Jessica Oreck
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The Changing Aatsinki Season
For us in North America, Winter formally arrives this Saturday, December 21. But the season has already changed — online, at least, and to Fall — for the arctic cowboys of Aatsinki Season, the hypnotic online collaboration between director Jessica Oreck and transmedia developers Murmur. For the last nine months, an online extension of Oreck’s documentary, Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys, has been streaming and scrolling online, with each quarter bringing a new set of meditative observations. When the project premiered, Oreck discussed the difference between the film and the site: The film is very pure, direct cinema—an immersive […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 19, 2013 -
Jessica Oreck on her new Web Series, This Working Man
Less than three months since she premiered her documentary, Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys, at the Tribeca Film Festival, Jessica Oreck is both on the road and back with new work. This Working Man is a web project combining video portraiture, travel, and crowdsourced curation. From the project’s website: This Working Man is a series of short portraits of men at work. It is about practiced motion, kinetic movement, bodies, and forms. It is about a particular type of man: exceedingly capable, strong, confident, and diligent. The project is a search for humble masculinity and an unapologetic admittance of […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jul 16, 2013 -
Tribeca 2013 Critic’s Notebook #1: Sea Change
It’s easy to get a bad rap in New York. It’s a town that holds grudges, where easy assumptions die hard and critical whispers ricochet from person to person. For a long time it was difficult for the Tribeca Film Festival to escape the stigma of its early years, when it remained spiritually connected to the aftermath of 9/11 and its original purpose while not having yet evolved into a truly satisfying event. Back then it was brash, unwieldy and overlong, its ambitions outstripping necessity and good taste. These qualities often overshadowed what it did well, and even as the festival […]
by Brandon Harris on Apr 26, 2013 -
Jessica Oreck and Murmur Launch Interactive Documentary, The Aatsinki Season
When we last checked in with 25 New Face filmmaker Jessica Oreck, she was attending the POV Hackathon, a two-day event at which the documentary television series paired filmmakers with web developers. There Oreck met Mike Knowlton and Hal Siegel of the hybrid studio/technology company Murmur, and in just over three months the team has created The Aatsinki Season, an online counterpart to Oreck’s forthcoming feature documentary, Aatsinki: The Story Of Arctic Cowboys. Launching today, the work is both hypnotic and thoughtful, comprising text, film and flow charts, and allowing the viewer to initiate debate over the ecological issues facing […]
by Scott Macaulay on Dec 11, 2012 -
Director Maiko Endo on Kuichisan
Easily the most out-there film I saw at last year’s CPH:DOX was one touted by the programmers as “the discovery of the festival”: Maiko Endo’s Kuichisan, receiving its New York debut tomorrow as part of the LaDiDa Festival. Previously, Endo was a vocalist in the band Battles and co-produced Jessica Oreck’s documentary Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo. Now, Oreck has produced Endo’s debut picture, with Beetle Queen d.p. Sean Price Williams behind the camera. Stunningly shot in both black-and-white and color, Kuichisan is a tumbling collection of images, organized as much by feeling, sensation and the rhythms of its experimental soundtrack […]
by Scott Macaulay on Sep 13, 2012 -
The POV Hackathon: Advancing Web Documentary
A few months ago, I got to participate in StoryCode‘s hackathon for narrative media (you can read about it here), and one of the thoughts I walked away with was that, while creating transmedia properties around fictional narratives is very rewarding, something I really wanted to do was delve deeper into the world of nonfiction transmedia. So I was excited to learn about a documentary transmedia hack sponsored by POV and held this past weekend at their office in DUMBO. If anyone in America understands social documentary, it’s the makers of this PBS series, which has won nearly 100 major awards–Oscars, Emmys, […]
by Randy Astle on Aug 16, 2012 -
Kickstarter is for People!
A filmmaker asked me, “Do you think I can raise $400,000 on Kickstarter?” I told her that that sounded like a lot. Start-up technology companies using Kickstarter as, essentially, a customer-financed pre-buy platform, are raising in the seven figures. But $400,000 would be on the high-end of a feature film raise. Blue Like Jazz raised about $350,000, and that was based on a New York Times best-seller. Koo did great with Man-Child, scoring about $125,000, but he spent a couple years seeding his campaign by building an audience at No Film School. But as I was talking, I realized the […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 5, 2012 -
Five Questions with Jessica Oreck About Her New Kickstarter Project
With her debut documentary, Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, Jessica Oreck reinvented the nature doc. Oreck, an entomologist who worked as a docent at the American Museum of Natural History, made a film about an insect that was as much about man’s fascination with that creature as it was the creature itself. To top it off, she made her poetic and allusive picture in Japan, exploring the country’s endemic beetle-mania through evocative cinematography and haunting voiceover. When so many documentary filmmakers make their artistic choices based on the desires of their funders, Oreck chooses the harder path. Her latest film, Aatsinki, […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 1, 2012 -
TAXI RIDERS: JESSICA ORECK
If you’ve taken a ride in the back of a New York City taxi cab these last two weeks, you may have heard the stories of seven of New York’s most distinctive independent filmmakers of the moment. In partnership with Royal Bank of Canada and the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, the IFP has produced six spots that are playing not only in cabs but on NYC Life. Jamie Stuart directed, T. Griffin scored and I produced these pieces, and each one, in addition to profiling a person, highlights a different aspect of the independent filmmaker’s current creative, production […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 10, 2011 -
Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo — A Hammer to Nail Review
(Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo is now available on DVD through Factory 25. Visit the film’s official website to learn more. NOTE: This review was first published at Hammer to Nail in conjunction with the film’s theatrical release at Film Forum on May 12, 2010.) The knowledge that Jessica Oreck is an entomologist at the Museum of Natural History in New York City who has never previously made a film might cause one to worry that Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo will be an unavoidably stiff and grueling piece of video academia. Worry not, skeptic. Oreck’s wildly precocious exploration of Japan’s ongoing […]
by Michael Tully on May 19, 2011
