Moderated by Darrien Gipson, Executive Director of SAGindie, this year’s Wonder Women: Producers discussion at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival was a must-catch, mostly for two glaringly obvious reasons, with the first being the wide diversity of the participants. Alongside white Brits Alison Owen (Elizabeth, Saving Mr. Banks, perennial panelist and SCAD Savannah Film Festival Advisory Board member) and manager/producer Laura Berwick (Belfast, All is True, and Sir Kenneth’s longtime rep), there was the English-Jamaican writer/actress/producer Nicôle Lecky (Mood, The Moor Girl) and American actress/producer Jurnee Smollett (Lovecraft Country, Birds of Prey). Then there was the second reason—the presence of “grande dame” of indie […]

At YouVisit Studios in midtown Manhattan, Ben Leonberg, Scott Riehs and Alice Shindelar, three recent graduates of the film MFA program at Columbia, bring their education to bear in rather unexpected ways. They are still, in a sense, filmmakers — Leonberg a creative director, Shindelar a writer/director and Riehs a creative producer, each aspiring to one day make a feature. But as their day job they practice filmmaking of a very different type: together they conceive, write and shoot commercial content that YouVisit calls “interactive virtual experiences.” They work in 360-degree video and with virtual-reality headsets. They experiment with new […]

If any one moment encapsulated the fervor for U.S. independent cinema among the young cinephiles of Wroclaw (pronounced Vrot-swof, by the way), it arrived at around 11:00 PM on my final night of attendance at the 4th edition of the city’s American Film Festival (22-27 Oct, 2013). I was strolling back to my hotel in the company of Killer Films honcho Christine Vachon and Tennessee-based producer Ashley Maynor when a lissome young Polish fellow with rosy cheeks, Kurt Cobain hair, and a T-shirt bearing the legend ‘Hipsters Don’t Wear Frames’ suddenly appeared. With a shallowness of breath that suggested he’d […]

The IFP’s Independent Film Week’s Filmmaker Conference kicked off today, beginning with a case study of Beasts of the Southern Wild and ending with a conversation, moderated by IFP Executive Director Joana Vicente, between producer and Killer Films head Christine Vachon and producer, screenwriter and Focus Features CEO James Schamus. Below are 12 tips from the latter event — advice aimed at producers and, in some cases, anybody else, from two veterans with deep, decades-long roots in the independent community. 1. Consider producing. Christine Vachon and James Schamus are producers, but they both remembered a time when they were not. […]

The devastation that the “Great Recession” has wrecked on the California exurbs resonates through the backdrop of Tristan Patterson’s fascinating study of a peculiar California skating subculture in Dragonslayer. Focusing his representation mostly on the drug and alcohol addicted daredevil skater punk Josh Sandoval, nicknamed “Skreech,” Patterson’s doc searches the lives of this talented, troubled young man and his makeshift family of itinerant skaters with tremendous aesthetic grace and ideological empathy; finding great beauty in the suburban wasteland of derelict homes and pools that become their refuge from a largely unforgiving world. With a skating style all his own, Skreech launches […]

Over the transom comes this press release from Killer Films and Moxie Pictures, who have combined forces to create KillerMoxie Management. With offices in L.A., New York and London, the company will rep filmmakers, actors and recording artists across various media and branded entertainment ventures. (Interestingly, and appropriately, the announcement makes clear that a broad range of media formats, not just feature films or conventional advertising, will be the focus of the company.) The venture will be headed by Brian Young, who leaves Untitled Entertainment to join KillerMoxie. Here’s the press release: New York-based indie film powerhouse Killer Films (Christine […]