[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20, 9:00 pm –Temple Theatre, Park City] I began making work as a painter and sculptor. It was not until I graduated from art school that I ventured into filmmaking. Though I’m glad I did, I sometimes lament that it has dominated most of my life for the past 12 years, as I have not been painting or sculpting much. On the other hand, it has taken me all over the world and been an expansive exercise which has broadened my mind and led me down paths I could have never imagined. I have found that […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, January 20 8:30 am –Library Center Theatre, Park City] In 2005, on the set of We Go Way Back (my first feature film as writer/director), I remember having the distinct feeling that I’d finally found what I was always meant to do. It was an electrifying and completely transformative revelation. As far back as I can remember I always knew I wanted to be an artist. Finding myself smitten with nearly every creative medium in existence probably made the fact that I ended up deeply exploring a variety of them before settling on narrative filmmaking unavoidable. I […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 20, 2012Watching Terence Nance’s Oversimplification Of Her Beauty is like being talked through the contents of a shoebox, each item another memento of The One That Got Away. Live action, animation, claymation reenactments, direct-to-camera address by him, on-camera interviews of her by him, blurry, amateur footage shot by her of him, all guided by a formally written voice over, delivered with somber, staccato clarity by an anonymous older man. Descriptions and depictions of other girls slide in and out of the narrative, intercut with shots of The One, whose name is Namik. One animation of a long-distance affair depicts a hand-drawn […]
by Alicia Van Couvering on Jan 19, 2012Safety Not Guaranteed might be the first feature film based on an internet meme. In 2005, a newspaper classified ad from 1997 started to spread across the web, depicted a mulleted man who claimed to be seeking, “Somebody to go back in time with me.” The ad, which also specified, “this is not a joke” was eventually revealed to be exactly that, a fake listing published to fill out space in the paper. But that hasn’t stopped director Colin Trevorrow from crafting his first feature film around it. Produced by Marc Turtletaub and Peter Saraf of Big Beach (Little Miss […]
by Jane Schoenbrun on Jan 19, 2012[PREMIERE SCREENING: Thursday, January 19, 9:30 pm –Eccles Theatre, Park City] Sarah Koskoff: I had always only written for the stage, but when I wrote Hello I Must Be Going it was a film from the beginning and could only be a film. I wanted to explore what it would be like for a grown woman to wake up suddenly in her parents’ house with nothing of her own, totally dependent–the subtle humiliations of being an adult thrust into the position of being a child. There was something just so horrible and so painfully funny to me about her situation, […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jan 19, 2012With The Loneliest Planet, the follow-up to her acclaimed feature Day Night Day Night, writer/director Julia Loktev builds a piercing drama around the contrast between a beautiful wide-open landscape and the ugliness of a momentary, possibly reflexive, moment of human behavior. In the film, an adventuring couple (Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg) trek through the Georgian mountains with a for-hire guide (Bidzina Gujabidze). A violent encounter changes everything. But in Loktev’s world, the hurt comes not from gunplay or kidnappings but from something more subtle. We asked Loktev about the relationship of landscape to story, about silence, and about […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 12, 2011With Your Sister’s Sister, writer/director Lynn Shelton brings a top-flight cast (Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mark Duplass and Mike Birbiglia) to an isolated island cabin on Puget Sound for a tale of grief, romance, and sibling rivalry. Duplass plays Jack, still reeling over the death of his brother a year earlier. Iris (Blunt), his best friend and dead brother’s ex, suggests he get his bearings at her father’s cabin, and there he’s unexpectedly confronted by Hannah (DeWitt). Needless to say, things get complicated in this latest from one of independent film’s most compelling new auteurs. Via email we asked her […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 11, 2011