Though Jeremiah Zagar has been directing shorts and documentaries since 2004, We The Animals marks his first feature narrative film. Adapted from Justin Torres’s novel, Animals gives a name to the source text’s unnamed narrator: Jonah (Evan Rosado), a young boy growing up in ’80s upstate NYC against the background of his parents’ unstable marriage and growing awareness of his own queerness. Editor Keiko Deguchi spoke to Filmmaker about her work on the film, which split the NEXT Innovator Award (chosen by a single juror, RuPaul) with Jordana Spiro’s Night Comes On. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your […]

As you made your film during the increasingly chaotic backdrop of the last year, how did you as a filmmaker control, ignore, give in to or, conversely, perhaps creatively exploit the wild and unpredictable? What roles did chaos and order play in your films? My wife became pregnant just before I left for the Sundance Directors Lab and I knew even then that I wanted the birth of our child to be part of the movie. On March 12, 2015 at the crack of dawn her water broke. That morning Jeremy Yaches and Christina King (my producers) dropped a camera […]

As part of our lead-up to the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, yesterday we published producer Mynette Louie’s advice for Sundance newcomers. Today we’re following up with eight suggestions from veterans of the ’14 and ’13 editions. Read on for advice, much of which you should take and some you will hope you don’t have to… — SM Ana Lily Amirpour (director, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night): The day I arrived at Sundance I got terrible news that my production designer Sergio De La Vega passed away in a sudden tragic accident. So that night we were drinking at […]

This afternoon the Sundance Institute unveiled the 12 projects that will be participating next month in its Screenwriters Lab. Among the filmmakers whose scripts were chosen are documentarian Jeremiah Zagar (In a Dream), whose first narrative script We the Animals (based on a book by Justin Torres) was also in IFP’s Emerging Storytellers, while another alum of that program (from 2011) selected here is Ryan Koo, with his project Manchild. Other notable participants this year imclude Jordana Spiro, the former TV actress whose short Skin played at Sundance 2012; uber inventive and wacky pop promo directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert […]

Why make a short film? At Short Takes, a recent panel discussion co-presented by IFP and DCTV, the answers varied with each pass of the microphone. The participating panelists — Terence Nance, Dustin Guy Defa, Lauren Wolkstein, Ryan Koo, and Jeremiah Zagar — reflected upon prior efforts to offer a unique, holistic picture into the business and practice of short filmmaking. Koo, who recently revealed Amateur, a short prequel to his debut feature Manchild, said that he viewed the format as a calling card, a means to entice both the industry and a larger audience. Nance and Wolkstein, on the […]

Jeremiah Zagar, the prolific documentary filmmaker behind 2008’s In a Dream is back with Heart Stop Beating: A Body Without A Pulse, a new short screening before Escape Fire this week at Sundance. Heart Stop Beating is a brief, fascinating look at Billy Cohn & Bud Frazier, two doctors who successfully replaced a dying man’s heart with a mechanical device this past March, proving that human physiology can be supported without a pulse. Over its four minute run-time, the documentary features glimpses into the operating room, as well as interviews with Cohn and Frazer. Watch it above. Also available to […]

Sundance seems a little incomplete for me without Jamie Stuart, who is shooting this year for Cinelan and GE’s new Focus Forward initiative. Led by Cinelan co-founders Morgan Spurlock and Karol Martesko-Fenster (Filmmaker‘s founding publsiher), the program brings 30 new three-minute short films to festivals internationally. So, to get my Stuart Sundance fix I’ll post this piece he shot for the organization, which is premiering its first five films here at the festival. Jamie may be lensing for this new short-form doc producer, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a photo gallery of snow-capped peaks, shuttle busses lumbering down Park, […]

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 […]