald Peary is old school. A working film critic for 25 years, his work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, The Toronto Globe and Mail, The Chicago Tribune, Film Comment, Cineaste, Sight and Sound and Positif, to name a few. He is the weekly reviewer for the Boston Phoenix, one of a rapidly diminishing club of alternative weeklies as paper after paper […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 24, 2009Tribeca Film Institute today announced the selected projects for Tribeca All Access (TAA). TAA is designed to help foster and nurture relationships between film industry executives and filmmakers from traditionally underrepresented communities. Celebrating its sixth year, Tribeca All Access will present 27 new projects during the six-day event taking place April 20 – 25 during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, held from April 22 – May 3. This year’s TAA jury is comprised of respected industry professionals – actors, writers, producers and directors – who will review script excerpts and work samples prior to the Festival, and deliberate over the […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Mar 23, 2009Kudos to Noah Harlan for braving the tape-recorded audio wilds of the breakfast conversation I took part in at SXSW this past week. At the festival CinemaTech’s Scott Kirsner gathered myself, Ted Hope, Lance Weiler, Brian Chirls, Liz Rosenthal, Brett Gaylor and Caitlin Boyle for a morning roundtable in which he asked us what had been on our mind while attending the festival. Each of us spoke for a few minutes and then there was a group discussion. As Harlan notes, the audio quality is poor, and I think an edited version, which I hope one of us can put […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 22, 2009ICONIC FASHION DESIGNER VALENTINO GARAVANI (CENTER) IN DIRECTOR MATT TYRNAUER’S VALENTINO: THE LAST EMPEROR. COURTESY ACOLYTE FILMS. Having demonstrated significant talent as a print journalist, Matt Tyrnauer has shifted his focus and brought his great observational skills to bear on the big screen. Born in the late 1960s in Los Angeles, Tyrnauer grew up with entertainment all around him. His father was a TV writer on shows like The Virginian, Columbo and Murder, She Wrote (which he also produced), Tyrnauer was a regular visitor to LA’s favorite rep houses such as the Nuart and the New Beverley, and he was […]
by Nick Dawson on Mar 18, 2009A couple of weeks before the festival, Filmmaker reached out to directors with films in the festival to offer them space to recount the making and mission of their movies. Below is a response we received from Keith Maitland, whose documentary, The Eyes of Me, premieres at the festival today. How do they see the movie, if they can’t see at all? The Eyes of Me follows four blind teens over the course of one dynamic year at the Texas School for the Blind in Austin, TX. I didn’t know much about blind people before I decided to dive into […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 18, 2009The winners of the SXSW jury and audience awards were just announced and Judi Krant‘s Made In China (pictured right) was awarded Best Narrative Feature while Bill Ross‘s 45365 took home Best Documentary. Another standout is Scott Teems‘s That Evening Sun which won a Special Jury Award for Best Ensemble Cast and the Narrative Audience Award. The complete list of winners are below. Feature Jury Awards DOCUMENTARY FEATURE Winner – 45365Director: Bill RossAn inquiring look at everyday life in Middle America, the film explores the congruities of daily life in an American town Sidney, Ohio. Honorable Mention – The Way […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Mar 17, 2009The goal in any festival director transition: to maintain the quality of a festival and begin to put one’s personal stamp on it while not slowing its momentum or dampening its good will. Mid-way through SXSW, I’d say that for new director Janet Pierson, pictured here at the BMI dinner, that mission has been handily accomplished. Attendance is up; audience reaction to a good number of films is positive; the panels are informational and packed; there’s the requisite fanboy buzz from the opening night I Love You, Man plus today’s sneak of some of the Bruno footage; and there are […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 16, 2009Sub-theme for me at SXSW this year: Fair Use. A day after posting my article on Tommy Pallotta about his American Prince, which employs a Fair Use strategy to include film clips illustrating doc subject Steven Prince’s life in the movies and relationship with Martin Scorsese, I run into Gerard Peary, who is here in Austin with his doc For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism. His film includes interviews with critics like Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Harry Knowles, Karina Longworth and Elvis Mitchell, and it also includes clips from the films they talk […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 15, 2009