“Christopher LaMarca and Jessica Dimmock’s The Pearl is a nighttime movie,” wrote Vadim Rizov out of True False in 2016, “all quiet, warmly illuminated interior spaces populated by a self-supporting community.” That community is one of older trans women living in the Pacific Northwest and coming out for the first time in their fifties and sixies, and LaMarca and Dimmock’s is indeed a beautifully shot and empathetic portrait. The film was selected for our 2016 “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” program, when we wrote: Dimmock and LaMarca’s debut feature documentary is an intimate portrait of a […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 2, 2018The Convention is filmmaker Jessica Dimmock’s short documentary about a convention comprised of transgender senior women. She writes: The film explores the annual Esprit gathering, where transgender women in their senior years who have been closeted their whole lives gather for a week of shared experience and understanding in a logging town in Northern Washington. For the attendees, many of whom are not out to their wives or children, this may be the only week of the year that they are not in hiding. I traveled to this event many times over the past years while Christopher LaMarca and I […]
by Scott Macaulay on Feb 21, 2017Placing the viewer amidst the everyday workings of a goat farm in southern Oregon, Christopher LaMarca’s Boone represents a daring exercise in direct cinema filmmaking. Originally a photojournalist interested in environmental causes, LaMarca found the setting of the farm to be an ideal location for one of his two feature filmmaking debuts (The Pearl, which he co-directed, premiered recently at True/False). Boone immerses the viewer in the fields, barns and homes of the farm’s human and animal inhabitants. As discussed below, LaMarca spent much more time on the farm than originally planned, finding it necessary to fully immerse himself in the day-to-day experience of the strenuous grind. With […]
by Erik Luers on Mar 14, 2016Producer Ted Hope, who has been running a regular independent film screening series at Goldcrest for the last few years, is moving uptown — he’s the inaugural curator of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s monthly Indie Night showcase. And for the series opening film, he’s picked a favorite of ours here at Filmmaker: Mark Jackson’s Without. On the basis of this first feature, Jackson was selected as one of our 2011 25 New Faces. In his write-up, Brandon Harris wrote: Comprised of shots that make you feel as if you’re glimpsing the most private of moments, a fly on […]
by Scott Macaulay on Mar 6, 2012