Financing
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Ten Lessons on Filmmaking From Director Abel Ferrara
The original King of Indie Abel Ferrara made a stop at Emir Kusturica’s Küstendorf Film and Music Festival this January to screen his latest film 4:44 Last Day on Earth. The Loisaida-set film paints a picture of addiction at the end of the world, starring Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh. Ferrara felt very welcome at Küstendorf, Emir Kusturica’s wooden village high in the mountains of Mokra Gora. “We just kinda have a connection, other than I look like him,” Ferrera told me of the famed Serbian director, minutes before entering a workshop to discuss the film with students who had descended […]
by Ariston Anderson on Feb 6, 2012 -
Zack Parker, Scalene
Zack Parker’s Scalene is a small midwestern gem of a psychological thriller, with several moments that are as shocking as any that will find their way to commercial movie screens all year. Parker and his co-writer, longtime collaborator Brandon Owens use two storytelling devices that have gone in and out of vogue — out-of-sequence and multiple-perspective recounting of events — to marvelous effect. Shot in the filmmaker’s home state of Indiana, it is a heady and tragic mind bender, one that has been unduly overlooked by the major American fests while having had a long run on the regional circuit. The film opens […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 26, 2012 -
An Interview With Frederick Wiseman
The New Year can be as much a time to reflect as it can be to project into the future. Some see the act of looking back as an integral part of moving forward. But on a brisk afternoon in Cambridge the day before New Year’s Eve, Frederick Wiseman resists this notion. The legendary documentary filmmaker has been making roughly one film a year since 1967, only taking breaks when funding difficulties, or in this case critical recognition, require him to do so. Tomorrow night Wiseman is receiving the Legacy Award at the annual Cinema Eye Honors for his debut […]
by Daniel James Scott on Jan 10, 2012 -
BUILDING COMMUNITY… ONE PROJECT AT A TIME
As the practice of ‘crowd-funding’ has come of age over the past couple years, so has the wide array of opinion about it. Some have called it a ‘game-changer’, especially when it comes to funding films, others seem to think of it as a magical place where free money simply appears from thin air, and yet others are wholly unconvinced, if not fully disdainful, of this practice of ‘organized-begging’. I can sympathize with the latter, seeing how crowd-funding has contributed to the advent of incessant self-promotion via social media sites, and the fact that you feel like everywhere you turn […]
by Gregorybayne on Nov 14, 2011 -
Karen Mintz and Simon Egleton on Their Frank Bender Doc
Karen Mintz has just finished shooting her documentary, The Recomposer of The Decomposed, about the forensic artist Frank Bender, who died recently. She is about to move into the post-production phase. I had the opportunity to meet with her and her producer Simon Egleton and talk about her film, the pros and cons of no-budget filmmaking, and the friend that she made, and also lost, during the process. Filmmaker: Can you start by telling me a little about how you became a filmmaker and what your background is? Mintz: I started working in production 15 years ago. I just kind […]
by Alix Lambert on Nov 10, 2011 -
Director Matt Osterman on Ghost From the Machine
When Matt Osterman attended the IFP Narrative Lab a few years ago, his $25,000, science fiction/supernatural thriller, about a grief-stricken man who builds a machine to communicate with the dead, was titled Phasma ex Machina. But when the film was finished and released this summer on DVD and, later, iTunes and Netflix by Screen Media, it went under the less obscure title of Ghost from the Machine. Now, however, another name change is in the works. This August Universal Pictures acquired the remake rights, attaching Gary Shore and Nathan Parker to write and direct. The new film will be called […]
by Eva Hill on Nov 9, 2011 -
Director Jarred Alterman on Convento
Since I spend part of my year in Amsterdam I’m always on the lookout for interesting Dutch folks to write about. Kinetic artist Christiaan Zwanikken fit the bill and then some. Zwanikken lives most months at his family’s retreat in Portugal, which was once a monastery but now serves as the laboratory for his Frankenstein creations, robots crafted from servomotors and the remains of wildlife he finds on the ancient grounds. American filmmaker Jarred Alterman is also fascinated by Zwanikken’s work – so much so that he crafted Convento, an “art/doc” that follows not just the Dutch artist and his […]
by Lauren Wissot on Nov 8, 2011 -
Will The Section 181 Film Tax Incentive Be Extended?
The film tax incentive known as “Section 181” is due to expire at the end of this year, removing one enticement producers have been using to convince investors to finance independent feature films. Part of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, Section 181 allowed investors to write off the complete cost of a qualified film in the first year. (Normally, this write-off is amortized, occurring in future years as a film demonstrates that it is money-losing.) If and when profits then occur, they are treated as ordinary income by investors. At the close of 2009, Section 181 was similarly […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 25, 2011 -
Director Jeremiah Zagar on Starved For Attention
It’s been awhile since I sat down to chat with director Jeremiah Zagar, one half of Brooklyn-based Herzliya Films, which he runs with his producer Jeremy Yaches, so I was pretty excited to hear about their latest venture, Starved For Attention. A short film series created at the behest of Doctors Without Borders and VII Photo designed to highlight childhood malnutrition around the world Starved For Attention also seems to be the rarest of public service announcements, doubling as works of cinematic art. I spoke briefly with Zagar as he was preparing for the release of the eighth doc in […]
by Lauren Wissot on Oct 21, 2011 -
Far From Afghanistan: U.S. Filmmakers Agitate on 10th Anniversary of the War
“Though I don’t have any children,” says John Gianvito, “I imagined a child someday saying to me, ‘You regard yourself as a political filmmaker, did you do anything during the longest war in U.S. history?’” Gianvito, the Boston-based director of the acclaimed feature The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein, recalls this thought coming to him earlier this year as the 10th anniversary of the U.S. war in Afghanistan approached. On Thursday, October 6, in honor of that day of infamy, Gianvito and a team of filmmakers will unveil an ambitious omnibus project to raise awareness about the enduring conflict. […]
by Anthony Kaufman on Sep 27, 2011
