Fall 2014
-
Redrawing the Boundaries
MDFF is a Toronto-based production company steadily churning out nuanced humanist films that capture a particular middle-class Canadian experience, while at the same time challenging the tendency for Canadian cinema to stay ghettoized within its own borders. Its founders, Kazik Radwankski and Dan Montgomery, are doing more than just bringing regional idiosyncrasies such as Toronto’s racoons or Vancouver’s methadone clinics to European film festivals. They’re using MDFF as an umbrella to foster a film-going culture in their own city, simultaneously supporting the emerging independent filmmakers north and south of the border whose films they produce and screen. Radwanski and Montgomery […]
by Whitney Mallett on Oct 20, 2014 -
Parting Shot
When it came time for writer/director Zachary Wigon to cast the mysterious heartbreaker of his cyber-age romantic thriller The Heart Machine, he immediately looked not to one of the current crop of chirpy uptalkers but to an actress who has brought an unusual gravity and intensity to several distinguished recent independent films, Kate Lyn Sheil. In Wigon’s picture, Sheil is the IP address-obscured object of desire, playing a geolocational game of hide-and-seek with a hipster Harry Caul, played by John Gallagher Jr. Of whether the film’s virtual romance (the couple fall for each other via Skype) is “real,” she told […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 20, 2014 -
Super 8
1. Solstice The independent video game studio Moacube’s ambitious follow-up to its well-regarded Cinders is a mystery set in an enclosed city, one in the middle of a desert constantly torn apart by blizzards. To remedy the lack of minority representation in video games, Moacube has made the majority of the characters minorities and offered up a gay male protagonist. The ambitious game has been in development for a few years, but the six-chapter saga will be out before year’s end or early next year. 2. The Absolution of Roberto Acestes Laing Critic — and occasional Filmmaker contributor — Nicolas […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Oct 20, 2014 -
Graphic Design: Miao Wang’s We the Economy
For We the Economy, the 20-part web series collaboration between Paul Allen’s Vulcan Productions and Morgan Spurlock’s Cinelan, documentary director Miao Wang tackled the topic of globalization and trade with China. Her short intercuts interviews with elegantly designed yet informationally dense graphics. Below, she and her motion graphic artist discuss challenges and solutions. Miao Wang, director: The biggest challenge of this project from day one has been how to address such an immense topic in such a short five-to-seven minute film. I knew I wanted to make a film driven by poignant human elements and stories, while also providing concrete […]
by Randy Astle on Oct 20, 2014 -
Has the Cinematic Water Cooler Run Dry?
Sex, lies and videotape; Pulp Fiction; The Blair Witch Project; Juno — they are now the stuff of indie film legend. Movies that came out of nowhere (although that’s not entirely true) and became not just crossover hits, but cultural phenomena, spawning think-pieces in The New York Times, TV talk-show fodder and conversations around the water cooler. Yes, they made money along the way, but we remember them as much for the zeitgeist they captured as their box office. These days, we can still point to the occasional breakout. This year, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood has benefited from that mysterious magical […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Oct 20, 2014 -
Film Studies for the 21st Century
In 2008, film scholar Catherine Grant started a blog titled Film Studies for Free as a venue for collecting and sharing links to interesting examples of film and media scholarship available online. Between university positions, she was unsettled by the thought of losing her faculty privileges — such as access to the library — and wanted to stay connected with academia. By launching the site, she quickly discovered a burgeoning community of other scholars in the blogosphere, as well as a readership that expanded beyond the university. “I guess I didn’t really understand how it would take off,” she says […]
by Holly Willis on Oct 20, 2014 -
Freeze Out: Ruben Östlund on Force Majeure
Amidst the red-carpet mayhem of any major international film festival, critics tend to adopt a sort of cinematic shorthand — a private language of allusions and descriptors. It didn’t take long for Force Majeure to earn its seemingly ready-made sobriquet: “the avalanche movie,” further confirmed by the film’s theatrical poster. Force Majeure does indeed revolve around an avalanche — a controlled blast in the mountains of a ski resort in the French Alps, watched by a vacationing Swedish family with awe until, as it hurtles its way toward the restaurant terrace where they are enjoying their breakfast, awe suddenly curdles […]
by Calum Marsh on Oct 20, 2014 -
When Restoration Met Distribution
As CEO of the Los Angeles-based creative studio and postproduction house Cinelicious, Paul Korver had the unsettling feeling that too many deals were passing him by. The preferred film scanning and restoration vendor for Criterion and Alamo Drafthouse, Cinelicious was also making a name for itself as a digital intermediate supervisor. Touring the festival circuit with the likes of Boyhood and Prince Avalanche, Korver found himself in conversation with various rights holders who were looking to restore films but without the funds to do so. What if, he thought, Cinelicious had a distribution arm to monetize that restoration investment? Thus […]
by Sarah Salovaara on Oct 20, 2014 -
The Art of Narrative Deduction
In 1887, an eccentric detective named Sherlock Holmes appeared in print for the first time. A literary creation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes and his companion Dr. Watson captured the imaginations of readers and quickly grew in popularity. Fifty-six short stories and four novels later, Doyle’s work has seen numerous adaptations. From films to television to stage plays, Sherlock Holmes has stood the test of time. But beyond the fiction, Doyle’s stories have had a lasting impact on the way that crimes are solved. Holmes’ obsession with protecting crime scenes from contamination and his use of chemistry, ballistics, bloodstains […]
by Lance Weiler on Oct 20, 2014
