At first, the notion of sibling filmmakers creating a doc about clearing out their recently deceased grandma’s house in New Jersey struck me as a potential recipe for a navel-gazing home movie. But the sister-brother team of Elan and Jonathan Bogarín, 25 New Faces alum, is not your average documentarian duo (even as their beloved Jewish grandmother is a familiar character — at least to those of us who grew up with idiosyncratic Jewish grandmas in Jersey. My physician grandmother in Teaneck likewise believed there was no wrong time for gefilte fish). Yet it’s this transformation of a very personal […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 28, 2018As Scott Macaulay wrote in our 25 New Faces profile of 306 Hollywood directors Elan and Jonathan Bogarin last year, “In 2001, the pair — who together run the production house El Tigre Productions — began shooting their grandmother, Annette Ontell, in the Hillside, New Jersey house she resided in for 71 years. When she died in 2011, the Bogaríns decided, says Jonathan, ‘to keep the house and transform everything there into a film.’ The result is the beautifully strange 306 Hollywood, ‘a kooky, imaginative film,’ he says, that uses ‘a maximalist language of fiction film, art, dance and myth in […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 1, 2018To paraphrase E. L Doctorow: Making a film is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. Two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to drive with more than headlights. My film 306 Hollywood was one of ten films chosen for the IFP Documentary Lab, and participating is like driving on a well-lit highway. With five days of presentations and workshops with industry insiders and peers you get a blast of clarity on how to finish your film and get it out into the […]
by Elan Bogarin on May 27, 2016