Jessica Oreck
-
Jessica Oreck Kickstarts a Traveling Museum
Back in 2021, filmmaker Jessica Oreck (Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo), who appeared on Filmmaker‘s 25 New Faces list in 2009, launched her Office of Collecting and Design, which she describes as “part wonderland, part library, and part nostalgia machine, devoted to the diminutive, the misplaced, the unusual, and the forgotten.” A truly unusual endeavor, the Las Vegas-based tiny museum is exhibition space, animation studio and prop house — in short, a physical extension of the enthusiasms that have powered Oreck’s filmmaking. From my print issue profile of the project: A cinematic sensibility permeates the whole endeavor, not just in the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 29, 2024 -
Trailer Watch: Jessica Oreck’s One Man Dies a Million Times
Jessica Oreck’s One Man Dies a Million Times premiered at SXSW 2019 but is only now about to enter theatrical release. That’s because Oreck—an adventurous, hybrid nonfiction filmmaker whose previous work includes The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga and and Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo—intended for the film to only be seen in theaters beginning in May 2020, a plan delayed by the pandemic. The film continues Oreck’s longstanding professional collaboration with Sean Price Williams (Good Time, Frownland), while programmer Eric Allen Hatch (who’s written for Filmmaker before) is acting as the film’s distributor. From the press release: Alyssa (Alyssa Lozovskaya, of Russian […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 19, 2022 -
A Musuem of One’s Own: Jessica Oreck on Her Office of Collecting and Design
Drawers of marbles and buttons, a wall of picture frames with nothing in them, empty matchboxes, broken dice and a tray of antique doll eyes, irises fixed in hopeful stares beneath the swoop of their curled eyelashes. These are just a few of the uncanny items you’ll find in the Office of Collecting and Design, a museum full of, in the words of its creator, filmmaker Jessica Oreck (Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, One Man Dies a Million Times), “lost and forgotten objects, things that people don’t think are valuable but have too much charm to throw away. These are things […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 12, 2021 -
Jessica Oreck Explains the Uplifting Origins of the Bra
Filmmaker Jessica Oreck (Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga) has created a new series for TED-Ed, “In a Moment of Vision,” dubbed “an all-new, all-fun animated micro-series about the history of common objects.” The first episode tells the story of the invention of the bra, which you may be surprised wasn’t invented until the early 1900s.
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 13, 2016 -
19th Century Poetry, The Stooges and Psychedelic Intensity: Composer Paul Grimstad Talks with Nathan Silver
Paul Grimstad is one of the most insanely inspired polymaths I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, and his brilliant lunacy bubbles from every song and piece of score he writes. He provided music for two short films which are about to screen in the New York Shorts Program at the 53rd New York Film Festival: my film Riot and Jay Giampietro’s Hernia. His other soundtracks include Frownland (which he also co-starred in), Heaven Knows What, Tired Moonlight, The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga, my film Stinking Heaven, among many others. Screening information for the New York Shorts Program can be found here. [iPod dictaphone app begins recording] Grimstad: Baudelaire […]
by Nathan Silver on Sep 25, 2015 -
“A Zinging Mix of Naturalism and Edge”: Jessica Oreck’s The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga
With Jessica Oreck’s The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga opening today at MoMA in New York for a week-long run, we are rerunning Howard Feinstein’s review from the New Directors New Films festival. Running the length of this labor-intensive doc about man’s late-developing historical estrangement from nature are excellent hand-painted animated panels depicting a composite Slavic fairy tale about displaced tween siblings Ivan and Alona who have, out of desperation, taken refuge in a forest they had learned to fear as small children. Residing there is the evil witch Baba Yaga, whose house is built on chicken legs and […]
by Howard Feinstein on Oct 15, 2014 -
Power Up Festival Features Work Crossing Art and Technology
HP has joined forces with presenting partner Made in New York Media Center by IFP (Filmmaker‘s publisher) to present Power Up, a five-day festival of new work and discussions centering around technology and creativity. Of particular interest to Filmmaker readers are events feature 25 New Faces Jessica Oreck and Andrew S. Allen; Paul Trillo’s short, A Truncated Story of Infinity, recently featured at Filmmaker; and a screening of director and Film Fatales founder Leah Meyerhoff’s debut feature, I Believe in Unicorns. Other notable events include an discussion on architecture with Daniel Libeskind and a panel on the VFX of James […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 24, 2014 -
Four Nights in D-Town: The Third Annual Oak Cliff Film Festival
A few days before the summer solstice, I arrived on an oddly cool night in Dallas for the Third Annual Oak Cliff Film Festival. A driver picked me up from the airport and whisked me directly to a pre-festival soiree at a bar called Wild Detectives where everyone seemed to know each other already. A few houses from the corner of East 8th St. and North Bishop Ave., Wild Detectives is proof Dallas’ zoning rules are the envy of lushes everywhere; the bar is a two-story house right in the middle of a residential neighborhood! That neighborhood, from which the […]
by Brandon Harris on Jun 24, 2014 -
True/False: A Place for World Premieres?
Despite its stated policy about not announcing a film’s premiere status, is the True/False Film Fest the new place to launch your documentary? In part one of a three part series, filmmaker and writer Robert Greene will chronicle the fortunes of five films that will world premiere at the 2014 True/False Film Festival, including his own, Actress. No film festival has meant more to me than True/False. My last two films (Kati with an I and Fake It So Real) began their lives in Columbia, MO — in front of the festival’s famously engaged crowds, amidst its street parades and […]
by Robert Greene on Feb 25, 2014 -
Winter Requiem: Jessica Oreck on Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys
The uncompromising yet lovely vérité doc Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys takes an unadorned, soulful look at a year in the lives of a pair of brothers who are among a collective of reindeer herders in rural Finland. A departure in many ways from the zany Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, Jessica Oreck’s new film is bloody and ice bound, showcasing a world of rustic north European life rarely glimpsed on screen. The grim slaughter of reindeer and the daily tribulations of running such an operation doesn’t escape the director’s eye; neither does the tenderness and decency of the people doing such work. […]
by Brandon Harris on Feb 3, 2014
