Documentaries don’t have to play by the rules of fiction films. Take a non-fiction hit like Won’t You Be My Neighbor?: It doesn’t merely tell a linear story so much as jump around subjects, with Fred Rogers’ life as a basic foundation. (Compare/contrast with the forthcoming Tom Hanks-starrer A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which zeroes in on one slice of his career.) But some documentaries go way out there. The IFP 2019 panel “Out of Bounds” rounded up four creatives — two filmmakers, one editor, and a producer tasked with helping people like them find funding and distribution — […]
by Matt Prigge on Sep 20, 2019At first, the notion of sibling filmmakers creating a doc about clearing out their recently deceased grandma’s house in New Jersey struck me as a potential recipe for a navel-gazing home movie. But the sister-brother team of Elan and Jonathan Bogarín, 25 New Faces alum, is not your average documentarian duo (even as their beloved Jewish grandmother is a familiar character — at least to those of us who grew up with idiosyncratic Jewish grandmas in Jersey. My physician grandmother in Teaneck likewise believed there was no wrong time for gefilte fish). Yet it’s this transformation of a very personal […]
by Lauren Wissot on Sep 28, 2018There are many reasons filmmakers might choose to self-distribute their documentaries: they may want residuals to come in throughout their careers, as opposed to what might be just a single upfront payment in an all-rights deal; they may feel a responsibility to their audience or subject matter to shepherd the project and not sell it off to a distributor focused on the bottom line; or maybe no one is knocking down their doors to buy your movie. At the recent DOC NYC PRO Distribution Book Camp, four filmmakers who have self-distributed projects (which can mean they are still self-distributing those […]
by Lauretta Prevost on Jul 11, 2018As Scott Macaulay wrote in our 25 New Faces profile of 306 Hollywood directors Elan and Jonathan Bogarin last year, “In 2001, the pair — who together run the production house El Tigre Productions — began shooting their grandmother, Annette Ontell, in the Hillside, New Jersey house she resided in for 71 years. When she died in 2011, the Bogaríns decided, says Jonathan, ‘to keep the house and transform everything there into a film.’ The result is the beautifully strange 306 Hollywood, ‘a kooky, imaginative film,’ he says, that uses ‘a maximalist language of fiction film, art, dance and myth in […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 1, 2018