What’s the main reason to go to film school? You could say to broaden the mind, to learn about cinema history, to meet future collaborators. Those are all true, but at base, the chief reason is to learn a skill. Ideally, you exit your program (whether it’s undergrad or graduate) ready to enter the industry. Perhaps you won’t be doing what you expected when you first applied, but you also don’t want to emerge with no idea what’s next. That said, film school can be tough. There are countless ways to do it, and it can be hard to focus and […]

Lookbooks are an increasingly vital part of the filmmaking process. A good lookbook can make a pitch, just as a bad one can dissuade an investor, producer or financier from a project. Yet the creation of lookbooks is rarely discussed. The topic is missing from the many labs and tutorial programs set up to help first-time filmmakers—even though a good lookbook is perhaps the quickest way for a project to stand out. Simply put, refined visual knowledge and the skillful conveying of that knowledge is power for a director. When we interviewed Reed Morano last year about her work on […]

Egyptian writer/director Abu Bakr (A.B.) Shawky and his filmmaking and real-life partner Egyptian producer Dina Emam made an impact weeks before their first feature, Yomeddine, even screened in Cannes. Theirs is the rare first-time feature to screen in what is most certainly the most prestigious launchpad for any movie: the festival’s Main Competition. Meaning “Day of Judgment” in Arabic, the film centers around a man with leprosy (Rady Gamal, “Beshay”) who goes in search of his family across Egypt with all of his possessions loaded on a donkey. Together with a young orphaned boy (Ahmed Abdelhafiz, “Obama”), the two fend […]

New York-based director and production designer Laura Moss landed on Filmmaker’s 25 New Face list this past year on the strength of Fry Day, her entirely exemplary short film about a teenage girl selling Polaroid photos on the eve of serial killer Ted Bundy’s execution. With this macabre event as a backdrop, Moss goes on to create, as I wrote in the profile, “a nail-bitingly tense, mournfully sad coming-of-age adventure.” I went on to write: That Fry Day uses the disquieting atmospherics and moral turbulence of the serial killer genre without indulging in gratuitous physical violence is a testament to […]

As the 2017 edition of SXSW comes to a close, here’s a list of eight short films I saw that are worthy of your attention. There’s no clear throughline apparent here: documentary work investigating the infected water supply of the DC water crisis, midnight selections featuring mannequin heads that come to life to suck face, and miscellaneous narrative shorts that cover everything from the ending of a romantic relationship to a bond formed during an impending school shooting. Many will continue to screen on the festival circuit throughout the year, and some will be made readily available online before you know it. […]